Zarco's MotoGP second chance can prove KTM wrong

Johann Zarco's turbulent season continues as, just a month after being dumped with immediate effect from KTM's MotoGP line-up, he is set to return to the grid for the final three races of the year in Australia, Malaysia and Valencia in place of Takaaki Nakagami at LCR Honda.

Honda made a big play to get Zarco into its factory line-up alongside its now six-time MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez for 2019 before two-time Moto2 title winner Zarco ended up agreeing terms with KTM instead.

Having struggled all season to adapt to the bike from the Yamaha he rode in Tech3 colours for the first two years of his life in the premier class, Zarco opted to end his two-year KTM deal early before his shock dropping from the squad after the Misano race last month.

Much has already been made of the intention behind Honda placing Zarco on Nakagami's bike. Officially, the reason is purely that the Japanese rider is to have surgery on a shoulder issue similar to the one that plagued Marquez throughout last year. Marquez was surprised by how tough and complex that recovery was for him, so Nakagami bringing his operation forward and calling a halt to his 2019 season after his home race has some logic for 2020.

But there is obviously also a school of thought that this is HRC's way of evaluating Zarco on an RC213V in race conditions to potentially replace Jorge Lorenzo - who has endured a similarly miserable campaign as Zarco's ill-fated KTM stint - next year.

This is a canny move from Honda. Nakagami's place in MotoGP is all but assured. Despite disagreements over bike specifications delaying the deal's completion for some time, the Idemitsu-backed side of the LCR garage is specifically built around a Japanese rider.

Therefore, benching Nakagami to allow him ample time to recover from an operation is a perfect, no-consequences way of conducting an experiment. But, HRC - and Zarco too - must be wary.

There is at least a glimmer of hope that this three-race stint could rejuvenate Zarco

The RC213V is a notoriously difficult machine to get to grips with, not unlike the KTM, and Zarco's temporary team-mate Cal Crutchlow has previously expressed pessimism over whether Zarco would have done any better at Honda than he was doing at KTM.

"If he thinks the Honda is any easier than the KTM then he needs to think again, if that was his other option at the time," said Crutchlow. "[He would have struggled] exactly the same, if not worse."

Riders who have 'grown up' in MotoGP terms on the generally user-friendly Yamaha notoriously get a culture shock when they go elsewhere - which has meant some scepticism over whether Yamaha's latest young superstar Fabio Quartararo would look like such a Marquez-beater on any other machine. Conversely, Crutchlow reckons Zarco would've had an excellent 2019 season with Yamaha.

"He is a smooth rider and if he would have stayed there he would have probably been on the same speed as what Quartararo is now," he added. "That's his riding style, he understands the bike."

How well Zarco is likely to fare on the Honda can, in part, be determined by analysing the performances of previous Honda stand-ins over this decade.

Most recently, 2011 Moto2 world champion Stefan Bradl was drafted in to ride in place of Lorenzo at the Sachsenring, Brno and the Red Bull Ring while Honda's troubled star signing recovered from a back injury sustained in a crash at Assen.

Bradl was solid, guiding the bike to 10th at home in Germany, with 13th and 15th place finishes in the following two rounds. But the RC213V isn't exactly alien to Bradl. He is HRC's official test rider, carrying out work on the bike through the winter, and he'd already raced it in test team colours to 10th at the Spanish Grand Prix - two places up the road from Lorenzo.

Bradl had also filled in for an injured Crutchlow at the last two races of 2018. That general Honda familiarity makes Bradl an unfair benchmark for Zarco.

In 2016, '06 MotoGP world champion Nicky Hayden made two supersub appearances with Honda. The first, at Aragon in place of Jack Miller at Marc VDS, yielded a point in 15th - a massively commendable achievement.

The late Hayden - who tragically died from injuries sustained in a road traffic accident in 2017 - hadn't ridden a factory Honda bike since his final year at the team in '08, with his final years in MotoGP spent on the Open class poundshop spinoff RC213V-RS not massively applicable. To boot, he had spent the year in World Superbikes, where his Honda Fireblade was a world away from the RC213V.

The fact he was able to jump on the bike again at Phillip Island, this time in place of the injured Dani Pedrosa at the works team, and come close to points before a late tangle with Miller, not only showed Hayden's class but that the right rider can make the difficult RCV work for them.

Even if Zarco's three-race evaluation ultimately doesn't lead him back onto the grid full-time next year, he can at least prove the point that it was KTM that was the problem and not him

That much was true for Jonathan Rea in 2012.

The now-five-time WSBK champion was called up to replace the injured 2007 and '11 MotoGP champion Casey Stoner at the factory Honda team for the Misano and Aragon races.

Like Hayden, Rea came from the Ten Kate-run Honda Fireblades and had to completely wrap his head around the RC213V with minimal running.

Complicating matters further was the fact he came to a bike when its usual riders were battling chatter problems on the front-end. In the Bridgestone days, extracting maximum performance from the rubber meant essentially abusing the front tyre.

The mountain Rea faced was steep. Despite all this, he scored eighth and seventh place finishes in his two appearances. Until Bradl's ninth at a wet Valencia last year, Rea remained the last Honda stand-in to crack the top 10 in any of their outings.

From race-to-race, Rea made an improvement of over 10 seconds in terms of finishing distance to the winner. At Misano, his deficit stood at 43.162s, while at Aragon it was 32.290s, with the nearest Honda runner (Alvaro Bautista of Gresini) four seconds up the road.

Bradl this year by contrast was just 22.708s from Marquez in Germany, but was 30.5s behind him at Brno and 31.962s from Andrea Dovizioso in Austria. It is fair to point out, though, that Bradl will also have been carrying out development work for HRC during his outings.

But Rea's subsequent demolition of the WSBK record books highlights that he was able to do what he did in his brief MotoGP stint because of his exceptional talent. And, as Crutchlow was also keen to remind people, Zarco isn't exactly average himself.

"At the end of the day, I do feel sorry for him, he is a fantastic rider, a world champion [in Moto2] and you don't click your fingers and turn that off," added Crutchlow.

And there is at least a glimmer of hope that this three-race stint could rejuvenate Zarco.

He isn't taking on the frequently lambasted 2019-spec Honda, which only Marquez has been able to make work. Though still a tough beast, last year's bike did win in the hands of Crutchlow in Argentina and was set to propel him to a top three finish in the standings before his horrific ankle injury in Australia

Lorenzo's first thoughts when he rode the 2018-spec Honda at Valencia and Jerez last November was that he felt "safer" with the front end than he did on the Ducati, which he had taken to three wins that year.

At that Jerez test, he was fifth overall, despite still recovering from his Thailand wrist fracture, and Nakagami topped that test on the bike Zarco is about to take over.

Phillip Island will be a stern test. Its flowing nature is tailormade to Zarco's riding style, but less so the Honda. Yet it is also a circuit where the rider can really outshine their bike.

So even if Zarco's three-race evaluation ultimately doesn't lead him back onto the grid full-time next year, he can at least prove the point that it was KTM that was the problem and not him.