2023-08-23 17:04:04
Fabio Quartararo is going through his toughest season on Yamaha. With only one podium in ten races -he was third in Austin-, the French rider is totally unrecognizable this year, conditioned by a Yamaha M1 that is still not up to par with its rivals and with which he is 11th overall in the championship. very far behind the leader, Pecco Bagnaia, who leads him by 178 points.
In a recent interview offered to DAZN, the French pilot does not hide that “We have had difficulties, especially in the evolution of the bike”, a situation that has also ended up affecting the confidence of a Fabio who, like any other athlete, has also come to distrust his own talent.
“100% mentally I was not there. You go from fighting for a championship to a Top 10. Mentally it was very difficult for me. For this reason, I want to face this second part in a slightly different way”, declares the one who was MotoGP champion in 2021 and one of the riders who came to lead the championship during the first half of last year.
It was precisely at that moment, in the middle of the year 2022, when number 20 accepted the renewal offered by Yamaha for two more seasons, an agreement in which Quartararo demanded certain technical guarantees from those of Iwata that, in the words of the French, “have not been fulfilled”.
Fabio knows that technically improving the bike “it’s hard”, but that does not discourage him when it comes to “put a lot of pressure and work a lot” to reach European factories: “When I renewed I was in a situation where I had just been world champion in 2021, I renewed as the leader of the championship in 2022 and above all with many things that I wanted as a guarantee of material. For this year it has not been the case. Now we are working a lot, Yamaha is working, we put a lot of pressure on the engineers to have a bike to fight with next year. If we will have it? We do not know”.
Questioned about what must change internally at Yamaha to take that much-needed step forward, Quartararo believes that “it’s a bit of everything”pointing out “the attitude” as one of the priorities to improve within the Iwata factory: “I think that the way of working in Europe is more open, and in Japan they are a little more closed, they want everything to be in Japan. Little by little Yamaha is opening up and hiring European engineers, they are letting them work a little more. Little by little during the year they have opened, although there is a long way to go. It is something that has to change, we are at the highest level of motorcycles”
Just like last year, Yamaha once again promised Fabio a great bike for 2024; the Gaul says not wanting to go into details” every time he asks in Japan about the progress of the bike, and thinks that they are “Acts are better than words” pointing out the next Misano test as a key date to understand how things can go next year: “Better than words are acts. I will have them in the Misano test, from there we can talk, but doing it before testing the 2024 prototype is just talking for the sake of talking. (…) I believe in the brand, and I think they will do something very big.”
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Finally, addressing the future arrival of Alex Rins at Yamaha, Quartararo highlights how important it will be for him to have a rider of Rins’ caliber in the same box, recalling the months he spent with Maverick Viñales: “With Maverick, the first part of 2021, more than helping in the technical part, is pushing himself to the maximum at the driving level. Rins is a very strong driver, very fast, He is the only rider this year to have won a race outside of Ducati, I have known him for many years. I think as riders we will push ourselves to the limit and we will be able to extract a lot of information from our bike.”concludes the Frenchman.
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