Fabio Quartararo reckons that there was “no reason” for him to cop a penalty for his part in the crash at the start of the Spanish Grand Prix.
The factory Yamaha racer was sandwiched between Marco Bezzecchi and Migiel Oliveira entering Turn 2 at the start of Sunday’s Jerez encounter, the resulting contact seeing Quartararo and RNF racer Oliveira going down and flying off into the gravel on the outside of the bend.
With the race red flagged, Quartararo was able to return to the pits and restart the race later while Oliveira suffered a dislocated shoulder in the impact and was thus forced to sit out the contest.
The race stewards took a dim view on the 2021 MotoGP world champion’s part in the incident and slapped him with a long-lap punishment, which then effectively became a double long-lap after Quartararo accidently touched the white line on the exit of the penalty loop while looking around trying to rejoin the circuit in a safe manner.
Quartararo was left angry that he even received a penalty in the first place, explaining that the stewards failed to “give an answer” to why a penalty was necessary and that he “had no space” due to the tight nature of the Jerez circuit on the opening lap of the encounter.
“I didn’t try to make an overtake (on opening lap of original Spanish GP start), I just tried to survive the corner but I had Bezzecchi on the right and Oliveira on the left, so I touched both of them because I had no space,” said Quartararo.
“Maio (Meregalli, Yamaha Team Manager) and Lin (Jarvis, Yamaha Team Principle) went to race direction to give them a bit of an explanation to see whether I deserved a penalty, we didn’t get an answer and from our side there’s no reason to have this kind of punishment because I was just trying to make my best.”
Despite having to serve a pair of long-lap punishments Quartararo managed to carve through the lower midfield and salvage a tenth place finish at the end of a battling afternoon, though he felt more was possible if he didn’t struggle so much to follow other riders.
The Frenchman felt his speed in warm-up showed he was more than capable of securing a strong result despite starting 16th, though insisted that the M1’s inability to follow other machines close enough to set-up an overtake is something Yamaha “needs to fix.”
“This morning in the warm-up I’ve never been as fast as that with the medium tyre, a 1:37.1 showed we can go fast,” continued Quartararo.
“We have problems and we don’t know why, I was behind Augusto (Fernandez) for so many laps and I was much faster but unable to stay close to him, so this is something we need to figure out how to fix, as well as improve our time attack performance.
“The main thing (to fix) is the time attack and being able to follow other riders, this is something we need to do in order to prepare an overtake because everytime I had free space I could catch the guy in front really fast but then I was blocked.
“We don’t need new things particularly we just need to fix these areas.”
