MARC STUDIES IT AND APPLIES
- After each workout he sees videos of his rivals
- Summarize each race in a mural
ALBERTO GÓMEZ. ESTORIL 05/08/12 – 11:50.
Talent without work is not worth anything. It gets lost like smoke. Marc Márquez knows it. All life was a worker. What is seen of him on the track is only the top of an iceberg. Below there are thousands of hours of application, of work. The big ones are not big by infused science. Many people in the paddock thought that, years ago, the all-powerful Valentino Rossi walked around without hardly entering the box. “One day I was leaving the Sepang circuit at night after dinner and I saw that Rossi was in his box working with his mech,” was surprised Fonsi Nieto, who then competed in 250cc.
The best have everything measured. There is no cardboard. Not even magic. Like the victory of Márquez in Estoril. Like all his victories. Inside each trophy hides a secret, the planning to win it. Marc is a Stakhanovite, from the moment he gets up until he is cloaked every night in bed. Every afternoon he studies, locked in his truck.
And on an Excel sheet, you write down each one of your sensations. Then he compares them with his mechanics, that tribe of which he does not separate himself either from the sun or from the shadow. His tribe of the particular Chihuahua, with which he travels a day before each grand prize and leaves a day later.
It is in that closed circle where he raises his battles. And so far it has not worked badly. Of the 18 races he has been racing in Moto2, the success has proved right. The CX Repsol has not dropped off the podium in the last 12. Nine wins, four second places and a third – at Phillip Island 2011 after finishing 38th on the grid – is the exuberant baggage he shows in the races he has been able to finish. Except for the three consecutive zeroes at the beginning of 2010, where I still paid the toll of inexperience, and a fall at Silverstone due to the rain, the rest is a catalog of podiums. “Either we win or I fall,” jokes the pilot, “I’m not very regular.” But it is not true, all the races that he finishes he does in some step of the podium.
Routines
Behind is a forecast. And a work of maximum concentration. Márquez, who speaks to his chief mechanic, Santiago Hernández, and the rest of the mechanics in English, forging his future in case he jumps shortly to MotoGP. Routines are the salt that spice success.
“I have seen many races of Vale: I saw how, if it suits him, he changes the strategy”
That’s why every day he thoroughly reviews videos of his rivals, of each training, of each race, looking for the small slits, the weak points, where to sink the tooth. In Estoril he worked a lot with the worn tires, he prepared for the final battle in the last turns. “It’s hard to get away on this track,” he had guessed the day before.
With his team they mark the different strategies, the alternatives. Marc writes them down in his head and then unfolds them. A new Rossi? “The truth is that I’ve seen many Valentino races, I always looked carefully at what I did in each race and I saw that he changes the strategies according to his needs, I also study this with my mechanics and at the moment it goes well”, reveals Márquez . Less in Jerez. The water dislodged his intentions when he caressed a new triumph.
Rituals
Nobody knows if it will be the new Valentino Rossi but it does have some tics. The rituals can not miss. In a mural that is in the box, Marc is writing down a phrase after each grand prize. They are your personal notches. In Portugal he signed the following: “Here we have won Congratulations mothers!”.
In Jerez, where he was second, he could read: “A very delicate weekend thinking about the World Cup”. Under the Qatar, where he won after four months off, he wrote: “In this GP we have seen all colors! Great team.” Jorge Lorenzo, when he was in 250cc, was marking each hole of 17 on a blackboard painted with his logo of On the outside with the position where he had been.
And, like Valentino, the ilerdense will soon share designer. Aldo Drudi, who was in Estoril, confessed “in love” with the child. “And he had only spoken to him twice on the phone,” added the cartoonist from Drudi Performance, the man who has painted all Rossi’s helmets – the first, that of his father Graziano.
Aldo has made a sketch of helmet with which, probably, will be in front of his fans and family, in Montmeló. “I like the brightness in his eyes,” he adds.
Marca.com
