The day after a sprint marked by several errors, Johann Zarco was able to confirm Honda’s progress in the main race at Motegi. Despite a bad weekend, the Frenchman achieved his second best result of the season, an 11th place, following on from the ninth obtained in Indonesia a week ago.
“I’m happy with 11th place”Zarco said. “It’s a good goal for us and good points. The good thing about this race is that I didn’t make any mistakes, so I was able to take advantage of other people’s mistakes in the first few rounds.”
Zarco actually gained four positions in the first corners, going from 17th to 13th place. He then took advantage of Pedro Acosta’s fall but was overtaken by Fabio Di Giannantonio and was unable to follow him in his comeback. Zarco then spent most of his race in the wake of Fabio Quartararo, without having the ability to overtake him.
“Behind Fabio, I felt pretty good. I did almost my entire race behind Fabio but I couldn’t go any faster because the pressure in my front tire was a little high, which made it difficult to slow down the bike .”
“[Il n’y avait] no way to stay close to him and overtake him, we really have two different styles”Zarco said. “What’s hard is that to maintain the pace behind him, I had to attack, and my tire was building pressure.”
Fabio Quartararo devant Johann Zarco.
Photo de: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
“At a certain point, when it reaches a certain pressure, you can no longer slow down when braking and you are in difficulty, you feel that you cannot do more, and it becomes a little tiring. So, I was happy with the position, I saw that we were going to get back on Miller and Aleix [Espargaro]because I know that on worn tires, we were better than them.”
“That’s what happened in the end. But there is always this same defect at one point during a certain acceleration phase, where I lose meters. Afterwards, here, the tire burned a lot, so I tried to straighten a lot more and still have traction. It allowed me to control, but it really ate my forearms.”
Zarco gained one more place with the fall of Maverick Viñales, and a last one just before the finish line, when Quartararo ran out of fuel: “I was lucky at the end. I was very close to him on the last corner thinking ‘maybe I’m going to have better acceleration than him, or he’s going to spin or something’, because sometimes when we’re trying to get out so much better, we can make a little mistake and in fact he was out of fuel and then I almost hit him but I gained a place.
Zarco therefore said to himself “very happy” of the five points taken this Sunday, something Honda could hardly claim just a few weeks ago: “It’s still, let’s say, almost top results compared to those we had before. Fighting with other bikes was good too.”
Johann Zarco has been in the fight with several drivers
Photo de: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
But if he was able to defend his chances, Zarco also noted the limits that his bike maintains behind the other machines, in particular when overtaking his opponents: “I kept this possibility of braking very late, as long as we are straight. But I cannot do like Acosta, to try to overtake, because I know that I will slow down in the last meters by leaning the bike. I don’t have that.”
“I had it a lot more in Mandalika, but they weren’t the same tires, not the same carcasses, I think that plays a big role. That gives us some information, but there you go, I would have liked to have had better between yesterday and today on that. We tried things, but it didn’t help.”
With Léna Buffa and Luca Bartolomeo
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