Long-term readers of the blog will know that my biggest gripe with Yamaha riders of late has been their total lack of consistency. One week they can be completely dominant and untouchable, the next they will spend all weekend looking lost and struggle to take any points. It’s been an issue for Quartarao and Vinales the last few years, it was an issue for Lorenzo towards the end of his tenure with Yamaha, and it has even become an issue for Rossi over the last three or four seasons.
So it is with cautious optimism that I admit this: Quartararo has completely outdone the competition so far this season. He had a tough first round but still managed to take a fifth place, and a week later he defied all odds to take down the Ducatis and bag his first win of the season. Now he finds himself leading the world championship after taking yet another win on the Rollercoaster in Portimao. It was an exceptional win, too, as the Frenchman took the lead early on and was untouchable by the majority of the riders chasing him.
The reason I’m still cautious is because the same thing happened last season. Quartararo won the first two races in 2020, but a number of crashes and a serious lack of podium contention led to him falling from favour and ending the season way down in seventh. It’s a positive sign that the tracks Quartararo has been able to win at so far this year are circuits he doesn’t have a strong history with, and we are headed to the Jerez circuit that he won at twice last season, but I still remain hesitant in calling Quartararo the ‘real deal’.
There’s another big reason Quartararo was so dominant on Sunday, and that’s the fact that the men who had the pace to stop him all had rather difficult races. Rins and Oliveira certainly looked like they had the pace to match the Frenchman, but both crashed out of the race. Bagnaia certainly had the speed, but he started from the fourth row and had to fight his way through the pack just to get into contention for the podium. I dislike playing the game of what-ifs, but it certainly seems like the three of them could have at least made life more difficult for Quartararo had the circumstances been different.
That’s not to take anything away from the other podium finishers, either. Bagnaia had a fantastic race, slowly catching the guys at the front and showing how capable he is as a fighter on board his factory Ducati. Mir also had quite a strong race to take his first podium of the year, going toe-to-toe with Marc Marquez and sticking with the front riders while others fell around him.
I’ve seen some comments of people trying to take away from the validity of Mir’s third place by pointing out that a number of podium challengers in front of him crashed out. This simply isn’t a mindset I can agree with. To take a podium finish you first have to finish the race itself; by crashing out of the race, the likes of Rins and Zarco failed to earn that podium result, regardless of whether or not they had the pace to theoretically take it. Mir held out till the end of the race, and was rewarded with a trophy and sixteen valuable points towards his title defence.
Speaking of Zarco, the Pramac Ducati rider’s stint at the top of the championship was short-lived as he crashed out of the podium fight not long after Rins. It’s a shame for Zarco, as he clearly had some solid form and could have kept the fight going with the likes of Bagnaia and Mir, but he remains solidly within the top riders in the championship right now. The true test for him will come when we head to Jerez, a circuit he has struggled with in the past, but I have a lot of hopes for a good season from Zarco despite this unfortunate setback.
Marc Marquez was back, too, and it was glorious to watch. Sure, he didn’t have an incredible race, but he battled until the very end and took seventh place at the flag, finishing as the top Honda rider of the day. I’m sure some people were expecting him to immediately return to his winning ways – and I do still believe that form will return sooner rather than later – but this was an incredibly important step for the Spaniard. He survived a full race, he took some solid points, and he hasn’t re-injured himself in any way. That must surely be mission accomplished as far as Marc is concerned.
While Oliveira’s race ended prematurely in the gravel trap, there was another KTM rider flying the flag for the Austrian manufacturer: Brad Binder. After a quiet weekend and a disappointing qualifying, the South African pulled off yet another come-from-behind race to finish fifth and take eleven points. It’s becoming something of a trend for the factory rider to qualify in a low position and battle his way to the front, and it’s a testament to the skill he possesses and the quality of the bike that he’s on. If he can finally figure out how to get a good lap in on a soft set of tyres, then the rest of the field should be very afraid of what Brad Binder is capable of.
If there was a disappointment of the weekend, it has to be Maverick Vinales. The factory rider looked so good in Qatar, and I was really ready to believe I’d been to harsh on him with my pre-season comments and predictions, but Vinales had a real stinker of a race in Portimao. After qualifying eleventh, he fell back all the way to dead last in the opening laps, and while he recovered to score a couple of points, it’s a massive let-down to see a factory rider perform so badly. It will sting even more for Maverick to know that his teammate had such a comfortable win, and knowing how heavily he relies on his mental fortitude I worry for what the next couple of races will have in store for the Yamaha rider.
I said in a previous blog that the European rounds would mark the start of the ‘normal’ championship, but Portimao is not an ordinary track, and has produced yet another unpredictable race. If there is a coming calm in the season, then it will come in Jerez, a long-term member of the MotoGP calendar and a favourite of many riders in the paddock. Only then will we know exactly what kind of a championship we are in for this year.
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