Fabio Quartararo leads the MotoGP World Championship by 22 points after eight rounds, but it didn’t get off to an easy start. The Monster Energy Yamaha rider has the slowest bike in terms of top speed, and it wasn’t until the fourth round in Portugal that the podiums started to be regular.
The frenchman confessed in an interview with Motorsport.com that it was not the bike that he changed since the start of pre-season, but his level of focus: ‘From february until now nothing has changed. What has changed is that, at the beginning of this world, I was not mentally focused’.
According to Quartararo, the lack of progress on the Yamaha YZR-M1 made him particularly angry: ‘I saw that the Yamaha had not evolved, anger got inside my head and blocked me. I was a little confused, because in 18 months of evolution the bike hasn’t gained even a kilometer per hour of top speed. I felt bad because, in a year, I went from overtaking Alex Rins in a straight line to seeing how the he took stickers off of me’.