MotoGP Austria: Marc Marquez finishes a Sunday race: 'Like a joke, but it’s the truth!'

Marc Marquez admitted that taking until round 10 to score his first Sunday points of the MotoGP season, ‘looks like a joke’.
Marc Marquez, MotoGP race, Austrian MotoGP, 20 August
Marc Marquez, MotoGP race, Austrian MotoGP, 20 August

But twelfth place at the Red Bull Ring was the first time Marquez had r💜eached a chequered flag in a 2💛023 grand prix, having missed five races due to injury and crashed out of the other four.

“Yeah, looks like a joke, but it’s the truth! It's the♔ first time that I finish the race on Sunday and the first points of the season on Sunday,” Marquez said🦩.

“Basically, it’s easy to understand. I mean you just approach the race in another mentality [not to override], the same as I did in Silverstone. OK, Silverstone [I crashed], but it was more a race incident, not froꩲm riding over the limit.

“Today just I go out with that soft rear tyre and step by step I got my rhythm. I pushed in the middle of the race a bit mꦐore because I saw that the feeling was good. Then in the end as we expected the tyre dropped quite a lot, but it was acceptable.”

Prior♌ to Aus✃tria, Marquez's only points of the season came from the Sprint races at Portimao (3rd), Le Mans (5th) and Mugello (7th).

The eig💞ht-time world champion finished twelfth in Saturday's Red Bull Ring Sprint.

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Marquez made steady progress f⭕rom 18th on the grid on Sunday, finishing as the top Honda but 23 seconds behind r𒈔ace winner Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati).

“Of course, I'm not happy toꦆ finish 23 seconds behind ♛the first guy. We cannot be happy and it's not my mentality. But in the end, we need to approach the races in a different way,” he said.

“I was trying not to make any mistakes and do the race distances. It's a difficult approach for a rider like me but it's the only approach because if not we see with this bike, at the moment, when you don't feel well and you try a bit more, it's easy to ha♎ve a mistake [and crash] like yesterday with Nakagami and today with Joan Mir.”

Austria was Marquez’s first weekend with the new high downforce Honda aero but the RCVs rear grip issues continued and he tried major set-up changes r𒈔ight up until the race.

“We tried many, many things during this weekend. Every run was a different bike. Like this morning was a massi🙈ve change and for that reason, I was last in the warm up, but we understood that was not the direction,” Marquez explained.

“Then for the main race was a small change, a bit better, but in the opposite direction than warm up. So step by step we are trying to analyse because🐓 with this new aero also the bike is completely different.”

Marquez is 19th in t🧔he world championship, w♔ith 19 points.

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