Johann Zarco leads the MotoGP 2025 crash statistics despite a strong season – The Honda rider explains why he has recently lost consistency
Johann Zarco remains the highest-ranked Honda rider in the overall standings in the 2025 MotoGP season. Nevertheless, the Frenchman has noticeably lost consistency since the Silverstone Grand Prix, where he finished a strong second.
This is particularly evident in a statistic that every rider would rather avoid: with 20 crashes to date, the LCR Honda rider tops the crash list and has already racked up more crashes than in the entire 2024 season, although not all of the incidents were the Frenchman’s fault.
When asked about the cause of the accumulation, Zarco emphasizes: “We crashed most of the time in practice, while I tried to finish the races.”
The approach: if you want to score points on Sundays, you have to push the limits on Fridays and Saturdays. At the same time, Zarco admits that this pushing of the limits has recently gone too far too often. A key factor here is a characteristic of the 2025 Honda.
Zarco puts it this way: “In my opinion, we have a very strong front end on the bike. But if that’s the only good point, we try to use it more than we should. And I think that was the reason for one or two crashes.”
When asked whether he will therefore be more cautious in the future, Zarco answers clearly: “No, because we have to push. That’s our job.” But of course, the goal is to “push without crashing.” The experience he has gained from his previous crashes should also help him in this regard: “I try to learn from them.”
In sporting terms, the calculation remains brutally simple. Every crash costs training time, rhythm, sometimes even starting positions and, in the worst case, the confidence that is so important for the decisive Q2 round or the first laps of the race.
Zarco’s Honda teammate Luca Marini shows that it is possible to avoid crashes altogether, having not had a single slip-up so far this season. However, he also missed three weekends due to injury after crashing heavily while preparing for the Suzuka 8 Hours.
Now recovered, he recently surpassed Zarco as the best Honda rider when he finished fourth in the sprint and fifth in the race at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Both Marini and Zarco were confirmed by Honda and LCR on Monday for 2026.
