Luca Marini reveals the ‘unique’ reason Johann Zarco is beating him at Honda

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Johann Zarco has once again been the lead rider for Honda in 2025. Ahead of this weekend’s Grand Prix of the Americas, Zarco sits an impressive P5 in the championship on 25 points.

Zarco just about missed on a point in the Thailand Sprint but he’s scored at every event since. He was seventh in the main Grand Prix and then starred in Argentina qualifying, surprising the paddock with P3.

While he couldn’t hold on for a first podium since the 2023 Valencian Grand Prix, he took Honda to heights they never reached in 2024 with P4 in the Sprint and P6 in the full-length race.

Meanwhile, Joan Mir and Luca Marini are sitting just outside the top 10 in the standings with 10 points apiece. Rookie Somkiat Chantra, Zarco’s LCR teammate, is still searching for his first score.

Zarco has already scored nearly half the points he managed in 2024 (55). He accumulated more than Mir and Marini combined on last year’s bike (35) and continues to show up the factory duo.

Luca Marini’s honest answer on Johann Zarco’s pace advantage at Honda

In an interview MotorSport Magazine, Marini was asked why Zarco was extracting more from the RC213V. The open and honest Italian explained it was a matter of riding styles.

The ‘unique’ Zarco is able to compensate for the bike’s weakness on corner entry. However, Marini has always preferred to brake late, even if means losing time on the exit.

He’s had to counter his instincts in the hope of finding more lap time. Honda head to Austin this weekend joint-second in the constructors’, making them the most-improved team on the grid.

“I think his riding style is quite unique, he usually sacrifices corner entry, the braking part, to have a fantastic exit,” Marini explained. “He was the same on the Ducati. This helps him to solve some of the problems we’ve had in entry.

“On my side, I like to brake deep and hard and enter the corner super-fast, but on the exit I sacrifice lap time, so especially with last year’s bike that wasn’t a good way to ride, so I often had to sacrifice my instinct to be more focused on the exit to make the lap time, because in corner entry we’ve had some struggles with the bike which didn’t let us enter as fast as we wanted.”

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Zarco was ‘very angry’ at the Argentina Grand Prix despite his eye-catching result. He complained that the bike was ‘moving a lot’, which prevented him from beating Fabio di Giannantonio.

Nonetheless, Neil Hodgson praised Zarco’s ‘incredible’ performance in Termas de Rio Hondo. He pointed out that the Frenchman only qualified in the top 12 four times in 2024, let alone the top three.

Zarco is the oldest rider on the grid at 34 and with 146 race starts to his name, he’s one of the most experienced. But his only premier-class victory to date came at the 2023 Australian GP.

It emerged in a recent interview that Zarco regrets not joining Honda earlier in his career, having had an opportunity to race for the factory squad alongside the dominant Marc Marquez. He’s previously had stints on Yamaha, KTM and Ducati machinery.