Fabio Quartararo’s dispiriting 2023 MotoGP season continued at Le Mans on Friday as he finished just 12th fastest and continued to lament his new Yamaha bike’s lack of improvement so far this year.
And, amid his disappointment, he offered a brutal assessment of the test outing at Jerez that had preceded the Le Mans weekend, saying that all the new parts brought in by Yamaha – including a new exhaust, a revised chassis and new aero configuration – effectively flopped.
Quartararo was already pretty mixed speaking after the test itself, but offered a sterner verdict at Le Mans when asked by The Race about the updates: “We tested an exhaust, it’s not working. Chassis, not working. Aero, not working. Electronics, things were not working.
“Maybe one setting that we tried with [suspension supplier] Ohlins was a little bit better. But… from the test, the new things we tried, was useless.”
Quartararo’s 12th place, over a tenth off from a top-10 spot that would’ve guaranteed a Q2 appearance on Saturday, should at least put him in decent stead to progress through Q1.
That, however, was little consolation on a day where he again lamented how unstable his Yamaha M1 felt.
He also continued to hint that the new, more powerful engine introduced for 2023 – which Quartararo had welcomed but which he believes is still not enough in the power department because he still cannot run an aero set-up that’s as sizeable and therefore draggy as he would like – has knocked off the balance.
Asked whether Yamaha was continually going backwards, he said: “I would say backwards is a tough word but we’re not improving at all and others are improving. We’re improving one way with the engine but I think it’s taking off the balance or whatever it is, that riding I never had a bike that aggressive and not turning.
“But I feel – if it’s aggressive for me it’s not a problem [as long as] we have the performance to fight for the top.
“I’m hoping for of course more power for the future, but you know, if every time we change something and we have more power, it’s taking us so much time to build the bike [balance around it], it’s incredible… maybe the character of the engine makes the bike super aggressive, we have more power but it’s making the bike super aggressive in any way.
“Normally I’m a rider that can say quite easily where I’m missing something, where I’m struggling, but right now on the bike I feel so aggressive on the bike, the bike is moving so much that I don’t know what to say. I’m [coming] out of the corner, the bike is shaking till the end. It’s difficult to say, ‘The bike is moving there’ – it’s moving everywhere.”
But although his rhetoric has been reliably severe, Quartararo insisted he’s keeping his emotions in check – although admitted this perhaps wasn’t the case slightly earlier in the season.
“I decided to not get angry anymore,” he said. “Because I feel like every time I get angry, it’s making things more difficult.
“We are I think in the toughest time of any year I’ve been with Yamaha right now. Because we cannot find a solution after I would say eight races, because sprints for me are races. And we don’t have any base and any speed.
“It’s the moment, having this tough time, to try to build up and find our way through the season.”
Team-mate Franco Morbidelli was half a second off Quartararo’s best lap on Friday, putting the bigger-than-usual-for-2023 gap down to him experimenting more with “solutions” that he said ultimately didn’t work at all.
Asked if he’d shared Quartararo’s assessment of Yamaha’s Jerez test, he said: “As I said after the test, we tried stuff and we didn’t improve.”
