MotoGP: Honda’s engine crisis continues

The crisis of confidence that Honda Racing had hoped that they’d seen the back of at the end of the 2016 season looks set to plague the team for another season, with both factory and satellite riders once again in development limbo over their 2017 powerplant at this week’s first pre-season MotoGP test.

The manufacturer has struggled for two seasons in a row now with difficult-to-manage engines that left their riders struggling to reign in the RC213V machines in both 2015 and 2016. And while the issue has been somewhat camouflaged by title success last year, Marc Marquez’s championship win came largely as a result of his newfound consistency and riding mentality and not outright pace.

And while the move from the traditional ‘screamer’ firing order to a new ‘big bang’ configuration that mimics many of their rivals looked set to cure some of the aggressiveness and acceleration woes that the riders faced in past years, the reigning champion admitted after the first day of action at Sepang that the issues are far from addressed.

“It looks like in low RPM the new engine is really different on the gas. It’s maybe a little bit smoother, but the lap time is more or less the same. But we still have problems in the exit of the corner, with the grip and with other things, and then on the straight maybe it’s a little faster but still it’s not working perfectly. So still we need to understand the potential of the engine.

“It’s true that even though I won the championship last year we had some problems through the year. Yeah, we won, but we weren’t the fastest in many races. Sepang is one of the tracks where we struggle the most, and for sure we have a lot of work to do. We know where the problem is, but fixing it isn’t easy, and we’re playing around with it now to try and correct it.”

Even worse for Honda, the Spaniard also admitted that it’s looking like, with multiple variations of the new engine to work through, that they’ll only decide on a final specification of the engine at the final pre-season test in Qatar. That gives the firm only two weeks to produce a total of 35 engines, with seven for each of their five riders required to be sealed ahead of the first race.

“It’s important to take a lot of information from this test, but we won’t decide the engine until the last test. We’ll decide there, although the long straights and long accelerations here will help us understand where we’re losing a lot.”