Marco Bezzecchi
Marc Marquez had a chance to win every MotoGP season that he competed in during the 2010s, but was let down by one year.
The infamous 2015 campaign (for reasons other than his speed) was a tricky period for the Spaniard, who had won the previous two premier class titles.
Marquez had dominated and made a great tandem with Honda, but their bike development took a bad turn after he claimed the 2014 championship.
He went from winning 10 races in a row to crashing very often, and overall, completing one of his messier years in MotoGP. It opened the door for an all-Yamaha title fight.
What would MotoGP have done without Marc Marquez?
Marquez had a ‘special’ talent, and he used it to catch his new rivals by surprise when he made his debut in 2013.
It took them some time to adjust to fighting him and his aggressive nature. One ex-colleague believes Marquez’s ‘best’ performance came before MotoGP. He was an incredible young rider.
READ MORE: Marc Marquez tells his fans to ‘save their energy’ instead of attacking Valentino Rossi
Casey Stoner says Marc Marquez paid ‘massively’ for Honda’s poor chassis development in 2015
Marquez was easier to work with than Casey Stoner for Honda, who managed to replace one excellent champion with another at the perfect time.
2015 is remembered for Marquez’s crash with Valentino Rossi in Malaysia, but the Honda rider had already been eliminated from contention by then.
The reason? Stoner points to Honda’s development and believes that they went down the wrong path ‘massively’ in 2015, which ended up costing Marquez.
“It wasn’t engine inertia, it was the chassis,” he said in Mat Oxley’s Marc The Magnificent biography. “As soon as you let go of the front brake, the front end just disappeared.
“Marc crashed and crashed and crashed during the first part of that year, then halfway through they went back to the old [2014] chassis, so they’d gone in the wrong direction, massively.”
Rossi warned his fans would never ‘forget’ 2015, and more than 10 years on, those comments have turned out to be true. Looking back, though, Marquez should have been in a better spot.
READ MORE: Jorge Lorenzo says Valentino Rossi once saw Marc Marquez as his MotoGP ‘successor’
How did the start of Marc Marquez’s 2015 season compare with 2014?
A direct comparison of back-to-back seasons shows just how much Marquez struggled at the start of his third season in 2015.
It’s widely known that he won the first 10 races in a row in 2014, as he really started to find his groove at the highest level.
But in 2015, he won the second race in COTA, before going on a six-race streak without returning to the top step.
It’s no surprise that when he finally bounced back at Sachsenring in race nine, his two victories so far had come at two of his most beloved tracks (COTA, too).
He had more retirements (six) than wins (five) at the end of the year, and that’s what ended up costing him the most. Marquez lacked the consistency to become champion again.
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