The 2021 world champion was pushed off the track at the 7th turn during the wet Argentina GP’s first lap and dropped from 10th to 16th. The rider had to work extra hard to recover after this, and eventually finished behind KTM’s Jack Miller in seventh place. After investigation, no further action was needed by the FIM stewards.
Quartararo was confused by this rule, because he saw how in the Moto3 race on Sunday Ayumu Sasaki was moved down one spot due to a milder action.
Quartararo was confused when asked about the stewards’ punishment decision on Nakagami. He had watched a Moto3 race where Ayumu did an overtake that appeared to be done properly, but he still got punished for it. Quartararo observed such actions are very common in MotoGP yet results in strict punishments.
Takaaki Nakagami, from Team LCR Honda, was not happy with how things went in the Portuguese Grand Prix last week. He said that someone named Sasaki got moved down one spot and then another person, Taka, “destroyed” his race in a corner – but they didn’t get anything out of it. Takaaki wasn’t happy because he felt like this same thing had happened before.
Fabio Quartararo believes that if it wasn’t for the crash, he would have placed fourth in the race. He was happy with his speed in the wet weather but overall he admits that Yamaha has not yet come up with a permanent set-up for their bike since they only got one day of practice before the season began.
He said his weekend in Argentina wasn’t great, but the good thing was that in both wet and dry conditions their bike had great speed. They hadn’t yet set up their ideal bike for testing, so for their first practice run of the weekend they tried a new bike. During the sprint race he used a different setting, and if it was dry he would have used another bike – showing that they still weren’t ready.
“I’m frustrated sometimes because I want to be on the top but I know it will take a lot of work to get there.”
Quartararo is only 32 points behind Marco Bezzecchi, who won the Argentina GP. Quartararo doesn’t want to think about his chances at winning the championship yet, saying it would be bad if he was thinking about it without actually fighting for a spot in the top five first.
“Let’s focus on trying to figure out how to fix the bike first, then we can talk about winning the championship afterwards.”
