Marquez spent Friday at the Italian Grand Prix comparing a new chassis with his current race bike and ended the day 12th overall, 0.767 seconds off the pace set by Aprilia's Aleix Espargaro.
Honda hasn’t come close to winning a race since the opening night of the championship in Qatar, while Marquez is yet to score a podium on the radically overhauled RC213V.
Marquez says his Friday at Mugello is following a pattern that started at Jerez, in that he is needing to try major changes and sacrifice his race work to try to better understand the Honda.
But even with a Friday devoted to testing, Marquez admitted that from his first laps in FP1 he is wary the Italian GP will be “hard” for Honda.
“It’s different - it’s true that today we worked in a different way, like on Fridays,” Marquez said.
“Since Jerez we are trying to understand the way to improve the bike for the future.
“And to understand this you need to take some risks, and in our garage we are the guys who are taking the risk because I’m the rider, I need to try things and understand the way for the future.
“It’s true that I was working with two different bikes, but this created some limitations.
“Tomorrow it’s time to do a step, time to understand which direction is the best one and work on small details for the GP.
“But since I went out in FP1, I saw that it will be hard. Will be hard not only for the bike, but also for me, I was struggling in the way to ride.
“I was trying a lot in FP1, then step-by-step I get better in FP2.
“But even like this, the bike must improve. In some areas it’s better this new bike in this circuit, but in some areas, we are losing a lot.
“So, we need to understand the way to ride faster and especially more consistent.”
Marquez was cagey on what exactly he was testing and refused to confirm he had been running a new chassis, but did note that the key area Honda is looking to improve is turning.
“How do you know it was a chassis?” he added, when asked about it and what Honda was looking for from it.
“No, I mean we are trying to understand the way to turn better. It’s true that as soon as you improve in one area, you lose in another.
“But we are trying to understand the way to turn better, to understand the front tyre better, the way to turn in a shorter time.
“In MotoGP, if you turn in a long time you cannot use the power, use the torque and you lose tenths there.”
