Zarco: Fellon coach but no longer manager

Johann Zarco has revealed he is still in regular contact with long-term acquaintance Laurent Fellon, albeit in a different capacity to before, with his countryman now working solely as a riding coach.

From a young age Fellon trained the Monster Tech 3 Yamaha rider while acting as his manager. But his absence from the German Grand Prix coupled with Zarco’s dip in form fuelled the belief that the pair were at loggerheads.

On Thursday Zarco confirmed he was still training with Fellon, and had done so over the recent summer break. The rider coach was, however, no longer managing his affairs, with the 28-year old citing the change is because he “is growing up.”

“We are together," Zarco explained. "With Laurent, what is the special thing is that when we have training we are on the track alone with the motorbike, we have kind of special feelings together. I like it and I want to still use it and work in this way. I feel it can make me still strong, even in the future.

“Because I am growing up with the career, it needs to change a few things like a child growing up. That’s why people think we are fighting or struggling together, but we are just changing a bit the way of managing but not how we are working on the track.”

So Fellon is now his rider coach, but not his manager? “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “That’s it. Simply, it’s seeing it like this.”

Two weekends away from the MotoGP paddock appears to have arrived at just the right time for Zarco. Throughout the German Grand Prix he cut a frustrated, exasperated figure that failed to place inside the top twelve in three of four free practice sessions.

The holidays acted as a time to reflect on what had gone wrong in recent weeks, and Zarco has concluded that only a handful of “small details” were preventing him from regularly challenging for the podium at Montmeló, Assen and the Sachsenring.

“The summer break was good for me,” he said. “Two weeks. The first week was a bit busy but the second has been the best one for rest, restarting the pshyical training and also ride with motorbikes. I got good energy back and I’m happy to be here in the Czech Republic.

“We can see with my team that even when we had problems in the last races we didn’t miss a lot to catch the good group or stay in the top five. These small things that are missing we saw that maybe I need to take the situation more relaxed, a bit more easy to let the work go and be better on the Sunday.

"We started well the Friday but maybe I get nervous because I want too much and maybe don’t analyse well enough and finally on Sunday, because I wanted too much, almost I get nothing. I was like not feeling well the bike.

“This is what we analysed well during the summer and I’m happy that we can speak clearly together in this way. No, I don’t want to think about the victories. I feel that even constant lap-by-lap we need too many things to get it.

“The podium pace is really something we can think about. It’s also almost what we can see in the championship. Victories is Marc. He’s already going away. But then the other guys are not so far. Everyone [else] is also struggling a bit. It’s what I analysed.”

With whom did he make this analysis? “First of all with myself,” he said. “Then with Laurent when we were having some training with Supermoto. And now with the team. The first one I was speaking to was myself.

“I feel I try to resume what I was doing. I feel, as I said, there are three important elements: bike, team, rider. The bike and the team are almost the things you can control the most because it’s technical things.

“You set it and it’s almost in the same way. Because I did not find the solutions in the last races with the team or the bike I could have the summer break to say [that]… Even I felt during my training there were a few things that maybe I could improve again or change myself.

“To get the bike always the same already did one problem in my mind. You cannot try or feel something else on it so at least that element will remain the same. I, and also the team, feel this element is also good to be on the podium. So that’s really the target.

“But we don’t really have such a big margin. Maybe we can change things or maybe at the max we can do. We don’t do this max all the time. We are close. So that’s why stay cool for myself, relax and that’ll help me to play with it. Trying to many things I was finally losing that control.”