Pol Espargaro confesses he was “not ready” for his Honda debut in the Qatar Grand Prix opening in March due to a lack of pre-season testing in 2021.
For 2021, the 2013 Moto2 world champion made a surprising switch from KTM to the factory Honda team, but found the transition to be extremely difficult.
Espargaro was forced to play catch-up for the most of the season because COVID-19 reduced pre-season testing to just five days in Qatar before the first two races of the year at Losail.
The 2021 Honda lacked rear grip, which caused difficulty for riders exiting and entering corners, preventing Espargaro from adopting his typical braking approach of using the rear brake.
Espargaro scored pole at Silverstone and finished second in the Emilia Romagna GP, completing Honda’s first 1-2 behind Marc Marquez since 2017.
When asked about his first season as a Honda rider, Espargaro confesses that he got off to a slow start, but that he believed he had made significant progress on the bike as the season progressed.
“Basically, the experience in MotoGP is half of the way – it’s super-important,” Espargaro said.
“And especially when you are changing bikes, the level now in MotoGP is fantastic, it’s super, super high.
“So, you have no time to say you are adapting, or you have no time to test, you have not so much testing now.
“We went into the first race in Qatar not ready, actually, with a few a laps in Qatar [testing] and a few laps on the bike.
“So, definitely I was not ready. Then I needed to discover how to ride the bike during the race weekends, which is very, very difficult because you have all the pressure, you want to perform well, you have crashes, you have no time to work on the bike.
“So, we needed to use the small tests as a very important test for us, and through the year these tests – especially from the middle of the year to the end – we really improved the bike, we really improved our set-up and I started to feel much better on the bike.
“Sure, if we could have this experience at the beginning of the year, like if the race in Portimao [the Algarve GP] was the first race, the year would have been much easier and different.
“But in the end it is what it is, we can’t go back in time. We need to take it.
“What was good is we ended with a pole position and a podium, we fought for top five positions in the last races and this is something great.”
Espargaro finished the year 12th in the standings with 100 points, 42 behind Marc Marquez, who was forced to withdraw from four races due to injury and crashed out of four more.
Espargaro was enthusiastic about the moves Honda had done with its 2022 bike during the two-day post-season Jerez test, noting that the upgraded RC213V had restored the missing rear grip. Espargaro was still damaged after a hard crash that ruled him out of the Valencia finale.
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