As usual, Fabio Quartararo presented himself cautiously on the eve of the second to last race weekend. El Diablo preferred to keep away from proclamations, even in view of the upcoming World Championship.
"I like the Portimão track, and I have good memories. Here we know we can do well because, for example, at the last corner, you come in leaning and slowly straighten back up, so it should be better. I'm not saying we'll be fast, but it's less aggressive so it might be more congenial to us, even though we don't have advantages anyway. More generally, this layout should give us fewer disadvantages by being as smooth as Silverstone," he said, somewhat hopeful.
Portugal and Spain, at least on paper, should be the M1's two last appearances in the current situation. "Not knowing how the V4 works yet, I don't know if I'll miss it. It's definitely good to change, but maybe I'll miss it next year. In any case, it's a new step in my career. We'll see how it goes. From what I understand, these will be the last two races with the in.line engine. For me, it's ninety-nine percent that way. The remaining percentage is only because, if it doesn't respond as expected, someone might ask to go back to the straight-four, but it's going to depend on Yamaha," he considered, already looking ahead to next year.
For now, the test, in a racing context, hasn't been particularly successful. In Malaysia, in fact, Fernandez did no better than his brand colleagues with today's bike.
"I had a chance to talk to Augusto about the new M1, since I had given him one of my swingarms in Sepang in an attempt to mitigate the vibrations he was feeling. Although the situation improved after that, the result showed that we're still far off in terms of performance. More than looking at the data, to date, it's crucial for the engineers to try to figure out how to close the gap," he said pragmatically, before answering the question about the improvements being made on the 2025.
"The focus of the engineers was more on 2026, so progress from Thailand to date has been limited. I hope it was worth it and that the next bike will perform better because, as a rider, it was hard. Overall, the progress has only be slightly made on the engine, while the large work has been on the electronics. We tried to figure out how to be performance-oriented by having less at our disposal," he concluded.