A “tough day to swallow” for Quartararo at Silverstone

The Yamaha rider certainly ranked ninth in the first free practice session, but this was due to the use of a new tire, which allowed him to move up the hierarchy. In the afternoon, where everyone was chasing the clock in order to qualify directly for Q2 (the first ten in Practice win this ticket), Quarterly could not create any illusions, with a sixteenth time, 1″3 from the reference, established by the Ducati Pramac of Jorge Martin. While his Yamaha has developments on the British track, the Nice native clearly expected better results...

“I wasn’t expecting that at all, I was expecting a lot better. It's weird because I thought we had taken a step forward for this weekend, but that's not the case at all. We'll see what we can do for Saturday. A lot of things are wrong, I expected to be much closer in terms of time. I'm not saying that I imagined going straight to Q2, but I thought I would be much better. Unfortunately, that is not the case. »

The 2021 world champion was unable to detail the list of new features on his M1, but one thing is certain, Japanese engineers will have to rack their brains in order to go in another direction, providing more performance! “I can't tell you what's new, but it didn't work. It's not better at all, so we really expected something else. The wing didn't help at all, but we still had to try it, to see if it was positive or negative. »

Winner on this same Silverstone track the year of his title, Fabio Quartararo already knows that he will not be able to replicate such success. What is even more difficult is the relative lack of progress on the part of Yamaha since this period. Where Ducati and others have made strong progress, the Japanese brand is marking time, failing to return to the times that allowed Quartararo to line up on the front row.

“The others, since 2021, they have enormously improved their times, while we cannot even reproduce our times from three years ago. It's still hard to swallow. For the moment it's like that, and we will have to work to find these times. »

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Comments collected by Luca Bartolomeo, at Silverstone.