Yamaha’s Mugello sprint pace causes concern for MotoGP star Fabio Quartararo

The 2021 MotoGP champion Fabio Quartararo has had a pretty poor Italian Grand Prix weekend so far. Going down hard on Friday resulted in a dislocated shoulder and a trip to the hospital while his excellent qualifying performance was rendered irrelevant by an awful race pace.
Even though the Yamaha rider has been seen as a qualifying extraordinaire in 2025, his fourth place at Mugello was particularly impressive due to his shoulder pain. However, the race was shocking with Quartararo tumbling down the order after the first couple of laps.
By the end of the race, the Frenchman was the fourth-slowest bike out on track. He came away with zero points after losing out to Fermin Aldeguer in the dying stages of the sprint. Quartararo outlined what his issue was even if he didn’t quite know how to solve it.
“Chatter,” said Quartararo. “Well, a little bit of everything. Basically we, I will not say all the details, but all parts that we need to go fast, we didn’t have.
“The chatter we don’t understand why [we have it] and this something that I’m a bit worried about because we never really had [it before] and it only happens in the race so it will be interesting to know why we have this chatter.”
Quartararo also made it clear that his injury from Friday didn’t influence the result brought home in the spirit.

Fabio Quartararo, Yamaha Factory Racing
Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

“To be honest, I expected worse because it didn’t affect the result that happened today,” he added. “Since yesterday the pain has been quite constant, I was impressed I didn’t wake up worse. I’m quite ok, let’s see how tomorrow goes but the performance of today was related to the arm.”
After the sprint, there were questions surrounding the Yamaha’s rather middlingly straightline speed. Quartararo didn’t hold back when asked about the ease with which the Ducatis overtook him down the straight.
“Too easy,” said Quartararo. “We are getting better but still we miss [performance] and especially you need to think of the data that they maybe struggle to overtake but we cannot follow them so it’s really complicated, especially during the race.
“Maverick [Vinales] was overtaking me every lap I think. I ran a little bit [away during] the first three laps from him but it’s the only moment for me when we can really fight and we didn’t have any issue.”
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In this article

Maciej Hamera

MotoGP

Fabio Quartararo

Yamaha Factory Racing

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