Fabio Quartararo has been cursed by his own pre-season prophecy of non-competitiveness on his outgunned Yamaha M1.
Only a brief spell of success in the middle of the year threatened to disprove his prediction from way back during pre-season testing. Since the mid-season he’s been forced to helplessly watch on as other riders chipped away at the points lead he’d toiled so hard for.
This weekend comes his final reckoning.
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The odds are against him overcoming sole remaining rival Francesco Bagnaia in the fight for the 2022 MotoGP championship, but Quartararo may well think his bike should never have lasted to the final race to begin with.
If he made it this far, why not one race further?
He’ll need everything to go his way, but that alone isn’t without precedent. Motorcycling history is replete with examples of against-the-odds champions winning the crown at the final round, some of which are still fresh in the sport’s collective memory.
Could history repeat itself?
But the crux of the championship equation for him is that he goes into the finale with a mission that goes against the odds and against the run of form.
It won’t be enough for France’s first and only motorcycling world champion to go out and get the title. It must come to him.
Valencia will decide if it will.
HOW DID HE GET HERE?
Quartararo started the season as reigning champion off the back of a consistently strong 2021 campaign, but from his very first pre-season outing on the new bike he was downcast about his chances of defending his title.
Yamaha hadn’t delivered on its promise to boost power from its asthmatic inline four-cylinder motor, and the Frenchman was so disappointed that he openly considered leaving the team at the end of the year if he couldn’t see tangible signs of improvement for 2023.
His opening quartet of races passed as he expected. Aside from the highly unusual conditions at the new Indonesian Grand Prix, where he took pole and finished second, he returned ninth, eighth and seventh and qualified no higher than sixth.
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Crucially, however, no rider used the opening stanza to really grasp the championship, and a mental shift spurred by evidence of work by Iwata precipitated a golden run of form in the middle of the season.
Between Portugal and Germany he collected three victories, two second-place finishes and a fourth place to take the title lead and establish the spine of his title defence while his main rivals either faltered or struggled to collect more than minor podium places.
His lead peaked at 34 points over Aleix Espargaró and a seemingly terminal 91 points over Bagnaia at the end of that purple patch.
But a crash in the Netherlands completely disrupted his momentum, and the dark clouds returned to the Frenchman’s mindset just as the Ducati bike hit its stride.
He’s collected just two podiums since that crash and three further non-scores while Bagnaia went on a victory spree, completely unstitching his once healthy points lead.
Espargaró’s challenge eventually petered out, but Bagnaia hasn’t finished a race off the podium since Quartararo’s Dutch TT crash.
Quartararo’s 91-point lead has turned into a previously unimaginable 23-point deficit, and he starts the final round with the odds stacked against him retaining world motorcycling’s most prestigious title.
THE PERMUTATIONS
Quartararo formidable 23-point deficit has its roots in his ruinous crash at the Australian Grand Prix in October. He thus has only one route to the championship. He will win the title if:
– he wins the race with Bagnaia 15th or lower.
Because he has only three wins to Bagnaia’s seven, a tie will decide the championship in the Italian’s favour.
“I will prepare myself like a crazy man, because I know the only solution for me to fight there will be to win,” Quartararo told the MotoGP website. “I want to enjoy the Valencia race because it’s the last one of the season, then we see how we do.”
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WHY HE’LL WIN IT
It’s happened before
The points gap makes Quartararo a rank outside in a last-race shootout for the title.
But history’s sided with the underdog before.
After crashing out of the penultimate race of the 2006 season, Nicky Hayden went into the final race eight points down on Valentino Rossi and lacking momentum, having let a 51-point lead ebb away in the second half of the year.
Rossi, defending five successive championships, was on a streak of seven podiums in eight races, including two victories.
The Italian was on pole with the American fifth, but their relative positions were quickly swapped off the line, with the Rossi slipping backwards and Hayden gliding forwards.
And then Rossi crashed.
Such was the rate of attrition in that race, he was able to recover to 13th for three points, but Hayden needed to finish only fourth to overturn the deficit. He finished third.
There are few more iconic championship-winning images than Hayden’s emotional celebrations after crossing the line.
The one glaring difference in the two stories is the size of the points gap, but with Hayden having run as high as second before settling for his title-winning third — and with a crash in today’s premier-class era more likely to result in a non-score — it’s not really much of a stretch to imagine similar circumstances prevailing this weekend.
He’s been the season’s best rider
It’s no disrespect to Bagnaia to say Quartararo has been the year’s standout performer. You just need to consider the bike he’s been riding.
The Yamaha M1 is not a championship-contending bike; it just happens to be ridden by a championship-calibre rider who’s dragged it to places it has no business finishing. That it’s scored three wins, five other podiums and 235 points is a minor miracle.
The bike’s lack of quality is self-evident in the hands of every other Yamaha rider.
Quartararo’s teammate, Franco Morbidelli, is 19th in the standings with 36 points and has finished inside the top 10 just once — seventh at the outlying Indonesian Grand Prix.
Andrea Dovizioso and Cal Crutchlow’s points tallies combined amount to a paltry 25 points and a best finish of 11th. Rookie Darryn Binder has a sole top-10 finish but just 12 points for the season.
That’s 73 points combined for all other Yamaha bikes — 31 per cent of Quartararo’s haul. The contrast is staggering.
And compared to Bagnaia’s up-and-down form, his record this year is just about flawless. He’s failed to score only three times all season, one of which was in Thailand, where an error on the team’s part setting tyre pressures left him helplessly slipping backwards.
The other two non-scores were crashes of his own making, though he’s been at pains to point out that the need to over-ride the bike to overcome its flaws means he’s always perilously close to crashing.
The pressure’s off
Quartararo’s third place in Malaysia was his first podium in six races and second podium in nine.
His ride in Sepang was gutsy and aggressive, and it was hard to remember the last time he moved forward so decisively in a race, having started 12th on the grid.
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It’s surely no coincidence it came the week after he lost the title lead for the first time since picking it up way back near the start of the season.
There’s no expectation on Quartararo now. There’s no longer a pressure to maintain his formerly huge championship advantage, and the inadequacy of his machinery has been laid bare by the supremacy of the Ducati bike in the second half of the year.
Permutations no longer matter. He needs to only go out there and put it all on the line one more time. The pressure is on Bagnaia to seal the deal, not on him to snatch it.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see Quartararo turn in one of his season’s best performances this weekend regardless of the outcome.
WHY HE WON’T
Too many things need to work in his favour
It’s just one reason, but it’s easily the most influential.
Put simply, everything must go right for Quartararo to successfully defend his title this weekend, and it’s vanishingly rare for all stars to align in MotoGP.
Assuming the bike rolls out of the garage feeling competitive, he needs to qualify near enough to the front to have a realistic chance at snatching the lead on the first lap and preferably off the line.
If he doesn’t, the Circuit Ricardo Tormo isn’t bountiful with overtaking opportunities. The M1’s problems circulating in traffic are well known, with its front tyre pressure quickly becoming the limiting factor in any forward progress. Considering he needs to win, even a lofty qualifying position may not be enough on its own for him to put himself in a title-winning position.
But even if he were to comfortably lead the race — and he hasn’t done that since June’s German Grand Prix — he’d realistically need Bagnaia to retire.
While it’s true Bagnaia has been extremely crash prone this year, he’s come off the bike just once in the last nine races, and that was when he was still chasing the title lead — Quartararo has crashed more than that during that same period. Realistically Pecco needs to do little more than finish to seal the deal.
The equation isn’t in Quartararo’s hands. He can go out and do his best, but that on its own won’t be enough.
Bagnaia winning the title after being 91 points down would be a story matchable only by Quartararo overturning a 23-point deficit in a single race. That’s the scale of the challenge.
THE WILDCARD
After underperforming in Australia, there’s an argument to be made that there’s no such thing as a Yamaha track this season. Ducati’s second half of the campaign has been strong enough to draw the balance of performance closer to Bologna.
But while the Desmosedici performs well pretty much everywhere now, Valencia could at least give Yamaha a fighting chance of having a bike to do the business.
The M1 is the most successful bike at Circuit Ricardo Tormo over the last 10 races at this circuit, claiming four wins to Honda’s three, Ducati’s two and Suzuki’s one.
Quartararo’s performance in Malaysia, a track that only half-suited his bike, suggests he’ll need only a sniff of potential to make something out of this last race.
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Admittedly it hasn’t historically been a Quartararo circuit — he has just one podium in any class at this track, his second place in his maiden MotoGP season in 2019 — but teammate Franco Morbidelli has a strong record here, including victory in 2020, his last win to date, as well as a couple of intermediate-class podiums.
Coupled with an upturn in form in Malaysia last round, having both riders pulling together to ensure the bike is at its best could be important in Quartararo overcoming the odds.
These are at best percentage gains, and they could count for a lot when Quartararo will be up against it just to win the race, but on their own they won’t be enough.
The bottom line is Quartararo isn’t in control of his championship destiny. This weekend his title hopes are in the hands of Circuit Ricardo Tormo.
