Fabio Quartararo’s sour mood through the 2026 MotoGP season has been the defining image of Yamaha’s new V4 project so far – but is he off-base or justified?After all, the current Yamaha bike is, so far, something of an experiment in seeing how motorsport teams and figures deal with a period of ‘deliberate underperformance’. And the answer, so far, is they aren’t coping well.Yamaha isn’t sandbagging or running massively turned down. It’s not ‘tanking’ for concessions. But it has switched to an all-new engine configuration in the final year of a regulatory cycle, with the inevitable knowledge the chance is very good that engine configuration will not initially perform as well as the tried-and-true inline-four.In other words, Yamaha is doing less well than it could …
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Author: Valentin Khorounzhiy
