Marc Marquez conceded that he was struggling on Friday at the Malaysian MotoGP.
The Sepang International Circuit has seen Marquez win twice in the premier class, but has also seen him struggle relative to his performance in other circuits.
This has been especially true on Friday at the 2024 edition of the Malaysian Grand Prix, where Marquez — who won only two weeks ago in Phillip Island and who crashed out of second place in Thailand last weekend — narrowly squeezed through to Q2 directly, 0.076 seconds ahead of KTM rookie Pedro Acosta.
“Today has been difficult,” Marquez said following Friday practice in Sepang.
“I tried to start in an optimistic way, in a positive way, but one more time here in Malaysia we are struggling more than usual.
“But we need to work more than usual to arrive on a good level. For the time attack I was a little bit far, but for the race pace I’m closer, but not enough.”
Marquez added: “I miss everything. It’s a circuit that I’m struggling more than usual.
“These two circuits in the calendar that I’ve been struggling at historically, that has been here and Montmelo.”
Explaining his struggles in Sepang compared to other circuits, Marquez said that the broken humerus he infamously suffered at the 2020 Spanish Grand Prix is at least partly to blame.
“Normally I was struggling, but I was able to compensate in one mode or another mode,” he said.
“Since my injury [in Jerez 2020], I’m struggling and I cannot compensate anymore. I was struggling already here before the injury, but I could compensate about the physical condition, about pushing more the bike, less in other corners.
“Now I’m struggling and I need to ride as I feel. If you see, my riding style changed. I’m not overriding the bike, I’m just riding what I feel and that’s it. I need to adapt.
“The races where I’m struggling, I’m struggling a bit more than in the past.”
Marquez insisted that his inability to compensate at Sepang this year is not because of the switch from Honda to Ducati last season.
“It’s because of me here in this race track,” he said. “You can see in the past here many Ducatis are fast, even today one GP23 — my brother [Alex Marquez] — he was faster than me in the time attack; in the race pace we were very equal.
“Every rider in this grid has some race tracks that are better or worse for his riding style.”
In addition to the difficulties that were unique to him in Sepang, Marquez joined the rest of the Desmosedici GP23 riders in being slow in the straights, with the four GP23 riders — Marc Marquez, Alex Marquez, Marco Bezzecchi, and Andrea Iannone — all filling the bottom four positions on the top speeds chart in Practice.
“For some reason, already we realised [...] all the GP23s we are struggling a lot with the hot temperature,” Marquez said, referencing last weekend’s Thai Grand Prix where the GP23s also missed straight line performance.
“In Mandalika it was not like this, but we don’t have long straights; here we have long straights — you can see [Marco] Bezzecchi, even [Andrea] Iannone, [Fabio] Di Giannantonio when he was here last week, we are struggling more with the hot temperatures.
“But Ducati is trying to help us to try to decrease that difference tomorrow.”
