Where Honda and Yamaha stack up at the start of 2025 MotoGP season

Honda won the inter-Japanese contest in the Thai Grand Prix after Johann Zarco finished seventh on the best of the RC213Vs, four places ahead of the highest-placed Yamaha of Jack Miller.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean Honda is starting the 2025 season ahead of Yamaha in the pecking order. The reality, as always, is more complicated, and a clear answer won’t be available until both bikes have been run on a wide variety of tracks. For now, there are both encouraging and worrying signs in the two garages.

As far as Honda is concerned, the opening round of the 2025 season was a huge success. Both Joan Mir and Johann Zarco made it into Q2, and the former’s best time of 1m29.422s was almost four tenths up on what any Honda rider managed in qualifying at last year’s Thai GP, which took place a little over four months ago in October. The gap to pole position was 0.640s, which again compares very favourably to the 1.1s deficit Honda faced at the same track in 2024.

Mir bagged a solitary point in the sprint in ninth place, with Zarco following him over the line in 10th, but it was Sunday’s race where Honda really shone. Mir rose from 11th on the grid to run a solid seventh until he crashed out just after the halfway point of the race. After his exit, LCR sophomore Zarco carried on the good work, bringing home nine points for seventh place. He sat 10th for the first half of the contest, but once his medium rear tyre started to click, he was able to make serious inroads. The fact that he finished just three tenths behind the factory Aprilia of Marco Bezzecchi was proof of the leap Honda has made over the winter.

Zarco’s deficit to race winner Marc Marquez was also just 15 seconds. A direct comparison to the 2024 Thai GP is not possible, as that race was run in the wet, but it’s worth pointing out that lead Honda riders sometimes finished as much as 40 seconds behind the race winner in 2024. Rarely was the deficit under 20 seconds in the second half of last season.

Perhaps the most under-the-radar performance at the Thai GP came from Luca Marini. The Italian dropped near the tail end of the pack after failing to engage the launch control device at the start, but was able to steadily recover lost ground to finish a solid 12th on the factory HRC.

Marini believes Honda has found four tenths over the winter break, which is no small achievement given the timescale involved.

“I think if we compare our pace, [it is] four tenths [faster] compared to last year,” he said. “Maybe we were 1.2s behind last year, maybe at the moment we are 0.8s.

“But we don’t know Marquez, how much he has in his pocket, [he was] still managing a lot in the front. They will go up a little bit but there is a limit at the moment that you cannot go faster with these tyres.

“The tyres are amazing because we are doing the lap times in an incredible way and also very constantly during the races, but surely we can get closer to them during the year. I hope sooner.”

Luca Marini, Honda HRC

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Mir too was thoroughly impressed with Honda’s progress, even though he failed to see the chequered flag following his shunt on lap 15.

“I think we would have been able to be very close to the top five with the pace that we were showing,” he said. “This is something I was not able to show to you at any race last year. It means that we are on the way. We were strong, so I’m happy.”

However, Honda is still lacking engine power compared to its rivals, meaning it still hasn’t fixed one of the long-running weaknesses of its MotoGP prototype.

“I guess here it was more difficult for us because it seems in Malaysia our engine was better than in Thailand, so maybe the heat was giving us more disadvantage than the other brands,” explained Zarco. “Let’s see in a place where it will be normal temperature if we catch back this disadvantage.”

It would be unfair to discuss Yamaha’s Thai GP weekend without mentioning its qualifying performance. Miller guided the Pramac-entered M1 to an incredible fourth place in qualifying, just 0.308s off pole position. While he benefited from following the Ducati of Francesco Bagnaia on track, Fabio Quartararo made it directly through Q2 and qualified another three tenths adrift in 10th, proving Yamaha’s one-lap pace was genuine.

Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Quartararo then rose to seventh in Saturday’s sprint race, which meant Yamaha beat Honda in the first points-scoring contest of 2025.

The main race, however, was a different story, where the ultimate potential of the M1 was masked by several unrelated issues.

Miller held a solid sixth place until lap 16 of 26 and was on course to equal Yamaha’s best result of 2024, achieved by Quartararo in the Indonesian GP. However, he rapidly tumbled down the order after a clip on the fairing became loose and he had to come up with ingenious ways to keep it in place.

“I had a little issue with the fairing on lap 8 when I lost touch with the front group,” he explained. “One of the clips unfortunately popped out and the whole fairing sort of started deploying. Aero these days is essential to help the bike turn in.

“The thing was, when you get up to speed it kind of pops up even more, and I got nervous doing 330km/h down the back straight that it was going to deploy, and I was trying to hold it together as much as I could.”

Jack Miller, Pramac Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Incredibly, Miller was still able to finish as the top Yamaha rider in 11th place. That was because Yamaha’s top gun Quartararo ran into his own set of problems and could only salvage a single point in 15th.

Starting 11th on the grid, the Frenchman slumped to 19th in just the first two laps, leaving him with a mountain to climb in the remainder of the race. He profited from retirements for Mir and Raul Fernandez, plus a crash for Acosta.

Quartararo had been struggling with the front tyre in the Buriram test in February and that issue seemingly carried over into the race weekend. Worse still, even the rear tyre wasn’t working to his liking in the race, leaving him a sitting duck in the opening laps.

“In the beginning we had an issue with the grip, I was struggling quite a lot. In the beginning my thought was to warm up the tyre,” he said. “In the first lap I could not push, I could not really lean the bike and the bike was just sliding, so I lost a lot of positions.”

In an interview with French broadcaster Canal+, he added: “We’re looking at what happened in the first laps, and the whole race.

“Clearly, in the first laps we really had trouble with the rear tyre. We knew about the front tyre, but we didn’t think it was going to be so complicated with the rear tyre. From the warm-up lap, we had a bit of a strategy to warm it up, to push from the start, but I couldn’t even turn for two or three laps. It was quite difficult.”

Alex Rins, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Miguel Oliveira finished 14th for Pramac, while Alex Rins was running inside the points until he dropped to 17th late in the race while battling with overheating issues on his factory M1.

As such, it’s hard to gauge the true performance of Yamaha after the first race of the season. It’s worth bearing in mind that Buriram was never expected to be a strong track for the Iwata-based brand, with pre-season testing confirming that the M1 still struggles in low-grip conditions.

It’s unlikely Yamaha’s fortunes will improve in Argentina, which hasn’t hosted a MotoGP race in almost two years, while Austin is also infamous for its lack of grip. Yamaha riders won’t be able to take full advantage of the progress the Japanese marque made in the off-season until later in the year.