LCR rider Johann Zarco hopes Yamaha’s expansion to four bikes in MotoGP next year will provide an extra incentive for Honda to close the gap to the front.
The French rider believes the decision of his former team Pramac to become a satellite squad for Yamaha from 2025 will benefit both Japanese manufacturers, as they seek to level the field with their European counterparts.
Both Yamaha and Honda have fallen further behind the competition this year despite changing their philosophies over the last 12 months, with MotoGP’s new concession system also proving insufficient to help them make any meaningful progress in the middle of the season.
Yamaha’s position in the last few years has been weakened due to the absence of a satellite team, but it will get to have four bikes on the grid for the first time since 2022 as Pramac ends a 20-year partnership with Ducati in favour of a move to the Iwata-based brand.
Asked for his opinion on the switch, Zarco — who scored one victory and 14 podiums during his three-year spell with Pramac — said: «It will be good for the Yamaha project. They need more bikes to develop and get more information.
«It’s good to get more Japanese bikes in the championship because now the European bikes, the Ducati, [they] get too much advantage so it finds a little bit better balance. And I hope that the Japanese will reduce the gap with the Ducati.
«[With] Marc and Pecco for next year in the top team, they will be impossible to reach and they will fly all year.
Johann Zarco, Team LCR Honda
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
«But at least from third position to the 10th position, there will be some changes and that will be good.
«And I think Yamaha doing improvements and getting more bikes on the grid will push Honda also to make the changes or push themselves to find solutions.»
With a best finish of just 12th in the opening nine grands prix of the season, Honda has scored only 24 points in the manufacturers’ standings — half as many as its nearest rival Yamaha. By contrast, all three European manufacturers have scored over 150 points, with Ducati taking its total over 300 with its latest triumph in the German Grand Prix.
Zarco firmly believes there is not much more pace that can be extracted out of the current version of the RC213V and Honda needs a new bike in order to have any chance of taking the fight against its rivals.
«[We are] still too far. The bike is still not competitive enough to make a step in the top 10,» the 33-year-old said.
«I look forward to a new bike that will give this performance. I try at the moment to improve myself and this [Sachsenring] weekend I could try to use the strong points of the bike because there are some areas where the bike is not too bad and I tried to use it to the maximum.
«I don’t know [when the new bike will arrive]. But I wait. I don’t want to know [when it will it arrive] because it will not change my concentration for all the races. But at least I would like to [do] as well as possible over what I have control.»
Additional reporting by Bjorn Smit and Sebastian Franzschky