Of all the riders lining up for the 2021 MotoGP world championship, there’s perhaps none with greater pressure upon their shoulders than new factory Yamaha signing Fabio Quartararo.
The 21-year-old is setting out to fulfil his own potential as well as filling the rather giant shoes of Valentino Rossi.
Whether he can deliver on those expectations or not is a big question to be answered in the coming season.
Having shown moments of pure genius alongside entire race weekends where he was almost absent last year, he needs to return to the consistency of his debut season in 2019 if he’s going to have a chance of succeeding in the title fight.
The pressure Quartararo is under in large part of his own making thanks to the incredible career trajectory that the youngster has experienced since moving from mid-pack in Moto2 on an underperforming Speed-Up to dicing with Marc Marquez week in and week out as a MotoGP rookie.
He was signed by the newly-founded Petronas SRT Yamaha team as a diamond in the rough to become understudy to Franco Morbidelli. And the Malaysian team quickly discovered that it didn’t take long to polish him into a frontrunner.
Impressive from his opening race (despite stalling the bike on the grid) and a regular podium contender from the midpoint of the season, Quartararo took an incredible seven podiums from the final 13 races of 2019.
For a while, he even looked like the only rider on the grid who could consistently challenge dominant champion Marquez – even if he wasn’t quite able to get the upper hand in their numerous last lap duels.
In fact, he was such a hot property by the end of 2019 that Yamaha had lined up to promote him to the factory team for 2021 before the 2020 season even got underway, announcing at pre-season testing that Quartararo would take the seat of Rossi for the following year.
All his promise looked set to be delivered upon when the 2020 season did get underway too, with back-to-back victories at the opening two races of the year setting up the Frenchman as the obvious title favourite.
Yet that was rapidly nixed by a combination of Yamaha’s engine woes, with power quickly handicapped to compensate for faulty valves that led to overstressed engines going bang, and the inherent flaws in the 2020 M1, as changing conditions highlighted that there was only a very narrow window in which the bike would operate consistently.
Though Quartararo was able to take another win later in the year when things once again aligned for him at his second home race at Barcelona, those were his only three podium visits of the year.
He ended the season in a lowly eighth place, three worse than his rookie championship and a long way off not just eventual winner Joan Mir but also from team-mate Morbidelli in second position.
That brings us to 2021, where Yamaha is hoping that a modified bike brings better consistency at its weaker tracks and where the promotion of Quartararo to the factory team means that he’s more able to help shape the bike’s development towards his own strengths and weaknesses.
However, perhaps the biggest flaw in his arsenal that Quartararo needs to adapt to in the coming year isn’t the bike but his own hot-headedness.
That’s something easy to forgive when you remember that he is only 21 and that there’s a lot of maturity still to come from him, But he’s prone to displays of his anger on the bike that hint at how much growing up is still to be done.
That’s going to be made harder not easier in the factory team, especially if he can repeat the performance of last year and make a strong start to the season.
It’s hard to draw too many conclusions just yet, but he’s looking strong enough in Qatar to be in with a chance of victory in the opening two races, and we know he’ll be strong at the first European tracks on the calendar too.
But will a strong start to the season put him under too much pressure too early? Would a more gradual build-up to form, like in 2019, be better for him?
Unfortunately you can’t tell your rider to stop winning, so it’ll be what it is for Quartararo – and it’ll be up to the people around him to manage that situation as best they can.
That’s got the added complication of Maverick Vinales on the other side of the garage, of course.
Something of an up and down character himself when it comes not only to form but to mental approach, if Vinales has another disappointing year then it just adds to the pressure already being piled on Quartararo in his unofficial role as number one.
In the end, it’s too hard to make many bold predictions about what 2021 will bring for Quartararo. It’s going to take time to assess the state of the complete package, from the consistency of the bike to the calmness of the rider.
If the stars align just right, like they did in 2019, if the factory Yamaha team does a good job of keeping pressure out of the garage and if the new bike proves to have a bigger operating window than last year’s, then a title campaign isn’t out of the question for him.
Otherwise, it’s hard to envision anything other than more of the same as 2020 – devastatingly fast race wins when everything is just right, but lots of days where Quartararo is left bitterly angry as the title fight wages on ahead of him.
