For the home appointment of Le Mans, Fabio Quartararo and Johann Zarco on Wednesday led a parade of motorcycling enthusiasts from the city to the circuit up to the Bugatti circuit, a sort of official catwalk for what will be an event that will go down in the history of the MotoGP world championship. Indeed, Sunday’s race will be the 1000th race of a journey that began way back in 1949. Quartararo certainly doesn’t arrive in the best possible shape at the GP in his home country of France, given that, although he has never retired in the four races held so far, he has added up the pittance of 40 points, equivalent to the11th place in the standings at -47 by the leader Francesco Bagnaia.
It’s no mystery that with the M1 made available by Yamaha in 2023, Quartararo isn’t managing to have a good feeling that allows him to stay in the leading positions. The chronic engine power problems are severely penalizing the 2021 world champion, unable to obtain important positions in qualifying and unable to overtake in the race. The Frenchman’s only hope is always to recover positions at the start, at the cost of taking excessive risks, as happened in the Jerez Sprint. On the Bugatti Circuit Quartararo has never won, although he has achieved three poles (2020 and 2021 in MotoGP and 2015 in Moto3), and achieved only one podium finish, with third place in 2021.
Quartararo’s words at the press conference
“The GP at home? I hope to give a good show for the fans, we hope that France can be a game changer throughout the season.
Did you try anything new in Jerez? We tried a few things in testing, not all of them worked. We will try the chassis again this weekend and we’ll see how it works. We tried to work on the time attack, we’ll try to find something more this weekend starting from the basis of the tests, which allowed us to step forward on the flying lap.
The new frame? I liked it. It clearly wasn’t better, but it wasn’t worse. Here we will have a standard frame and a new one.
Is Yamaha losing its strengths? Yes, that’s the feeling we have. The others are growing a lot and so are we we are losing cornering stability. Having tried to make the engine a bit more powerful, we have lost a lot in other areas. Right now we lack the cornering and the stability of the bike.
The home race after Jerez? In the end, the Spanish GP is the past, having a test on Monday helped me find myself. It would be great to have the support of the fans. We’re in a situation we’ve never met before, the goal is to get back to riding the way I want. I will do my best to get back up front and hopefully we can do it here in France.
The meeting with the College of Commissioners? I just expect them to do their job.
Lorenzo’s words? I don’t know how many days of testing Jorge did, but if I’m not mistaken I wasn’t even in the factory team in 2020. He was a long way off in terms of lap time. Obviously it’s a legend, but I don’t think it could change that. Cal Crutchlow is very motivated and we are pushing in the same direction, trying to change the mentality of the Japanese engineers to bring them towards the Italian style. Step by step, however, we are working”.
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