Maverick Vinales has turned his ire towards the Yamaha Factory Racing team once again for its failure to find any solution to the rear grip woes that have led to a spectacular slump in form this season.
Ahead of the Dutch TT at Assen, the Spaniard is still reeling from a torrid German MotoGP last weekend that saw him qualify on the back row - in part because of a costly crash in FP3 that consigned him to Q1 - before trundling around at the back in the race to finish last of all.
A fresh nadir in a season that has been on an alarming decline ever since he burst out of the blocks with victory in the 2021 MotoGP season opener in Qatar, the result comes at a sensitive time following Vinales’ comments in Barcelona that intimated he will leave Yamaha at the end of his contract in 2022.
Indeed, those words - given in an interview with Spanish television - might go some way to explaining why Vinales is becoming more forthright in expressing his opinions and was duly refusing to hold back when blaming Yamaha for its failure to find a solution for his rear grip woes especially.
"I don’t feel very respected as a rider because I have never been in this position before: finishing last in one race. I don’t remember any race in my life since I was a kid. Basically it is for that that I am very upset,"
"The way things are going is that I don’t understand anything. The problem is that when I try to find a solution [from the team], the answer is the same and that’s ‘I don’t know’," he said.
"For me what is very strange is Qatar 1: how I can be with that superiority to the rest and then it is all gone. I went from first to last. Maybe here I can be first again. It is pretty strange and as a rider it is complicated for the motivation.
"It is tough to accept but in the end we don’t know what is going on. I am always asking the same: ‘why in Qatar was it working acceptable and now we are in this position?’ For me it is pretty strange and difficult to accept.”
Indeed, Vinales’ frustration is merely compounded by the fact he is being entirely overshadowed by new team-mate Fabio Quartararo, who leads the standings with three wins from seven races, while he was on the podium at the Sachsenring.
As such, he says he will look to the Frenchman for clues as to how to extract the best from the M1, saying he will change ‘everything’ to spur his fortunes.
"For sure one solution is to put the same bike as Fabio, same electronics, same clicks, same suspension, same everything to see what is going on because we have solved nothing. So here in Assen I will copy everything. Everything. And we will see.”
