QUARTARARO KNEW HIS YAMAHA ENGINE WOULD FAIL AND SAYS ARAGON UPGRADES MADE IT WORSE

Fabio Quartararo said he knew his Yamaha engine was going to “blow up” after a run of technical problems during the Aragon GP sprint. The already difficult weekend worsened on Saturday afternoon when he was forced to stop on track as heavy smoke billowed from his M1. The 2021 champion linked the failure to the issues he had been experiencing earlier.

Quartararo later explained that the warning signs were visible from the start of the Sprint, describing his dashboard as having lit up “like a Christmas tree.” He said: “It started vibrating more – or rather, I had a Christmas tree on the dashboard: it was red, yellow, purple, green, red, yellow, purple.” According to Quartararo, he did not know the exact cause of the alerts, but “in my opinion it was easy to tell that something had broken.” He added that after losing ground early, he could feel the engine’s performance dropping on the straight, which led him to expect the failure would come sooner rather than later: “From the start, I lost ground; I felt something strange, and then on the straight I could feel the engine’s performance starting to drop, so I knew that sooner or later it would blow up.”

Quartararo’s Sprint ended in a DNF after his engine exploded on lap 6, with his P17 grid slot for the race reflecting a tough Saturday for Yamaha. The wider picture was bleak for the marque as well, with Pramac’s Jack Miller the only Yamaha rider to finish inside the top 10. Alex Rins followed in P12, more than two seconds behind Miller, while Toprak Razgatlioglu was a further second back in P13.

Beyond the engine, Quartararo also suggested Yamaha’s development direction at Aragon left him feeling like a “test rider.” After qualifying in P17, he told Moto.it that Yamaha had made his bike “even worse” through trialling new upgrades, saying: “Yes, it’s worse. Actually, I said yesterday that it was worse; they wanted to compare it again, and this morning it was even worse, so I think that, as I said, I’ve been more of a test rider this weekend.” He explained that he tested the chassis multiple times: “I tested the chassis three times but it wasn’t working, so I basically raced on the standard bike, but when you switch from one chassis to another, even if the difference isn’t huge, the feel just isn’t there.”

Quartararo said he was “confused,” while insisting the engineers were “trying to find more performance” for Sunday’s Grand Prix. He also raised uncertainty about Yamaha’s remaining engine supply for the rest of the season: “Honestly, I don’t know how many engines we have, but I don’t think there are many left, so I don’t know whether it was a used one or not.”

He suggested the team had been prioritising development and testing over chasing outright speed during the weekend: “But this bike was really slow all weekend; we had to test a lot of things. I was switching from one bike to another, and it was more about testing than chasing performance this weekend.”

With Sunday’s Aragon Grand Prix still to come, Quartararo will have another chance to bounce back, though he acknowledged doubts about Yamaha’s competitiveness moving forward. He said he hopes the engine issue involved a unit with “plenty of kilometres on it,” but the Sprint retirement underlined how far Yamaha’s current package is from delivering consistent results. After practice on Friday, Yamaha chief Paolo Pavesio confirmed the team had been using Quartararo to collect data on several parts relating to its overall chassis package.