Quartararo ‘in toughest year’ of MotoGP career as Yamaha woes continue

The 2021 world champion ended Friday at his home race outside of the Q2 qualifying spots in 12th as he continued to struggle for pace on the 2023 Yamaha.

After four rounds, Quartararo has just one podium and is 47 points off of the championship lead.

Quartararo has faced hard times already with Yamaha since making his debut in 2019, such as his struggles last year to defend his title and his failed championship bid in 2020.

But he feels he has not endured a harder season with Yamaha than he is now currently experiencing.

“I’ve decided to not get angry anymore because every time I get angry it makes things more difficult,” Quartararo said.

“I think we are in the toughest time of every year I have been with Yamaha, because we cannot find a solution after, I would say, eight races – because the sprint for me makes it eight races. We have not any base [set-up] and not any speed.”

Quartararo says “there is no explanation” as to why he is so far off the pace on the Yamaha, and feels the gains the Japanese marque has made with engine power in 2023 have come at the expense of the bike’s other strong points.

“The thing is, there is no explanation,” he added. “Even on the bike, what do I say? I have no feeling on the bike, it’s like the bike is super aggressive, it’s not turning like usual.

Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

“But we are losing all of our strong points that even when we had less power we had other strong points.

“Now we’ve found something in one point [the engine] but we’ve lost in other ways.

“And we are not going up in both and looks like right now we get more power but we lose much more in riding.”

The Frenchman also said the post-race test at Jerez two weeks ago was useful for him to confirm that none of the new development items Yamaha brought were any good.

“We checked exhaust, it’s not working, chassis is not working, aero is not working, electronics was not working,” he said.

“Maybe one setting we tried with Ohlins [suspension] was a little bit better, but the new things we tested were useless.”