Luca Marini: The analyst at the heart of Honda's MotoGP revival

Media interaction with MotoGP stars at grands prix usually takes place through a hectic and chaotic process of ‘debriefs’ that last anywhere between 5-10 minutes per rider and with varying degrees of organisation, attendance and lucidity (mainly from us journalists). Most racers want to rush through this daily rigmarole as quickly as possible. There is one athlete who is a little different to the rest, though.

Honda‘s Luca Marini can sometimes be found lurking at the back of other riders’ sessions, listening attentively, curious. The stick-thin but hauntingly handsome athlete then takes place for his own exposition and has become something of a media darling for his patience and willingness to divulge different elements of MotoGP minutiae, from performance pressure to tyre pressure, from aerodynamics to business dynamics. He does this all in his second language.

“When you talk and you feel that someone is listening to you then it’s great; even if you have to explain twice,” he says with a hint of embarrassment as Motor Sport quizzes him about his level of engagement. “I just like to help people to know more. Every time that I’ve visited another sport, cars, football, tennis, then knowing or seeing more details lets you get more ‘inside’. You start to love it a bit more. TV can show you one thing, but being there shows something bigger or better. It’s not just about [paddock] gossip. There is so much more about MotoGP that even you journalists don’t know. Also, you could do your job better if there were things we could say.”

The more Marini chats, the shrewder Honda’s recruitment seems to have been. On the bike, the 28-year-old has been a counterweight against team-mate Joan Mir‘s urgent but ‘crashtastic’ approach; the Spaniard and 2020 world champion fell off 22 times while Marini registered only two dismounts in 2025, one of those caused by Mir in the Valencian GP Sprint. He’s not slow. He took the Honda to six top-seven finishes in the second half of the season after not managing a single classification in the same bracket during the first half of the year. He scored 88 points from the last 12 rounds and since coming back from the biggest accident of his career while testing for the Suzuka 8hr endurance race where he was set to help Honda earn their fourth win in row (“Not easy [to block it out]. It needed a little bit of work. I had nightmares every night for a month.”).

Mir, who gathered two podiums for the brand in Japan and Malaysia to underline the company’s improvement, notched 47 points. Marini is one of five current riders yet to bank their first premier class win, but his value extends beyond results.

“There are different kinds of riders, and this guy is an analyst,” team manager Alberto Puig told Motor Sport. “He wants to understand how the changes we make on the bike can affect his riding. He is one of the most analytical I’ve seen. All of them are, but there are some that study really deep and are thinking on the bike. Luca is a methodical rider, but at the same time, he has made steps this year.”

“If I don’t know something, then I feel I am ‘missing’ something, and I’m not really relaxed,” Marini explains.

Marini is Valentino Rossi‘s stepbrother and therefore dealt with the waft of nepotism long before he accumulated six wins, 15 podiums and five seasons in Moto2 and then distinguished himself as a frontrunner in MotoGP from 2021 with two rostrum appearances and two poles. He is also firmly ensconced in Rossi’s VR46 Academy and has the backing that many other grand prix racers can only fantasise about. But the Italian bravely vaulted into HRC at a time when Marc Márquez was so despairing of the Japanese’s plight that he prematurely ended the most lucrative deal in the history of the sport to escape.

Marini also switched from the best manufacturer to the worst outside of the current contract cycle, which meant he had less time to make his mark with Honda and risked MotoGP ejection; a situation he was able to remedy in September with a fresh one-year extension for 2026.

At the end of 2023 and the Valencia test, Marini cut an excited and effervescent figure in his fresh, new HRC clothing. Team personnel told us that his enthusiasm was like a bolt of adrenaline for the beleaguered racing corps, which were heavily bruised after the Márquez affair and was more fragmented than usual due to more staff swaps. “Internally, they keep changing the people and each management has its own view of how they want to approach the racing,” Puig says. “There have been different ones; some helping one way, some helping the other.”

Since those first laps at the Ricardo Tormo Circuit, the journey for HRC, Marini and Mir has been fraught. Some of those media debriefs verged on the edge of depressive. Journalists almost turned to counsellors, struggling to avoid the same autopsy-type questions while studying their shoes. Marini scored one single point from 13 grands prix in 2024 and didn’t appear in the top 10 once. He refuted rumours that he was looking for an early getaway after it became apparent very quickly that he’d become a backmarker while Mir scraped asphalt across the continents.

“It was a bit tough,” he says now with distance and hindsight adding a softer hue. “Even in those hard periods, like early last year, where things were not going in the direction I would have liked, I always saw the light at the end of the tunnel and thought ‘OK, maybe we need another year’. I could feel the improvements after each test. Everything was then getting better. I knew in those little moments that better periods would arrive. Maybe sometimes I was a little sad inside, when I was coming to my media debrief without a smile, but I knew inside that we were arriving to the target.”

Can it be frustrating to be judged solely by a race ranking when people don’t see the contribution or the toil behind the pitbox door? “‘Frustrating’ is not the right word but sometimes we are just a number: ‘P5’ or ‘P6′. If you are not winning then you are nothing,” he muses. “A little bit of a pity. But it is the same in other sports. If you are world number three in tennis at the moment then nobody knows who you are! It’s a little bit of communication, but it was also the same in the past so we cannot complain too much. Now all the media and the world is changing, instead of making more races we can instead try to reach more people and show interesting things.”

Marini adapted. Honda was also rallying. Renowned technician Ken Kawauchi, the man who helped Suzuki ascend to 2020 world champions and winners of grands prix until the factory’s prompt withdrawal at the end of 2022, had been brought into the set-up but he did little to arrest the slide of form through 2023 and 2024. Inexplicably, the RCV went from being a Honda missile to one of the slowest for top speed. Progress stumbled and Honda (and the works team) languished last in the 2024 constructors’ standings, teams’ standings and with its riders 22nd and 21st in the championship (Mir gaining one spot over 2023).

So, HRC went hunting towards the end of ’24. A bold approach to Ducati Corse’s magician Gigi Dall’Igna was rebuffed but the Japanese found resolve in Aprilia‘s Romano Albesiano, who swapped a black shirt for a white one as technical director.

More Aprilia nuance came with the surprise defection of racer Aleix Espargaró. He had a bumpy term in 2025 with cycling injuries interrupting his work but still raced five times and was full of his typically forthright insight right up until the last laps of the season.

“At the beginning, for me, it was really hard to understand how the Japanese work because in Aprilia, when you have some problem with the chassis, you go to the one who’s in charge of the chassis,” Espargaró said. “If you have some problem with electronics or with the engine [the same]. Here in Honda it’s a little bit more complicated. There are more people, and it’s difficult really to understand which engineer is in charge of everything. I talked a lot with Romano. He spent a lot of time in Japan. Now we are a little bit quicker and when I need something the information goes more direct.”

“I think Honda made a big effort to understand that working more like this is more efficient, it’s better,” he added. “So, the way that we work now is completely different than [it was in] the beginning.”

Espargaró was just one of the test mules as the riders and mechanics put in the mileage at tracks around the world permitted by Honda’s ‘D’ rating for MotoGP Concessions; a system designed to help ailing brands regain ground. LCR Honda’s Johann Zarco was another. The 35-year-old, the oldest on the grid, delivered only Honda’s sixth victory this decade thanks to his opportunism and wet-weather skill in Le Mans in May. The Frenchman harvested the company’s best results during the first half of the campaign but dropped off in the second as Honda had to spread their allocation of parts. Zarco barely concealed irritation at points with Marini and Mir having more advanced concepts with the RCV but towards the end of 2025 was also stressing the need for consistency of the technical platform. Honda was not short of remedies.

Marini did not earn any Prosecco, but his own encroachments were easy to chart. The points were symbolic of Honda’s incremental path nearer to the top of a championship they once used to rule with a blasé air of arrogance stretching back to Mick Doohan‘s five titles in the 1990s, Rossi’s three championships at the crossover of MotoGP’s four-stroke period, Dani Pedrosa‘s decade-long excellence (wins every season for 12 years) and, of course, the Márquez age. Rather than a limp, some of the HRC swagger is starting to return.

“When you start to go up and up and up and you feel there is a different energy. Different air,” Marini said. “You represent such a big manufacturer and HRC is more than just ‘something’ here. We know what we are representing and what we want to achieve in the MotoGP class. Honda can only win, in my opinion. Like any sport, there will be some ups and downs, but we have to be ‘there’, always. When we started with the project last year I felt very involved with it and a really good connection with the Japanese engineers. I found a good atmosphere and working together we already did a very good job. From the outside it is not enough, but from the inside, everybody here is very pleased with the level we have now. Maybe some did not expect this.”