The double Moto2 world champion made his MotoGP debut in 2017 and has come close on several occasions to his first victory, but always came up short.
Going without a win in his racing career since the 2016 Moto2 Valencia GP, Zarco snatched a maiden MotoGP class victory on the last lap of a thrilling Australian GP on Saturday from Pramac team-mate Jorge Martin.
Asked if he’d ever lost hope of taking that first win, Zarco said: “Just to ride the bike, you have to put in an incredible amount of energy.
“But sometimes you say to yourself, 'OK, maybe you just have to accept that it's not going to happen’.
“But you also take on the mentality of a competitor by saying to yourself 'in any case, do your job to the full and it's so tight that at some point, if you concentrate in the present, maybe you can catch the thing at the right moment’.
“Clearly, that's what happened today, so I'm very happy that in the end the long race was today.
“I said yesterday that as I had attacked well and I had the speed here, maybe that could prevent the others from finding the speed on the podium. It worked out pretty well.”
Zarco says he considered following his team-mate Martin in selecting the soft rear tyre having felt bad on the medium on Saturday morning in practice, but was forced away from this having found a big drop with the softer compound on his time attack laps.
Source: Autosport