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Marc Marquez put in a late push in the afternoon to top the post-race test on Monday, the Repsol Honda rider dipping under Cal Crutchlow’s pole record from 2013. Marquez deposed Jorge Lorenzo at the top of the timesheets, though Lorenzo closed down the Repsol Honda man’s advantage.

Rain fell late in the session, stopping activity for a while, and looked like preventing Valentino Rossi from going out on the 2015 version of the YZR-M1, but the sun burned off the rain and dried the track enough for testing to resume for the final hour.

The hot-hand fallacy finally caught up with Marc Marquez. His amazing streak of consecutive wins stays at ten, the Spaniard being beaten for the first time this year.

In his twenty-ninth race in the MotoGP class, Marquez and his crew finally failed to find a good enough set up to win, or even make it onto the podium.

The Repsol Honda man has only missed out on the podium twice before, once at Mugello last year, when he crashed, and once at Phillip Island, when he was disqualified from the tire fiasco race.

Defeat had been waiting in the wings for Marquez for a while now. Look solely at the points table, and his dominance looks complete. But go back and look at his winning margin, and his advantage has not looked quite so large.

Of his ten wins, only two were by a considerable margin: one at Austin, where he has always been better than the rest; one at Assen, where rain created large gaps. His advantage at Argentina and Indianapolis was 1.8 seconds, at Jerez, Le Mans and the Sachsenring under a second and a half.

Marquez could only eke out victory at Qatar, Mugello and Barcelona, races he won by a half a second or less. At most races, Marquez was winning by a slender margin indeed, lapping on average just five or six hundredths of a second quicker than his rivals. It was enough, but it was really not very much at all.

Marquez’s slender advantage over his rivals was a sign of just how close they really were. Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa had all come close to beating Marquez, and in the case of Pedrosa at Barcelona, Marquez had been forced to delve deep into his bag of tricks to beat his teammate.

Marquez’s talent may have loaded the dice he was rolling, but eventually they would fall another way. “People said winning was easy for me,” Marquez told the Spanish media, “but I know how hard it was.”

The following is the result of what happens when you put two World Champions in a room full of 500GP / MotoGP World Championship winning machines, and film the interaction.

Having both Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa on-hand to kick the tires on bike’s like Mick Doohan’s NSR500, Rossi’s RC211V, and Stoner’s RC212V, the two Repsol Honda riders compare and contrast the differences that generations and prodigies create.

It’s a pretty candid perspective on some of the most dominant machinery from perhaps the two most qualified critics. Enjoy it after the jump, you might be surprised by what they have to say.

Honda Racing and Red Bull have announced an enhancement to their collaboration in MotoGP through the Repsol Honda team, which sees the energy drink company’s logo featured on Honda’s factory team starting in the 2015 season, as it becomes the official energy drink for the team as well.

The two parties have collaborated over the last nine years, but the Red Bull logo has never before been featured on the Repsol Honda machinery, despite Red Bull supporting both Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa with personal sponsorships.

At the start of the summer break, Repsol and HRC announced they will be extending their sponsorship agreement for the next three seasons.

The Spanish oil giant will continue to back the factory Honda team until the end of the 2017 season, continuing a partnership which first started in 1995, the year after Mick Doohan won his first title for Honda. The press release of the deal is after the jump.

The 2014 MotoGP Silly Season is rapidly closing, as HRC has announced the re-signing of Dani Pedrosa through the 2016 season in the MotoGP Championship. This means that Pedrosa will have at least 16 consecutive seasons with the factory Honda team to his name, where thus far he has been three-times the bridesmaid (once behind Casey Stoner, and twice behind Jorge Lorenzo).

HRC’s move solidifies the Repsol Honda team’s all-Spanish rider lineup, and quells any rumors of Pedrosa making a move to the Suzuki Racing project, which will reemerge into GP racing for the 2015 season. Pedrosa was never a likely candidate for Suzuki, though the Spanish rider’s presence surely would have signalled the level of seriousness that the Japanese OEM was giving the MotoGP World Championship.