In a French Grand Prix where experienced race-winners lost their heads as rookies and backmarkers kept theirs, Johann Zarco stayed cool, kept emotionally stable, and stuck to his guns.
All while eyeing one of his mates on the MotoGP grid like a hawk.
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Sunday’s victory by the French veteran at his home Grand Prix – the first Frenchman to win a premier-class race at home since 1954 – was all about MotoGP’s oldest rider picking a course and sticking to it.
And, as the 34-year-old admitted afterwards, watching what Jack Miller was doing as a sign that – with all the chaos of a track that went from wet to semi-dry to very wet to somewhere in between corner by corner, lap by lap – he was doing the right thing.
Races as crazy as Sunday’s 26-lap rollercoaster ride are few in MotoGP, but when they come along, it’s all about being on the right tyre at the right time, and making the most of it.
Of the 22-rider grid, seven – Zarco (Honda), Miller (Yamaha), Miller’s teammate Miguel Oliveira and fellow Yamaha rider Alex Rins, Ducati’s Francesco Bagnaia, and Honda pair Luca Marini and Takaaki Nakagami – elected to start the race on wet tyres on a track that was damp, but where slicks were, for a time, the optimum tyre.
One by one, they fell by the wayside as the rain trickled, then tumbled.
Miller and Oliveira crashed out into retirement. Rins, Marini and Bezzecchi all abandoned their wet-tyre strategy and pitted for slicks, then pitted later for wets again when they realised they’d made a mistake. Bagnaia was taken out on the first lap by former Ducati teammate Enea Bastianini and never had a chance to see how his tyre strategy might have played out as he tootled around at the back.
Which left Nakagami – a wildcard for the weekend who was on track for Honda to gather data in a race environment.
And Zarco.
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As the seas parted, Zarco took full advantage. Miller – whose 2022 wedding Zarco attended and famously performed a song he’d written for the Australian and new wife Ruby on a guitar – was an unwitting part of that success.
“We knew it was going to rain so my choice was with the rain tyres … when we started, the other guys with slick [tyres] were faster but I saw some rain drops,” Zarco said.
“I knew it was too tricky [for slicks], and I saw them crashing or going to the [pit] box, and I gained positions.
“Jack was with the rain tyres, and I know Jack in these conditions is so strong, and he was in front of me. But when he crashed, I began to trust that I can do something really good.”
Really good meant a second race win to go with his first, which came in Australia in 2023 to end the longest drought (120 races) for a maiden MotoGP success in history.
Really good was Zarco becoming the first Frenchman since Pierre Monneret in Reims 71 years previously to win at home.
Really good was a Honda rider snapping Ducati’s run of 22 consecutive Grand Prix wins that had equalled Honda’s 1997-98 run as the sport’s most sustained run of dominance.
And really good was that a race-day crowd of 120,403 people – part of a MotoGP event-record weekend attendance of 311,797 fans – deliriously witnessed a victory that nobody could have ever predicted.
Le Mans is renowned for wet races – Sunday’s was the 12th time in 24 Grands Prix since to advent of the MotoGP era in 2002 that a French Grand Prix was affected, at least in part, by rain – but the 2025 iteration of one of the sport’s most famous races will live long in the memory.
ZARCO SAW HIS OPPORTUNITY, AND NAILED IT
Zarco’s race was decisive and superbly executed, his win thoroughly deserved. But any success in a race held in such sketchy conditions needs a little luck, and Zarco rode his on the first lap.
As the field thundered into the left-right flick of the Dunlop Chicane at turn three – an accident hotspot at any time, let alone when the track is damp – Zarco narrowly avoided being taken out.
From 11th on the grid, Zarco was trying to stay out of trouble when Bastianini pinballed Bagnaia, Honda’s Joan Mir checking up as he tried to avoid the fallen Bagnaia and clattering into Zarco. With nowhere to go, Zarco ran across the gravel trap after his left hand became momentarily dislodged from its handlebar, and lost six positions to end lap one in 17th place.
It left him behind Miller on track, and – knowing the Australian’s superb feel and penchant for being on the correct tyres on a semi-wet track – validated his decision to start on grooved tyres.
As the rain began to intensify – and the all the riders who had abandoned their wet-weather tyres for slicks began to regret their decisions and were slowly returning to the pits one by one to get back on the appropriate tyre for the conditions – Miller moved up to 11th on lap six, Zarco behind him in 13th.
At the final corner of the Le Mans circuit, Raccordement, to complete lap six, Miller then violently high-sided off his Yamaha in front of Zarco; the same treacherous corner had seen pole-sitter Fabio Quartararo (Yamaha) and KTM’s Brad Binder crash out in separate but simultaneous accidents three laps earlier.
Zarco took note of Miller’s accident and gave the corner more respect. As the slick-shod rivals ahead of him pitted for wet tyres, Zarco moved up from ninth after Miller fell to the lead two laps later. With 18 laps to go, he held a seven-second lead; a nation held its breath.
The Honda rider didn’t put a foot wrong, and splashed his way to a victory that, even as it was happening, he realised was highly unusual.
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“I’m always pushing myself to get the best performance and I always trust that one day I can win, but when it’s happening it’s a bit strange because the way it happened today,” he said.
“I need to control a lot and almost wait. Sometimes you go to catch the victory, today I had to wait for it to come.
“We are in Le Mans, so we can trust it was going to rain. We knew that these clouds were coming. It didn’t rain as much as we could expect, but enough to be with the rain tyres and that was the right choice. Being with the rain tyres even on a dry track makes me feel more comfortable and more confident.”
Even more special was that Zarco’s mother Francoise was in the LCR Honda pit box to watch her son’s special, history-making, moment.
“It’s the first time in 17 years of racing … I never ask her to come, but I said ‘you have to see the French crowd and how they are supporting me’, so she came with my dad,” he grinned.
“They came once, they have seen it, now they can enjoy the next races at home. I’m so happy for what we have lived this weekend.
“I’m so happy because I love the history of motorbikes, I know many big names from the past. To be a French winner of the French GP, wow … that’s special. It’s just magic.”
MARQUEZ EXTENDS ADVANTAGE DESPITE ZARCO DEFICIT
While Sunday at Le Mans was all about the home hero – who reprised his signature celebration from his Moto2 championship-winning days by running across the circuit to perform a backflip off the trackside barriers in front of the fans – the rider closest to Zarco at the finish had plenty to smile about, too.
Marc Marquez – one of the riders to go to the grid on slick tyres, change to wets, change back to slicks before the race started and then pit again on lap seven for the wet tyres Zarco was on all along – finished 19.907 seconds behind the Frenchman on Sunday, but made significant gains on his two main title rivals after Alex Marquez and Bagnaia failed to score.
The Marquez brothers ran together for much of the race before a pair of crashes saw the younger Marquez fall to sixth on lap 21, then out of the race altogether with four laps left. Bagnaia, skittled by Bastianini on the opening lap, was the 16th and final classified finisher on a battered bike and, like Alex Marquez, didn’t score a point on Sunday as Marc Marquez bagged 20.
What was a one-point championship deficit to his younger brother after the previous round in Spain became a 22-point advantage for Marc Marquez, his largest this season, after he’d banked a sixth straight sprint race win 24 hours earlier.
Afterwards, he admitted his early-race crash at Jerez – after which he remounted and produced a brilliant comeback to finish 12th – played on his mind on a day where there was plenty to lose.
“If I come with a victory from Jerez … I’m not 100 per cent, but maybe 80 per cent sure I would crash today because I know myself,” he said.
“I was just trying to score the maximum points and didn’t exaggerate. I tried to be full focus all the race because the first five or six laps were crazy and super demanding on the mental side to understand what you need to do.
“The track [conditions] were changing super quick … less water, more water, the grip was changing a lot and it was difficult to adapt the riding style to the conditions.
“To score 20 points plus 12 from yesterday [in the sprint], we can say that was a good weekend.”
CRASHED PAIR INCUR STEWARDS’ WRATH
After such a wild race – race direction issued 116 separate notifications for riders who had crashed, entered the pits, served long-lap penalties or rejoined after falling off – two riders will feel the sting of Sunday’s madness for the British Grand Prix in a fortnight’s time.
Quartararo was penalised for refusing to leave his crashed bike with the trackside marshals when instructed to as he desperately tried to return to the fray; the Frenchman was fined 2000 Euros and must sit out the first 10 minutes of opening practice at Silverstone for “being found to have behaved in an irresponsible manner, disobeying direct instructions from marshals, and causing potential danger to yourself and others”.
Bastianini, who served four long-lap penalties and crashed twice in a fraught race where he finished 13th, has to serve another long lap penalty at Silverstone for “irresponsible riding” in the lap one Bagnaia crash, which led to Mir – after he’d been pushed into Zarco – being taken to the circuit’s medical centre, where the 2020 MotoGP champion was diagnosed with a right hand fracture and neck pain.
In all, 10 of the 22 riders crashed on Sunday, three of them (Bastianini, Alex Marquez and Binder – the latter falling three times before eventually retiring) more than once.
With so many big names becoming early spectators, three lesser lights shone – one of whom is fast-becoming a rising star.
A day after his first sprint race podium, Alex Marquez’s Gresini Ducati teammate, 20-year-old rookie Fermin Aldeguer, took his maiden Grand Prix podium in third after hunting down fellow Spaniard Pedro Acosta (KTM) late in just his sixth premier-class start.
Nakagami, in his first start this season after retiring from full-time riding at the end of 2024, was sixth, while Aprilia’s test rider Lorenzo Savadori, deputing for injured world champion Jorge Martin, was a career-best ninth.
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