Marc Marquez Goes For a Drive
The week before the Austrian MotoGP at the Red Bull Ring (where Marquez finished second to J Lo by 0.13 second), the small Spaniard was granted the opportunity to schwantz around the circuit in a Scuderia Toro Rosso F1 car for a few laps.
At the 2017 MotoGP race there, MM qualified in pole position with a 1.23.235 lap. At the 2018 F1 race, Valtteri Bottas qualified on pole with a time of 1.03.130. Word from Red Bull is that the Catalonian cruise missile lapped about 9 seconds off his usual MotoGP pace in the four-wheeler – which means he’s 11 seconds from competitive.
Maybe if they’d put Valentino in another car ahead of him, MM could’ve gone faster, before the inevitable shunt?
The 2018 MotoGP points leader had this to say: “It was an unbelievable experience, and an absolute highlight of my career. There is a massive difference to MotoGP. The limited visibility was a great challenge, in particular, to begin with. You feel a lot more constricted in the cockpit. The braking distances and timing in turns is completely different. A Formula 1 car has much more downforce, of course, which made for a lot of fun in the part of the circuit with the most turns, in particular.”
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Everybody's looking for another John Surtees or Mike Hailwood (look them up if you've never heard of them, youngsters) who can cross over from bikes to cars and be competitive. Based on this, it doesn't look like Marquez is going to be the one.
A question about time computation. Marquez' MotoGP pole time is already 20 seconds off Bottas' F1 pole time, and you say Marquez was 9 seconds slower in the car than on the bike. So doesn't that make Marquez 29 seconds from being competitive, rather than the 11 seconds you quote? Or are you using some other non-pole F1 time, not cited in the article, as a "competitive" pace?
I might be nuts, but I think of all the current GP riders Jorge Lorenzo would be the most likely to succeed in F1.