YAMAHA BOSS ADMITS VALENTINO ROSSI WARNED OF STRUCTURAL ISSUES A DECADE AGO

Yamaha team leadership has acknowledged that the manufacturer’s recent struggles trace back much further than the current results suggest. In an interview with Motorsport Magazine, Yamaha director Massimo Meregalli said Valentino Rossi had already flagged “structural” issues with the MotoGP package roughly a decade ago—problems that, in Meregalli’s view, were never properly addressed.

Meregalli’s comments came as Yamaha continues to search for a path back to the front, and they were framed around Fabio Quartararo’s role during a period when Yamaha’s competitiveness was inconsistent. According to Meregalli, Quartararo’s performances masked shortcomings that were present year after year. “The problems we started to have year-on-year were ‘covered’ by him and what he could do,” he said. He added that Rossi, Maverick Viñales, and Andrea Dovizioso also faced difficulties, but Quartararo remained fast enough to keep Yamaha from falling further behind. “Valentino had problems, also Maverick [Vinales] and [Andrea Dovizioso], but Fabio was still very fast. ‘He covered the problems, but then the limits that he had from the beginning started to become [more of] an issue.’”

The key admission from Meregalli was that Rossi’s warnings were not new. He said that if Yamaha lost time without results, the cost would compound, and that Rossi had identified the underlying nature of the problem early on. “If you lose one or two years in racing [without success] then [in reality] it is more. We had some [structural] problems, and Valentino underlined them ten years ago but, somehow, we kept them.”

Meregalli also explained how Yamaha managed to “survive” despite those issues, largely due to rider quality and a bike that could still function effectively. “OK, we had the best riders and the bike was working well and maybe the others were not as good as they are now: all this allowed us to survive, but not to progress.”

The backdrop to these remarks is Yamaha’s decline in the years following Rossi’s final seasons with the team. After finishing third in the 2018 championship, Rossi’s results tailed off, while Quartararo delivered Yamaha’s most recent end-of-year title in 2021. Meregalli’s assessment suggests that while top riders helped Yamaha remain competitive enough to avoid immediate collapse, the fundamental problems Rossi highlighted were never fully resolved—leaving the team unable to move forward even when it had the talent to compensate.