Honda’s problems for 2023 start and end with their bike. It may sound like a foolish thing to say, but this Honda is not necessarily a bad bike. We’ll explain
Honda completely redesigned their RC213V for 2022. It was the single biggest redesign of a single ruleset that they’ve ever done. While the bike may have turned out to be difficult, with poor front feeling, poor turning and a lack of horsepower, essentially what they did was build a bike concept that some of the other manufacturers had already had a few years of practice with. Ducati have had this concept, with the added weight in the tail unit since 2017 and it’s been a long road to perfect that concept ever since.
Honda dove into a world a bike with a very different weight distribution to what they were used and they forced themselves into a position where they had to learn quick. At first touch, it looked like they might have nailed it, but once they delved deeper into finding the last few tenths they needed, that’s where they found this bike wasn’t up to scratch. We honestly believe that if Honda can make only a few key changes to this bike, their performance will drastically improve. The problem with that though, is finding where to make those changes and what those changes require and this is where we feel Honda have struggled with their lack of knowledge of this bike concept.
After a year of trial and error, Honda came to the Valencia Test with this. It was their first go at a sort-of 2023 spec machine. It had a new tail unit and new fuel tank. While the chassis was different it wasn’t new with it being something we had seen before. But the biggest takeaway from this was that Honda appeared to be exploring more with changing the weight distribution of the machine and that can only be a good thing.
While the comments about this bike seemed to overall be negative, Puig did say to us that they had found some things that were better, but just not quite as much as they would have liked. Even so, it’s positive. It’s another step in learning more about how this bike concept works and how they need to change it to unlock the next big step in performance
But with them not being happy with it, it does make us wonder what we’re going to see in Sepang.
From motogp tech facebook page.