A season is like a career compressed into a year: made up of ups and downs, depending on the races, the riders' fitness, but also their bikes, sometimes performing well, sometimes struggling. As the oldest rider on the grid, Johann Zarco knows very well that a year in MotoGP is not a long, quiet river, far from it. But the Cannes resident perhaps did not expect to find himself so deeply in the trough of a wave that nevertheless carried him to seventh heaven just a few weeks ago.
After a positive start to the season, where his Honda was already showing signs of improvement, the two-time Moto2 world champion showcased his talent by pulling off the coup of the century at Le Mans, in front of his home crowd. The first Frenchman to triumph on home soil in over 70 years, Zarco wrote the finest chapter of his career—even more emotional than his first victory, achieved in Australia at the end of 2023, in a race broadcast in the early hours of the morning in France, and where the sound systems at the Phillip Island circuit started to go off the rails as he played the eagerly awaited Marseillaise. This time, Zarco wouldn't have needed speakers to rock out to the rhythm of his national anthem, sung at the top of his lungs by the tens of thousands of compatriots in the Bugatti aisles.
Not really back down from his cloud at Silverstone during the following round, the former Pramac driver scored another resounding coup by taking second place in a race won by Marco Bezzecchi, in which fabio quartararo could claim. Since this new convincing result across the Channel, Zarco has inexorably returned to the standard he has known since leaving the Ducati fold for Honda at the start of 2024.
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Imperative rebound
With LCR, he had a very difficult first year, and the significant progress made this season still seems too fragile to fully benefit from it. Thus, this is the second weekend in a row that the Frenchman has not scored any points. At Aragon, he finished 16th in the sprint race before retiring the following day. At Mugello, it was no better: two retirements to conclude a poorly-started race, which began with an elimination in Q1 (14th on the grid).
"The first feeling is that it's difficult to start from scratch, to not finish the race. And so, I really feel like I'm in a bad spiral.", the double Grand Prix winner complains to the microphone of GP InsideIn his defense, Johann Zarco was unable to take advantage of the sprint race to gather information and refine his feelings, as he likes to do: the LCR driver was thrown to the ground at the first corner, a collateral victim of a collision between Fabio Di Giannantonio and Brad Binder.
"After a really good time a month ago, you have to accept returning to normality, but this isn't normal: it's zero points, crashes, mistakes. I don't like repeating mistakes," Johann Zarco says angrily. "I hope to recover as best I can for the next races, to be able to rebuild something pretty good.", he continues, after falling alone this time on Sunday. The most important thing is that he didn't hurt himself in his antics, except for a slightly swollen ankle after his fall on Saturday: he is now ready to get back on track at Assen, on a circuit where he clashed with... Fabio Quartararo in 2023. Let's see if his prayers will be answered in the Dutch Cathedral.
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