Cal Crutchlow firm despite MotoGP return: “I don’t miss the sport”
Cal Crutchlow says he still doesn’t “miss” MotoGP despite having come back for several races to replace Johann Zarco.
Cal Crutchlow’s replacement spot at LCR Honda in MotoGP has not changed his view on his relationship with motorcycle racing at 40-years-old.
Crutchlow stepped away from full-time racing at the end of 2020, after his sixth season as a full-time rider with LCR Honda, a team with which he won three MotoGP races.
The British rider did multiple races after that, though, with Yamaha, for which he was a test rider until 2024.
For two years then he didn’t ride, but came back in 2026 to replace Johann Zarco when the Frenchman was injured at Catalunya and HRC couldn’t use either of its test riders to fill the position.
But riding is not something Crutchlow has missed, and this has not been changed by his mid-season stand-in for Zarco.
“No,” said Cal Crutchlow at the British Grand Prix pre-event press conference, when asked by Crash.net’s sister site Visordown whether his LCR fill-in ride has made him regret retiring.
“It’s not an easy game to come out of for two years and then come back in, not riding a bike at all in those two years before I rode 30 laps of Misano just before Mugello.
“It’s not a game to be playing at.
“I love the sport. I haven’t come back for any other reason than they asked me to come back, Honda and LCR asked me to come back.
“I wouldn’t have done it for anybody else.
“So, I don’t miss the sport, necessarily, I miss the competitiveness – I miss racing, let’s say.
“But I was also fine with sitting at home and watching it on TV, so I’m not looking at this as though I want to come back racing, because I don’t, that’s 100 per cent. I’m 40-years-old, I’m 41 in a couple of months – I’m not stupid.
“But it’s good fun to come back in and know that I’m only doing a certain amount of races and then I’m going to go back home.”
Coming back as a replacement for a certain number of races could also mean less pressure for Crutchlow, but he says that comes from himself.
“To me, the pressure comes from myself, actually,” he said.
“At the start I thought ‘I’m just going to ride around, wave at the crowd, take it as it is’, and then suddenly you start to become pissed off and you want to be competitive.
“That’s a good thing because it means you’re doing it for the right reasons.”
Alex joined the Crash.net team in August of 2024 having covered consumer and racing motorcycle news at Visordown for two years.
