Fabio Quartararo's gesture shows his growing frustration with Yamaha

Fabio Quartararo‘s body language at the Buriram test spoke volumes about his growing frustration with Yamaha’s performance in MotoGP.

Quartararo returned to action on Saturday after missing most of the Sepang test due to a finger injury. However, his first day back at the track proved to be rather frustrating for him and the entire Iwata-based brand.

The Frenchman ended up 18th among 22 riders in Thailand, more than 1.2s off the pace set by Gresini’s Alex Marquez on a factory-spec Ducati.

Pramac rider Jack Miller led the four-bike Yamaha contingent in 17th, but his time of 1m30.325s was less than two tenths faster than Quartararo’s best effort.

The latter’s frustration was palpable, to the point that he even showed the middle finger to his bike. The 2021 champion was later seen with his head in his hands in the Yamaha garage.

When questioned earlier this afternoon by the official MotoGP website, team manager Massimo Meregalli responded with some embarrassment, recalling the scale of the task undertaken by Yamaha in switching to a brand new V4 engine this year.

“The riders cannot wait, but we knew since the beginning that we couldn’t expect magic,” he said. “We were aware that especially the beginning for us was going to be a learning process.

“I want to believe and I’m still thinking that from the second part of the season gradually we will improve the performance and accordingly the result.”

He added: “We knew that it was going to be a big change. I think it’s part of the process now. We are really learning the bike because even if last year we could do testing, it’s one thing to do tests with the testing team, but when you move everything to the factory team, the rider are always pushing more. They need something special.

“And like what we had in Sepang, we are just discovering the bike, discovering unfortunately also some problems that sometimes you can expect, other times not. It’s really a learning process.”

No engine update for the moment

In Malaysia, Yamaha had to pause its testing programme for a day due to an engine-related safety issue that the engineers wanted to investigate. It is public knowledge that the technicians are exercising utmost caution with the V4 at this stage due to reliability concerns, and even put a hard limit on how much mileage riders could accumulate in Sepang.

Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

There has also been talk of introducing an upgrade to the V4 engine in the early races. However, Meregalli denies that this will happen at the start of the championship.

“No, it’s later in the season,” he clarified. “They already scheduled by when we should receive [the upgraded engine]. Then it depends if things go smoothly without problems.

“But from what we evaluated and confirmed in Sepang, it’s the material with which we will start the season.”

Photos from Buriram test – Day 1