Two grand prix weekends into his new MotoGP contract with Yamaha, Fabio Quartararo sure sounds like he had sounded for much of the previous deal covering 2023-24.
When the bike isn't convincing him, he'll let the team know. Publicly. And after a brief second honeymoon with the revamped M1 bike in the off-season, he's been getting cranky again off the back of two not-particularly-inspiring outings.
"For me there are no positives from this weekend," he said after trundling home in 15th (which became 14th after Ai Ogura's disqualification) in the Argentine Grand Prix.
"I don’t think that we can really take something."
Quartararo's Termas race was, of course, conditioned by being slammed into by Marco Bezzecchi into Turn 1, but considering how tough he'd found keeping the pace up even in the sprint the day prior there's no guarantee even another top 10 would've been on offer here.
And certainly, finishing 7.5 seconds off the win like Johann Zarco did in the lead Honda - the same Honda that's supposed to be further away on its road back to the front in MotoGP than Yamaha - was out of the question.
Yamaha doesn't have the best relationship with Termas de Rio Hondo in what limited recent data we have. The layout seems a decent fit but the grip level isn't, though any judgment seems to be complicated by the indication it isn't a great Quartararo track.
In any case, he acknowledged that the struggles were worse than expected this year - and even went as far as to indicate to French broadcaster Canal+ that he was no longer convinced Yamaha has taken a genuine step forward relative to last year, which at least the Sepang test in February had indicated.
"For me, when you do five days with MotoGP bikes on the same track, the track becomes super - with a lot of grip, a lot of rubber," said Quartararo of that Sepang performance.
"Testing after the GP, one day at Jerez or whatever, at the end of the day we are much closer than in the GP. So imagine [the impact of] five days of tests. At the end we were much more close.
"But as soon as the condition is a little bit worse or we overheat the tyre a little bit, it’s really difficult."
That's a characteristic Quartararo has long mentioned - an excessive dependence of the bike's performance on the track conditions. In fact, you could convincingly argue it's a Yamaha trait that predates Quartararo.
At the same time, the profile of the performance seems to have changed a little bit. Whether that's encouraging or not, opinions may vary.
"There isn't margin to improve right now," said Quartararo's team-mate Alex Rins. "We have a limitation - it's the grip. We can do one lap, one crazy lap, but in terms of pace it's quite difficult to maintain. The drop is quite high."
That's a change. Last year's Yamaha M1 was a turgid qualifying bike, confounding those in the works team (which didn't yet have Pramac at its side). Quartararo routinely flashed good race pace but couldn't qualify or overtake.
On the evidence of Argentina, he can qualify now. He fired the bike into Q2 on Friday without a tow (Pecco Bagnaia crashed out in front of him right away), which felt like something we won't have seen last year - and it came two weeks after Pramac Yamaha’s Jack Miller was an impressive (tow-assisted) fourth on the grid.
"Maybe the one-lap pace for qualifying was acceptable because we were only one tenth and a half from the front row," summed up Quartararo in Argentina. "But the pace was really a disaster."
Looking at it closer, it's still a little inconclusive, a little on the margins. It's not like the M1 has become a qualifying-spec giant-killer, nor was it completely hopeless in race trim at Termas - just kind of really 'meh'.
But whether the early clues about the new M1's performance tendencies are correct or not, it seems pretty clear the performance baseline must be higher. And you have to wonder again at this point whether the best way to make it higher is to wait for that V4 engine to arrive.
Because relying on a bike that's this compromised in non-optimal conditions won't get you very far over 24 rounds.
