A look at the technical side: can the Yamaha V4 surprise in 2026?

by Marc Seriau/paddock-gp

Aside from Marc Marquez’s dominance, which practically removed the suspense from the world title from summer onward, the 2025 MotoGP season was overall interesting, with the enigma of Francesco Bagnaia, Aprilia and Marco Bezzecchi moving to the front row, Pedro Acosta’s resurgence for KTM, progress from the factory Hondas, and the question mark surrounding the track debut of Fabio Quartararo’s Yamaha V4.

We bring it up because, like Marc Marquez on the Ducati or Pedro Acosta on the KTM, El Diablo truly made the difference compared to the other current Yamaha riders and remains, at least for 2026, an undeniable asset for the Iwata manufacturer!

This winter, given the few elements observed, we can still try to question the expected performance level for next season, an element inseparable from the French rider’s future…

A test is still a test, and the day is so fragmented into short runs that it’s difficult to draw concrete conclusions. However, that doesn’t stop us from gathering the factual elements here.

Although only one bike with a V4 engine was available at the Misano tests, each of the four Yamaha riders — Fabio Quartararo, Alex Rins, Jack Miller, and Toprak Razgatlioglu — had one at their disposal. It was a significant effort from the tuning fork brand, even if, visually, we didn’t notice changes compared to the last test in Italy on the Adriatic coast.

Fans can rest easy: the beast is still called YZR-M1!

In reality, only the external starter seemed to have evolved, moving from a kind of hastily improvised solution to a truly dedicated one.

After on-track activity was slowed by persistent damp patches, Fabio Quartararo got comfortable on his usual M1 and, in just 4 flying laps, quickly set a 1'30.020 on medium tires and with a healthy amount of fuel onboard.

With only two and a half hours of running left, he switched to the V4 with the main goal of finding a good front-end feel. It wasn’t easy, nor did he achieve it, and it was only on his sixth attempt with the V4 that El Diablo finally managed to better his time of the day, posting a 1'29.927.

At the end of this very short test day, during which he completed 24 flying laps on the V4, only 2 of them were faster than the 1'30.020 he had set after just 4 laps on the inline-four! On the evening of these official Valencia tests, the results were therefore not exactly brilliant, even if the track clearly didn’t offer the same grip as the Grand Prix: with the best time set by Raul Fernandez at 1'29.373, the test session was overall half a second slower than the Grand Prix qualifying time, during which Marco Bezzecchi clocked a 1'28.809. Compared to these benchmarks, Fabio Quartararo went from 1'28.978 in Q2 (6th) to 1'29.927 with the V4-powered M1 (15th), which suggests that at this stage of developing the synergy between Fabio Quartararo and the V4, he was still about half a second short of matching the performance of the classic M1.

But given the context and the early development stage of the machine, half a second doesn’t seem that much…

On Tuesday evening, as night fell, Fabio Quartararo gave his view: "First of all, we had to find the best setup. So the goal wasn’t to find something already better than Misano. We mainly worked on finding a base, on getting the front-end feeling back, but nothing really important, I would say."

The next day, the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Valencia was turned into a private track to host, among others, Yamaha.

Was the famous half second found during this full day, at the end of a program this time not affected by moisture? That information didn’t leak out and the rider hasn’t had to face the press since.

We can only speculate, except that someone, who prefers to remain modest but is fully in the know, posted a message online...

-> The original article on Paddock-GP