A disconsolate Fabio Quartararo has admitted Yamaha is “years behind” its MotoGP opponents right now – and has refused to shoot down the idea that a switch to a V4 engine may be necessary in order for the team to return to title contention against the might of Ducati and the current grid’s other V4 machines.
Following Suzuki’s exit, Yamaha is the only team on the grid still using the inline-four engine configuration – meaning Quartararo and team-mate Franco Morbidelli are the only two outliers against 20 V4 users.
Quartararo made the remarks after crashing in Saturday’s sprint race at the Circuit of the Americas, where he had been visibly over-riding his Yamaha M1 for the first half of the short race trying to stay in the top six before a mistake at Turn 1 left him on the deck. He remounted to finish 19th.
Riding on the edge = trouble ⚠️@FabioQ20's #TissotSprint effort came to a devastating end 💥#AmericasGP 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/AvqXfvpI2Z
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) April 15, 2023
It marks yet another low point in Yamaha’s 2023 season, with the team yet to take a podium and with the best results so far Morbidelli’s pair of fourth-place finishes at the Argentine Grand Prix two weeks ago.
While Quartararo obviously struggling to match his rivals on track comes as no real surprise after years of the same issue for not just him but all the Yamaha racers, he suggested afterwards that dramatic changes now need to be implemented.
“Yesterday I followed Pecco [Bagnaia],” he explained after the crash, “and it’s a totally different way from everyone to make the laptime. They make the time somehow like they’re using much more power with less wheelie and the same traction.
“[When I’m] behind them, they just get away from me. I need to make corner speed, because starting from lower speed we have more wheelie. You have to be super smooth, and when I try to be behind someone and do what they do I wheelie and they just go away.
“Of course it has to change. I don’t know how, but even if I feel better today fighting, in four years I haven’t felt a big improvement from the bike. Now I’ve got quite a lot of experience on the bike, but I don’t see any big improvements.”
The team initially thought that a more powerful version of the current inline-four machine would bring significant improvements for 2023, and while it has allowed Quartararo to be at least marginally more competitive while racing in the pack, it’s still obvious how much he loses out on in acceleration.
Both Quartararo and Morbidelli have also acknowledged Yamaha’s top speed was underwhelming at Austin, something the latter put down to the nature of the corners feeding into the track’s start-finish straight and longer back straight.
And Quartararo, for his part, is adamant that despite the promise of new parts at next month’s Jerez test, it’s not small upgrades that he needs to turn around his fortunes but rather a significant rethinking of the entire M1 machine.
“The thing that we have to change is much bigger than something small on the bike like a new exhaust. It has to be a big change,” he explained.
“To make a big change can be difficult, but if we can guarantee an improvement we have to do it.
“Even the top speed today wasn’t like the first races, and we have to figure out why and see if we can find a solution.”
Quartararo refused to be drawn too much on the possibility of Yamaha switching to a V4 machine – something that team boss Lin Jarvis has already said is very unlikely to happen ahead of the rewriting of the current MotoGP rulebook for the 2027 season.
But, with the Yamaha lagging behind not just in terms of engine power but also in aerodynamics, it’s clear that Quartararo sees the two as very much linked.
“This is the thing that I cannot say because I’ve never ridden a V4 before,” Quartararo admitted when asked about the prospect. “I always rode the Yamaha, and I don’t want to ask for something that I’ve never tried.
“In the end, all the others are using this, but I don’t think the plan for next year is this one, and we’ll start again from far away.”
And when asked about Yamaha’s lean aero set-up relative to its rivals, he said: “The problem is that to use this amount of aero you need to have an engine [that’s stronger]. Ours is slightly better but we cannot use this. These [other] bikes don’t even look like bikes, they look like rocketships.
“They have wings on the top, on the middle, on the bottom, at the back. If you want to use that, you have to have a lot of power.
“Then you can use it in a way that brings you a lot of downforce but also helps you to turn. I think we are years behind in this area.”
