Need to make considerable progress compared to previous seasons, Monster Energy Yamaha is working hard to reduce its distance to the top of MotoGP. However, the Sepang tests showed that the YZR-M1 is not competitive enough and Fabio Quartararo is asking for solutions.
The 2021 world champion did not hide some concern and question marks regarding the relative performance: ‘Of course, when you do 1m57.5s and see that you are in 11th place, you have several questions in your head. On Wednesday night, I didn’t sleep much because I was trying to think about what we can improve and this is something we have to find a solution for. But it’s not really my job to find the solution‘.
Quartararo then explained his task and how he tries to guide the engineers: ‘I gave some ideas to test on Thursday, personally I wanted to try a configuration on the bike and it was good. I bring my idea, I say: “I want to try something. Maybe the bike will shake or whatever, but I want to try what we can do for grip. Give me the maximum grip and then we see how the bike reacts”. And we see some positives – of course, some negatives – but I think by trying these kinds of things we can see what we are missing‘.
