Aboard the Desmosedici GP23 of the Gresini team, Marc Marquez managed to hit his goal for 2024: to regain the competitiveness he had lacked in recent years at Honda and secure a place in the official Ducati team in 2025.
It was a path of sporting renaissance, which led the 31-year-old Catalan to savor again the joy of victory from which he had been fasting since the 2021 Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
Improving race after race his chemistry with bike and team.
It was precisely Marquez's adaptation to Ducati that was one of the topics addressed by Frankie Carchedi in an episode of the Crash.net podcast.
In which the experienced chief technician, who has worked with Marc at Gresini after following Fabio Di Giannantonio in 2023 and flanking Joan Mir at Suzuki in 2020, wanted to emphasize the great growth accomplished by the eight-time world champion, which has allowed him to take three wins in the second half of the year.
"Marc was fast immediately fast Valencia. But when you're testing, you can take everything in your own stride and work through your programmes.
Even his race simulations at Sepang and Qatar were really good. The problem was more when we went back for the European rounds: you've got 20 laps, then you go into qualifying and we weren't ready," Carchedi noted.
"There's also a technique to doing a flying lap with the Ducati to get the best out of it, and I don't think we made many Q2s directly in the first half of the year.
So, then the whole weekend was all about comeback. It's very difficult for someone in their first year on a different bike to just go 'bang' straight away."
A dynamic that changed considerably as the season went on:
"By the second half of the season, we made Q2 quite easily in general. And then the strategy changes, because you can work on your race pace and everything else for longer. That was the biggest thing that changed throughout the year."
Progress that the 31-year-old was able to materialize at Aragon, breaking 1,000 days of victory drought into perfect weekends.
"Maybe things could have gone differently if we had his first win earlier," Frankie admitted, thinking about the occasions when Marc came within a whisker of success:
"I remember Jerez quite well, unfortunately we crashed on a wet patch in the Sprint whilst leading. And that had a bit of an effect in the main race. We were also coming back off Austin, where we had a brake issue."
The great improvement by the Spanish rider is also underlined by his performance in the right-hand turns of the races in Malaysia and Barcelona.
"We know Marc's always found the fast right-handers more difficult than the lefts. But we do what's called median analysis, which is race pace analysis, so not just your fastest sector but your average.
Sepang and Catalunya are probably the two tracks he detests the most, and we were actually fastest in the last sector over the Catalunya race, which is purely fast right-hand corners.
And the same in sector 1 at Sepang, which is the very fast Turn 3," said the crew chief. "From where we started, that was really good from a personal point of view.
Because from something that he struggled with or didn't like he became the most competitive."
