From the slippery Aragon coating that had leveled the performances, Johann zarco and all the drivers of the Championship MotoGP took to the very grippy Misano circuit for the 13th round of the season.
14th at +0.779 seconds from the leader in FP1, the driver in Castrol colours dropped back to 15th at +1.050s during Practice, almost abandoning all hope of reaching Q2, unlike what he had done in Spain.
It was therefore a little lost that he addressed the journalists on Friday afternoon, drawing all the same satisfaction from being, by far, the first Honda.
As usual, we report here his words during his debriefing, without the slightest formatting, and this time in French.
John Zarco: "The first laps in FP1 were very complicated. We managed to quickly adjust the bike to make it more usable, more efficient, to get to a slightly more correct zone, and this afternoon, we tried to stay there. The time, the stopwatch, is not too bad, but there you go, everyone is very strong and I expected Q2 to be almost impossible because the gap between the top 10 is too tight, and so I couldn't get an opportunity like in Aragon. Here in the years gone by with the Ducati, I couldn't really take advantage of good riding, and so that means there were things I was doing wrong, but I'm trying to work on them, even with the Honda here. I feel like I'm still moving up a gear. This circuit is very tight and the circuit grips a lot, but I think I couldn't understand that in the past years. Now, I'm happy to feel it, learning at the limit of our bike, which really doesn't want to take the corners. And no matter how much angle you put in, the bike doesn't turn and it lacks acceleration, or it slides or it moves, and that's our big, big deficit. So, I'm fighting hard but it's only one second behind the first."
Compared to a circuit where there was no grip at all, and here where there is a lot of grip, how do we adapt?
“I feel like it puts us more of a gap with the others, actually. It makes the bike more difficult because we have the grip, let’s say on the max angle, it’s not the worst. It’s… we have a bike that doesn’t turn well, but in terms of grip it’s not the worst on the angle. Maybe that’s almost why it grips too much on the angle, and that’s why it doesn’t turn. But once we straighten up, we really have problems. I don’t know if it’s aero, chassis, engine, but where we move or we pitch up or we slide. In fact we never have a stable bike to accelerate hard. So on a track like that, we feel that the others manage to use the grip to pass to turn quickly and then to keep this speed coming out of the corner.”
Is Q2 possible?
"I feel like it's mission impossible. I would like to play it, but seeing the energy expended today, I tell myself “is it really worth it
kill your health in qualifying and miss the sprint?”. I really want to feel strong in the sprint and strong in the race tomorrow. I don't want to sacrifice qualifying, but I want to keep more energy than I did today, because today I really gave a lot, a lot. I made a big difference compared to the other Hondas, but it still leaves us out of the game. So, is it really useful?
Does qualifying really consume energy?
"Yes! But in fact it's just that the heart beats at more than 185 and you can't do it 6 times a day."
Johann Zarco Misano
Johann Zarco Misano
