Yamaha tries everything, small gains at Jerez: Quartararo isn't getting his hopes up

Intense work inside Yamaha to try to raise the level in a very complicated 2026 MotoGP season: there have been some improvements, but for Quartararo it's not enough.

Fabio Quartararo can’t wait for 2027 to arrive: new year, new regulations, new team, new motivation. This championship is very frustrating for him; he wants to fight for podiums and wins instead of having to contribute to a project started from scratch like Yamaha’s, which since 2026 has been using a V4 engine for the first time in the MotoGP era. It’s almost a year of testing in view of the next one, on which the Iwata manufacturer is heavily betting to return to the spotlight.

Monday in Jerez there was an important MotoGP test and for Yamaha it was an opportunity to try many things. It’s difficult to make up all the gap in a single day, but it was still essential to find a direction to try to improve the competitiveness of an M1 that so far hasn’t shown particular strengths.

From Jerez, Quartararo’s final assessment of the test wasn’t thrilling, although he admitted there were some positive signs, albeit not enough to make a breakthrough: "We tested many things: chassis, swingarm, electronics and aerodynamics, some of which we had already seen during the weekend. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any significant improvements. We worked a lot on the electronics and it seems that we have a bit more confidence with the front end, but it’s not a real performance improvement".

The French rider highlights that he has been asking for some time to intervene to improve the Yamaha M1’s front end, given that the braking phase is problematic: "It’s something we’ve been saying since last September; it’s a recurring problem for all of us. The bike behaves differently under braking, and that complicates everything".

Quartararo tried several aerodynamic variants, including a 2025 version, and not everything is to be thrown away: "I tried different configurations, he explains, and the last one was the most positive. For me it’s very important to feel safe with the front, but I still have to understand where the limit is. There’s still a lot of work to do. We tested things that, in theory, should have had worse performance, but in some cases they worked better than expected. This means there are still aspects we don’t fully understand".

Despite a few small steps forward, the French rider doesn’t want to be overly positive about the French Grand Prix to be held at Le Mans on the weekend of May 8–10: "I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic. I think it will be a bit better, but we didn’t find anything truly significant. They are small details that could help, but nothing major".

Low profile; he doesn’t feel he has any reason to be particularly confident for his home GP. Asked also about the new Yamaha engine, he said he didn’t have the chance to test it at Jerez: "I hoped to try it, but it wasn’t possible".

The original article with the interview in Spanish on Motosan.es