Johann Zarco<\/a> cracking the top five in Argentina and Qatar, before claiming a historic victory at the French Grand Prix.<\/p>\nHe followed that up with a podium at the British Grand Prix, though this proved to be his last top eight finish of the season.<\/p>\n
He crashed in three of the next four rounds, while his results dipped as Honda\u2019s bike updates took their time to filter to the LCR team.<\/p>\n
Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
Cecchinello believes this led to Zarco not being \u201c100% focused on riding his bike\u201d in the latter part of the season, as he slumped out of the top 10 in the standings to 12th.<\/p>\n
\u201cUndoubtedly, we started the season quite good,\u201d the LCR boss said in Valencia.<\/p>\n
\u201cArgentina, fifth place, and we finished fourth in Qatar, we won Le Mans, second at Silverstone.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the first part of the season was really, really good for us, above our expectations.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt a certain point, we were fifth in the championship ranking. So, we really enjoyed it.<\/p>\n
Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality is that in the second half of the season, we started to struggle.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there are several expectations about that.<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically, because of the very good results in Le Mans and Silverstone, these kinds of results were extreme and influenced by the weather conditions, because also at Silverstone we had a very, very cold day, and not every rider could feel good with the front tyre.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when you enter the podium, you really strive to achieve other top results, and eventually, Johann started to have too many crashes.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, those crashes didn\u2019t help us.<\/p>\n
Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
\u201cAlso Honda produced some very good development parts, and we needed to wait some weeks to get them delivered.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this created a little bit of disappointment, and he wasn\u2019t 100% focused on riding his bike.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite this, Zarco earned a new two-year deal with Honda through to the end of 2027, which will see him maintain factory support from the Japanese brand.<\/p>\n
Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LCR MotoGP team boss Lucio Cecchinello believes Johann Zarco\u2019s \u201cextreme\u201d results at the start of the 2025 season…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,15612,15613,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-400122","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-johann-zarco","11":"tag-lcr-honda","12":"tag-motor","13":"tag-motor-sports","14":"tag-motosport","15":"tag-motosports","16":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}