Petronas Yamaha rider and 2020 MotoGP title contender Fabio Quartararo has admitted that he and his team have reinvented the wheel this weekend with their Yamaha M1 in an attempt to fix the issues that have been plaguing him at Valencia – but go into tomorrow’s race still doubtful they can compete despite the championship being on the line.
With Quartararo working not to refine the base setting of the M1 but instead attempting radical new steps after admitting last weekend at the European Grand Prix that he hasn’t had a bike that felt like his own at any point in 2020, it seems like those changes didn’t pay off after MotoGP’s most consistent pole position man qualified a distant 11th.
“I think that the amount of changes we’ve made this weekend are more than we made all season last year,” admitted the young Frenchman after qualifying at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo.
“We’ve made big changes because we think that they’re going to work, but every time we have the same problems. Every time I push and try to adapt to the bike, it’s the same thing.
“Normally when we’re running like this, we can put in a new tyre and everything is OK because you can find the rear grip again. But this weekend all of us [Yamaha riders], apart from Franco [Morbidelli] on a different [older-spec] bike, are running like this.
“Normally qualifying is my strongest point – I can put in a new tyre and go to the limit, but today we’re seven tenths from the limit. The problem is that I’m much more on the limit, and I can’t flow. I’m rigid on the bike, and that means I’m on the limit.”
And with the prospect of fixing the bike and finding his speed only a distant hope at the minute, it means that Quartararo is going into tomorrow’s race knowing that his chances of taking the 2020 crown are all but done.
That’s a far call from the opening two races of the year at Jerez, where he dominated the field to take back-to-back wins – an even more poetically painful result now, knowing that Mir managed to score just 11 points from those two rounds.
Not everything is lost just yet for Quartararo, though, with one final Hail Mary play to make in the morning, in an attempt to turn things around and keep the pressure on Mir – something that requires at least a podium finish.
“I’m not thinking about Joan, I’m trying to think about making the biggest improvement that we can,” Quartararo said. “We’re going to make a change tomorrow in warm-up that’s even bigger than today’s. I believe in the change because the team is confident.
“There isn’t really a strategy except to have fun and to try and finish as far in front as possible. I’m not in the mood to think about Joan and more in the mood to make an improvement. If I can do that, then maybe tomorrow I can think about him.”
However, despite the poor result today and the feeling that the championship is inextricably starting to escape him, Quartararo was quick to take the silver linings from the hard work that he and crew chief Diego Gubellini have done over the past few weeks.
Set to graduate to the factory Monster Energy Yamaha team in 2021 and taking the Italian engineer with him, Quartararo is adamant that they’re doing the hard work now so that the future is easier.
“We’re not working with Yamaha much, but we’re working with my team,” he said. “The engineers from Yamaha are helping us a lot, and it’s always good to have someone asking me a lot of questions – but we’ve tried a lot of things.
“But these tough times is all experience. Having a bad time now will be good for the next few seasons. But something needs to happen from all of these changes.”
