MotoGP attends the umpteenth return of Marc Márquez: "It's my last cartridge"

He comes back and the first thing he does is say hello to everyone.

The smile betrays him, and infects those who cross him.

"Let's have some fun," he says when he shows up at his team's garage.

It is Marc Márquez, the flagship of the MotoGP World Championship, on his fifth return to competition in two years –what if the arm, the falls, the diplopia–.

The Aragón Grand Prix is ​​a second home for him, just two hours from his native Cervera.

He says he doesn't want to push hard, don't rush, but he runs like always, pure instinct as long as he's been away from the best of him.

After three and a half months of convalescence due to his fourth and, he hopes, last operation on his right arm, he connects from the first minute with the rhythm of the best, although this year a few tenths are a world.

Thirteenth on the grid,

his time in Q1 was just two tenths slower than when he qualified fourth last year.

The

for Pecco Bagnaia, who broke the circuit record, was almost a second away.

“I understand that people are excited about my return, but I am the one who is most excited, and I hope it will be the definitive one, because in the end it is almost the last cartridge for this arm”, he acknowledges.

After several scares, some saves of his own and a fall from which he emerged unscathed during the training sessions, his teammates and rivals are not surprised, nor do they buy the prudence of a guy who has never stopped doing barbarities on the bike , this is the last one.

Fabio Quartararo, who will start sixth, even sees him fighting for victory.

"We already know what he is like," warns the reigning champion.

In short, everyone in the

is happy for him and also understands the importance of his figure to animate an exciting event, but lacking in superstars.

In MotorLand, the mere presence of him, announced last minute on Tuesday, has managed to catapult ticket sales.

"I'll start directly, without you asking" jokes Aleix Espargaró, fourth classified for Sunday, with the journalists.

"It has been a luxury to see him, and he was sure that he would go fast."

Although he is the same, as his inseparable chief mechanic, Santi Hernández, recognized – "Marc does not change, he continues to be a super positive person" – the umpteenth return of the eighth champion is accompanied by significant changes.

With the arm already on

He kept pushing and came to win races, but the pain that Márquez felt due to the humerus, since his disastrous crash in Jerez 2020, was not normal.

Neither was the position of the bone, 30 degrees crooked with respect to what the human anatomy establishes.

It took him a while to digest the matter, but Alberto Puig, who had surgery up to 50 times on his shattered left leg at Le Mans in 1995, 15 of them at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester (Minnesota), recommended that he visit specialists in the United States to end his ordeal with his arm.

The doctors did not believe or understand how he still competed.

The passage through the operating room was a success and the one from Cervera felt it almost immediately.

He was smiling at the world through social networks after the postoperative period, and he has not stopped doing it since then.

“I have already won, in normal life, on a day-to-day basis.

Now, what I have to see is if I also win in professional life, on the bike”, he explains.

His decision to stop at Mugello was all or nothing, after understanding that he could not continue mortgaging his future.

The plan has been carried out to the letter, step by step, although he has been able to exceed the expectations of the doctors in terms of his competitive return.

Although he hides in prudence, a virtue that he did not exhibit when he made rash decisions in his previous returns, the pace that he exhibits in Aragón shows that he is still there to compete with the best.

"Next winter is where I must understand what my limit is, what my arm allows me to do," she ditches without getting into the rag.

Everything indicates that he will allow him to be as fast, whether or not there are changes in his driving style, as in the past.

From the town to the city

Another change, looking for fresh air in his life, both personally and professionally, has been his move to Madrid.

That yes, "Cervera and my people are sacred", he remembered her at the beginning of the course.

His move has followed that of several key people in his circle of trust, which has added significant new assets and some notable casualties.

Emilio Alzamora, his agent throughout his life, agreed to his separation from the Márquez brothers after almost two decades at the head of his business.

They recognized "the normal wear and tear over the years", although the decision wants to give a new push to his image.

The emergence of Jaime Martínez, until recently responsible for motor marketing at Red Bull Spain, has already been noted in the first promotional videos of his return to the ring.

It is not trivial to use one of the great assets of the energy drink brand, also a neighbor of his in Pozuelo de Alarcón, to relaunch his figure.

The new Marc, more urban, seeks to open up to the world, build a global brand that can replicate the influence that other great champions with similar track records have had around the planet, without going any further than Valentino Rossi.

Just as the fluorescent yellow of

covered the stands in all corners of the planet, just as Dutch fans do now with Max Verstappen and his orange tide in Formula 1, one of the missions is to generate a red tide that supports with fervor reborn at 93. Another stone to rebuild his image will be the next premiere of a five-episode documentary series on Prime Video, which will tell through unpublished moments the tremendous 2022 that the one from Cervera is experiencing.

New Focus at Honda

To regain winning form, Márquez has already reminded Honda several times that he is not a miracle worker: "You can win one, two or three grand prix with some prowess, but titles are won by a team."

Despite missing eight races this year, he reappears in Alcañiz as the best bike of the Japanese, stuck in a crisis of unprecedented results.

“Two factories are the reference”, he says about the new roadmap.

Ducati and Aprilia lead the European rush in the contest and from the Pacific they begin to get their batteries.

“When a team with so much history notices that something is not working, it is time to do a complete review.

We are going to change a little of everything”, concedes Takeo Yokoyama, technical director of HRC and in charge of designing a groundbreaking prototype for 2023. “We have identified what we must change, and we all have to work more than ever in the same direction”, Hernández points out from the garage.

There, this same weekend, Honda has made available to its strut an aluminum swingarm born in a small German factory.

It was one of the best kept secrets, and the unprecedented synergy between

Kalex and the Hamamatsu Colossus, until recently reluctant to assemble such essential parts from third parties, it is understood that the project moves where he asks.

If this is not the case, and if results are not achieved, the option of an even more radical change of scenery by the eighth world champion already sounds.

2023 is the last year of his contract and he does not hide when he points to the Italians as the example for the whole world to follow.

“You see how the other bikes are going and we have to work”, he sums up.

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