until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
Cast your mind back to the 2016 Japanese Grand Prix at Motegi – five years plus just over a week ago.
It was a weekend Marc Marquez entered with a 56-point lead over Valentino Rossi, and just a hundred available in the remaining races.
In other words, Marquez was more or less the champion elect, but both Rossi and his reigning champion Yamaha team-mate Jorge Lorenzo, a few points back, at least looked like they were definitely going to keep the title fight going beyond Motegi, and maybe beyond next race Phillip Island too.
And indeed, when the Japanese GP began, though Marquez led, the two Yamahas were in pursuit, looking well set to at least postpone the coronations.
Rossi fell first, sliding out of second place after just six laps and unable to continue.
But Lorenzo was still fighting, despite having gone to hospital the day prior after a practice crash, and was hanging on to second ahead of Andrea Dovizioso, on course for just barely enough points to keep Marquez waiting.
And then he crashed too. His time as Yamaha’s reigning riders’ champion was over. His time at Yamaha as a whole was coming to an end, too – and the drought was to begin for his soon to be former employer.
It is so easy to see the parallels between what happened then and what just happened at Misano today, as Yamaha emerged from its dark period, with Fabio Quartararo grabbing the prize that was supposed to wait until Portimao.
Francesco Bagnaia, so excellent at Misano, had just seemingly broken Marquez’s resistance in the lead battle. Even if Marquez retaliated, a second-place finish would’ve still kept the title battle alive – what with Quartararo fighting further back and no way for the two to actually meet on track.
But it again turned in one split-second. Somewhat anti-climactically, like in 2016 – but perhaps there is a certain poetry to that.
Yamaha won’t have known it would take so long to get back onto the mountaintop. It looked to have secured a spectacular coup in signing Maverick Vinales, who was lightning from the get go, to replace Lorenzo. That partnership should’ve brought titles.
Instead it brought a vicious cycle of hype and disappointment. Vinales lost the feeling with the bike, and never really recovered it for a sustained stretch. Both he and Rossi struggled big-time in low-grip conditions.
It didn’t really work in the wet – and while that was fixed, mixed conditions, which seem to be more frequent than fully wet anyway, remains an Achilles’ heel to this day.
To add insult to injury, older-spec satellite bike would repeatedly show up the factory-spec machinery. It started with Johann Zarco (and sometimes with Jonas Folger) at Tech3 and continued with the arrival of Quartararo, who would ultimately become Yamaha’s unlikely saviour, at the new Petronas team.
It got so bad that midway through 2018 Yamaha had its tech department publicly apologise to Vinales and Rossi for the performance of the bike at the Red Bull Ring. By 2021, it would move on from Rossi – and midway through the year Vinales forced it to move on from him, too, in a spectacular split.
And though Quartararo was clearly magic, 2020 would’ve brought the fear again. He looked like he’d stroll to the title in Marquez’s absence, but soon proved incompatible with the 2020 version of the M1, lacking confidence and dropping out of a title race that should’ve been his to control.
Again, a satellite, older-spec bike – that of his team-mate Franco Morbidelli – was showing up the works machines, and yet he came up short too – with Yamaha’s campaign compromised across the board by an engine valve issue.
It looked at that point like Yamaha could no longer be counted on. Like it would find all-new ways to lose titles that seemed up for the taking. It briefly looked that way again this year when Quartararo lost a heap of points through arm pump at Jerez and a suit malfunction at Barcelona.
But he never dropped the ball, and actual unforced errors were nowhere to be found. Yamaha’s ghost of failure has been banished – and, fittingly, in such a familiar way.
