Can fear of failure prompt Honda into a rebound ahead of MotoGP rules change?

Honda comes into the 2025 MotoGP season off the back of one of its worst years ever in the premier class, having amassed just 75 points and no podiums.

Last season marked the third winless campaign for the struggling Japanese marque in five years, with it coming in the wake of Marc Marquez’s exit from the brand at the end of 2023.

Honda made limited progress across 2024, with its top rider in the standings Johann Zarco in 17th with a best grand prix finish of eighth in the wet Thai Grand Prix.

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HRC will be hoping to build off the late-season gains it made with its RC213V in 2025, but with a rules reset looming for 2027, at what point does the factory write off the next two seasons?

“There will come a point where Honda has to say ‘Ok, we have to just bit the bullet on ’25 and ’26 and focus on ’27’,” Crash.net’s Senior Journalist Lewis Duncan says in the latest Crash MotoGP Podcast

“Because also, when you look at the last time we had a major regulation shake-up, they didn’t hit the 1000cc era that well.

“Casey Stoner hated that bike, it had a lot of chatter. Part of that was due to the Bridgestone tyres as well at the time. But Honda didn’t have the easiest of years in 2012.

“It looked better than it was on paper because the competitive landscape at the time was that if you were on a Yamaha or a Honda factory, you were going to win. That’s not the case anymore.

“When we went from 990s to 800s Honda got it wrong. The first two, three years were a bit of a nightmare.

“So, Honda does kind of have a history of not getting the jump [under new rules]. So, Honda does have a tricky task ahead of it as to how much it puts into the project it needs to to get into a better position, but also at what point does it go ‘ok, everything we do now is for 2027’?”

MotoGP Editor Peter McLaren wonders if the fear of failing in the current era of aerodynamics and ride height devices may, in fact, spur Honda into a rapid resurgence before 2027.

“Running through the history of Honda and where they’ve struggled, it sort of reminded me that they like to win at the end of a set of rules, if that makes sense,” he said.

“End of the 500cc era, end of the 990s. We don’t quite know where MotoGP fits onto the radar of MotoGP being such a big company, and it could be that having had all these years of losing and hitting this rock bottom and seeing this new set of rules coming, that from an engineering pride point of view, that - as we’ve seen several times in the past - they’re actually going to go ‘we need to show that we can master this technical rules before it all changes’.

“Because it is interesting that when there’s been a change of rules it’s actually not often worked out too well for them at the start - it’s actually been at the end of the rule cycle that they’ve usually been at their strongest. And then they’ve had to take a step back and build up again.

“They’re running out of time now, but we could see, and maybe losing Repsol will give a nudge to the people at the upper end of Honda to say ‘we need to get on with this’.

“We know how proud they are of their engineering tradition. So, let’s see the reaction. The loss of Repsol, the coming to the end of this era of technical rules, it could be that they want to show the world that ‘we can master this, we can make ride height devices work, we can make aero work’. It will be interesting to see if it stings them into a reaction.”

Crash Social Media Manager Jordan Moreland adds: “It can, because Honda always has this pride. Racing is their DNA. HRC and the way that brand and that structure works, they want to win everything.

“But, I don’t know if they have… it’s difficult for me to say, because in the past they’ve had the riders to do it.

“And the pull of Honda for so many riders, like getting Casey Stoner, for example, getting Marc Marquez, having Dani Pedrosa for so long was such a key to all that.

“And even going back to when Rossi was there, that kind of stung them as well when Rossi left because they kind of assumed that the bike would do all the winning. And it didn’t, they needed the rider there, as Rossi proved.”