Want to know how bad the 2023 season was for Yamaha and Fabio Quartararo? Even with double the number of races than the previous season, the 2021 world champion could only score 172 points – 76 less than he scored in 2022 with three victories on his way to runner-up spot in the championship.
From ending 2022 17 points adrift of world champion Francesco Bagnaia, Quartararo was 172 back at the end of this season, having amassed just three grand prix podiums in Austin, India and Indonesia.
“Being honest, from the first race,” the Frenchman tells Autosport when we sit down with him at the Malaysian Grand Prix, as we begin by asking when he thought the 2023 title was out of reach.
“Even last year I didn’t expect to fight, but of course as a rider the expectation is really high, of never giving up in every situation. And the first part of the season until the middle of the season was hard because I never expected the situation that I was going in.
“Clearly finishing in P10, P17, even P7 sometimes, I was always frustrated and never happy about my positions. Sometimes my riding was really good, but just clearly it was the potential we had. So, this was something we had to accept. But the second half of the season was much better, just giving my 100% and that’s it. But like a rider it was really tough for me, the first half of the season.”
As Quartararo alludes, after scoring 73 points over the first half of the season there was a noted upturn in form in the second part, when he scored two of his three grand prix podiums and 99 points. Some of this was down to the stiffer tyre carcass brought by Michelin to places like India, Indonesia and Thailand to cope with extreme heat. It didn’t necessarily give Yamaha an advantage, but pinned back its rivals a bit to allow the performance gap to be closed.
Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images
Quartararo cut a frustrated figure for much of the first half of the year as Yamaha’s number one struggled
But the second half of the season also featured a notable shift in mindset from Quartararo.
“I was arrogant… not in a bad way, but in a way to improve,” he says of the many times he railed against Yamaha’s lack of progress to the media earlier in the 2023 campaign. “Of course, like I said I never accepted being in that position, I wanted to really push Yamaha to the limit. So, the way I was doing it was not the good one. But I always want to be at the top…
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