Box Confidential: Honda’s last mohican falls

The final fall of Honda’s Mohican.

In the tests after the Misano GP, Marc Márquez already said: “There are new faces in the box, I don’t know who they are because they haven’t been introduced to me.” At the Indian GP a week ago I didn’t see him in the box either. “Maybe he has a visa problem,” I thought. But no, the absence of Shinichi Kokubu in Buddh a week ago was for no other reason than his defenestration as head of Honda’s MotoGP project. With his ‘disappearance’ the book is surely closed on the generation of engineers who made the HRC acronym a myth. Kokubu joined Honda racing in 1986 as a ‘trainee engineer’; its place, the chassis. After years of working in the race and earning titles, in 2016 he was named general manager of the Technological Development Division. After the failure of the new concept introduced by Takeo Yokoyama in 2023, Kokubu returned to the circuits with the right things… It didn’t take long. Meanwhile, the ‘noise’ continues to come out of Honda’s box, such as Dall’Igna not joining them, Honda not placing Davide Brivio at its team leader, or the interest in acquiring the services of an engineer from Aprilia. After several periods in which it seemed to hibernate, the ‘Honda bear’ woke up.

The ‘Pilots Union’ is underway.

In this same section last month, specifically at the Catalonia GP, we wrote how the drivers met behind closed doors to propose the creation of an association that would defend their interests. Extraordinary – this is the word used by the main characters – there was unity. Well, this ‘union’ is now a reality. The drivers put Sylvain Guintoli at the helm. And it is easy to imagine that in the agenda of the manager of the Riders’ Association, one of his priorities is to put on the table the adaptation of the contracts of the riders to the new format of MotoGP. Because let’s not forget that in the last general renewal of contracts in 2022, the races that appeared in those agreements were less than half of those forced to run as a result of the introduction of sprint races. Some pilots openly talk about the need to update their income, others assure that it is not a problem for them, while a third group takes a profile. This season, drivers reluctantly agreed to run 40 races without a pay review as the new format got teams with closed budgets, but facing 2024, both sides need to sit down at the table .

Heat, that enemy that is invisible but always there.

Those who understand thermodynamics know very well that the generation of electricity involves heat. And with motorcycles, like MotoGP, which are supposed to make 380 HP, this means a lot of heat, mountains of heat. For engineers, getting that heat from between the walls of the fairing is a huge headache, especially in this era where aerodynamics has become an absolute priority. Just a few days ago, in India, we witnessed the consequences of the heat that the engines give off to the pilots. It has a lot to do with Jorge Martín’s notable episode of dehydration; Fabio Quartararo explained that from lap one the leather suit burned his skin; and here in Motegi, it was seen today how on the Aprilias of Espargaró and Viñales they ‘invented’ some remarkable channels to evacuate that heat that not only burns the riders, but also causes a series of technical problems that affected the operation. of Noale motorcycles. When Aleix says that the Aprilia suffers especially in the heat, he goes that way.