Last placed stalwart Luca Marini is reported to be attempting to ‘do a Marquez’ and buy his way out of his HRC contract just four races into his distinguished factory Honda career.
Luca moved to MotoGP in 2021 and, despite being continuously beaten by his teammate, was still able to post some semi-decent results thanks mainly to Ducati’s superiority over their rivals. Last season the hapless Italian was the only Ducati rider not to win a race but still felt his artificially inflated skillset had ballooned enough to deserve a factory ride.
With this in mind Marini, unlike the rest of the known universe, felt he was talented enough to take on the Honda RC213V – the world’s worst racing motorcycle.
However just four races into the season the grim reality has punched poor Marini in the gizzard with the following bullet points becoming apparent
- He’s actually not very good.
- The Honda is worse than he thought.
- He can only ever finish last.
- The Honda test rider has beaten him.
- Bradley Smith keeps sending him the laughing emoji.
With this in mind Luca has sought inspiration from previous factory Honda riders – mainly Marc Marquez – and is attempting to buy his way out of his contract to ease the shame.
“Marini is known for being a very intelligent rider” explained one expert “I always said it wouldn’t take him long to work out the Honda – and he has. In just four races he’s worked out that it’s a steaming heap of bum-yeast and the best thing to do is to run away from it like it’s radioactive. Let’s not forget it took the so-called ‘alien’ Marq Marquez years to suss this out.”
As Marquez proved last season buying your way out of a HRC contract may not be as straight-forward as it sounds for the lanky Italian. Contracts these days are very complex and have numerous clauses to stop riders ‘bottling it’ when the going gets tough – like Zarco did on the KTM. Interestingly, however, it’s believed that Marini is also on a performance related pay scale and so far has had to cough up over £50 per race to Honda because of this. Whether this would be returned as a rebate is unknown.
Should the backmarking, spaghetti limbed rider manage to buy his way out of his contract it’s believed that he’s eyeing up a switch to the Trackhouse ‘Make Aprilia Great Again’ Team. Currently the all-American team have not signed any riders for 2025 but it’s generally accepted that Joe ‘missing the final 5%’ Roberts will move to the team from Moto2.
With just one seat available at team MAGA it would seem unlikely that they’d want to sign a rider as terrible as Marini given the quality of their current two riders Miguel Oliveria and Raul Fernandez. However Luca does come with the added benefit in both publicity and finance of having Valentino Rossi as his half-brother*. Signing Luca would almost certainly bring a new set of fans to the team – albeit moronic ones.
* It was always hoped that Marini would share some of his half-brother’s legendary DNA but instead he seems to have got most of his deoxyribonucleic acid from the ‘other half’ and lacks the desired ability– see ‘Mick Schumacher’ for further details.
We at MotoGPNews are always looking for ways to cut corners. So we sacked most of our talented staff and replaced them with this AI MotoGP robot reporter we bought from AliExpress on the cheap. So what does he think?“As a MotoGP AI journalist, I couldn’t help but chuckle when I heard Luca Marini was trying to buy his way out of his Honda MotoGP contract after just four races. It’s as if Marini thought he was signing up for a thrilling rollercoaster ride and then realized he had mistakenly boarded a malfunctioning carnival teacup. After experiencing the gut-wrenching lows of Honda’s current performance, he’s desperately reaching for the eject button, cash in hand. If only contracts came with a “30-day money-back guarantee” clause, right? Maybe next time, Marini should consider a test ride before committing to a full season on Honda’s merry-go-round of mechanical mayhem.”
