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Superb pre-season pace. Back-to-back wins to start the season. Another win a few races later, to retake the championship lead.
But none after that, in a campaign where respectable weekends are intercut with really bad ones, leading to a championship challenge everyone predicted fizzling out – while a fellow rider on the same brand of bike, but an older specification, vastly exceeds expectations.
Now, which Yamaha rider and season am I describing?
Is it Maverick Vinales circa 2017 (pictured below)? Or is it Fabio Quartararo circa 2020?
Don’t answer, it’s a trick question – obviously it’s both. I deliberately framed it like that, sorry.
There are pretty major differences in the end. These are different MotoGPs we’re speaking of – 2020 had a much tighter pack but no Marc Marquez to ruin everyone else’s hopes and dreams. And Vinales did finish third in 2017, whereas Quartararo was only eighth in 2020.
But the similarities are there, and they’re hard to ignore.
Yamaha has fielded two riders that are/were the next big thing, helped them to a fantastic start to a campaign and then watched everything fall apart and catch fire.
Quartararo said in the lead-up to Portimao that he’d be happy with the season no matter what, given he got three wins on the board.
But his tone changed a little after a miserable 2020 finale that unravelled due to the dreaded “arm pump” – forearm muscle pain – but didn’t promise anything better than a fifth place at best anyway.
“So difficult to finish in this way and I wanted to do much better,” a “really sad” Quartararo said. “When you finish the last six races so badly, it’s difficult to say I’m happy about the season.
“The Japanese [engineers] hear what the riders comment, but at the end they do what they want. They have already in mind what they want to do” :: Valentino Rossi
“But I can say that, yeah, it will be a season to remember.
“Three victories, some riders never win in MotoGP, and I have three wins already, so I think looking back at this is really positive.
“In some way it’s a great season, but unfortunately not such a great end. A bit sad.”
Quartararo is just 21 and the proud recipient of a two-year factory Yamaha deal, so he has every reason to believe he’ll have a much better chance in the future – even if Marquez’s absence made for a special opportunity.
But it’ll be a real test of Quartararo’s trademark positive attitude to not feel concerned about the example of his 2021 team-mate.
Vinales, after all, has made very little progress towards his ultimate goal of becoming champion since his 2017 campaign unravelled.
Though that season ended in disappointment, Vinales jumped at the chance to commit to another two-year Yamaha deal, at what was effectively the halfway point of his original deal. Two murky years later, he did it again, despite apparent interest from Ducati.
But whatever bond is there between Vinales and Yamaha has been hard to discern from the rider’s increasingly sardonic and fatalistic media appearances over the course of 2020.
It reached a new height at Portimao – where Vinales admitted it felt “impossible to win”, felt his feedback to Yamaha was getting “very repetitive” and cracked wry jokes about winning the 2020 Yamaha title (by beating Quartararo and Valentino Rossi in the standings, though finishing over a race win’s worth of points behind the 2019 Yamaha of Franco Morbidelli).
It’s hard to assess blame in the Vinales/Yamaha situation. The 2020 M1 bike still won more races than any other spec of bike this year, yet Vinales has been adamant this year – and in the years prior – that he’s tried everything to get an M1 that he’s reliably comfortable with, and he just cannot do it.
No set-up has cracked the code, no riding style he can attempt, no practice programme he can go through.
Not even the drastic, controversial switch of crew chief from Ramon Forcada to Esteban Garcia did the job, or at least it didn’t do enough.
Vinales certainly made it clear he doesn’t regret it and is more at ease with Garcia, yet it’s also inescapable fact that Forcada didn’t do too badly as Morbidelli’s crew chief in 2020.
When it was put to him by The Race a few weeks back that Quartararo’s recent slump on a same-spec bike was vindication for his own comments all this time, Vinales seemed in agreement. And the comments of his now ex-team-mate Rossi from this Friday were also revealing.
When asked how his involvement in Yamaha bike development will change with his switch to the Petronas SRT satellite team, Rossi said: “Bah, I think that I will be involved like this year. It doesn’t change a lot. And we need to understand whether this year I’m very involved or not.
Though that last sentence was followed by laughter, the rest of the answer was definitely serious: “I don’t know, sincerely, what I can do is give all my experience, and then try to say what, for me, we need. But more or less we have a similar problem for a lot of time. I think that next year doesn’t change a lot.
“I think the Japanese [Yamaha engineers] hear what the riders comment, what the riders said, but at the end they do what they want. As in, they have already in mind what they want to do.”
Everything Vinales said of late suggests this is a viewpoint he shares. Quartararo, for his part, does not – and while it’s true he has been a Yamaha rider for half the time Vinales has, it’s also true Vinales seemed a bit more disgruntled in 2017 already than Quartararo was this year.
When asked about Vinales’ increasingly dejected comments and his apparent fear that there was no way out of the situation, Quartararo said: “For sure there is a solution. Last year’s bike was working so well. Also, I didn’t ride the 2016 bike but he [Vinales] says that the bike was working so well.
“So, a solution there is, they just need to find a way to improve in what we struggle.
“I think, looking at the data with Franco, it’s quite clear that we miss turning and rear grip. They just need to work on that and to analyse.
“I think that Yamaha is really motivated, they see that the 2020 bike, the last races, was a disaster for everyone.
“They [Yamaha] see. We don’t need to tell them all the time that the bike isn’t working. They see. And they are working hard. They will find something.”
Quartararo also says he has “quite clear ideas” of what to ask from Yamaha for next year.
If Quartararo’s situation in the future stays the same as it was in 2020, he’s bound to change his tune
“I think we just need also to believe in them.
“They’ve made really great bikes in the past, and for me last year is the best example, because of my first season.
“I think we need to have confidence in them, tell them our ideas and then I think that will be important for us to believe in the project.”
Despite the differences, the sense of deja vu between the Vinales of the past and the Quartararo of the present is strong.
And if Quartararo’s situation in the future stays the same as it was in 2020, he’s bound to change his tune.
Then again, maybe having now become team-mates the two of them will somehow find a way to be either more convincing to the engineers or more creative on set-up side.
And if Yamaha finds a way to fully unlock both at the same time after all, it will have an absurdly potent line-up.
But the clock is already ticking on that dream scenario.
