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Marquez says Honda acceleration issues not solved
MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez says Honda has yet to solve the engine issues the Spanish rider had to fight during the 2016 season.
Pablo Elizalde
Edited: Jan 30, 2017, 4:01 PM
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Marquez spent all of last year struggling on corner exit, as the Honda engine delivered the power too aggressively, a problem that led to the Japanese manufacturer change its engine philosophy for this year.
After testing at Sepang on Monday, however, the Spanish rider said the problems are still there.
When asked if the engine was doing what he wanted, he said: "Not yet, no. We've worked on the engine to try to improve the acceleration and the top speed and we have improved on the latter a bit, but the problem with acceleration is that if we can't use it it's unnecessary to have more [power].
"So we are working on the wheelies and all those things that gave us a headache last year.
"Tomorrow it will be one of the most important things to work on."
Marquez finished the opening day of testing down in ninth position, a full second off the pace set by Ducati's Casey Stoner.
The reigning champion had only one of the 2017 bikes at his disposal, meaning he spent long periods in the garage as the team worked on making adjustments.
While he admitted the situation was not ideal, Marquez said it had been a positive day overall.
"One bike was basically last year's bike with a small change, but we focused on the new bike mainly because there's a lot of work to do, to re-adjust the mapping to the new engine because it has different characteristics," he said.
"The thing is that working with just one bike you lose a lot of time in making the changes, so tomorrow we'll probably have two identical bikes, which in theory will be the new one.
"It was a positive day, even though the result was not the bests."
Additional reporting by Oriol Puigdemont
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