How Jerez was a timely reminder of one MotoGP champion’s true class

Prior to last weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix, the balance in MotoGP’s unofficial ‘Japanese Cup’ was heavily weighted in Honda’s favour. And that has arguably been the biggest surprise of the 2025 season so far.

HRC didn’t even score 100 points in the manufacturers’ standings last year. Its star rider in 2020 world champion Joan Mir spent too much of the campaign on the floor; Luca Marini’s turn as Marc Marquez’s replacement yielded little in the way of results, while the bike itself has to rank as one of the worst ever put on a grand prix track in recent memory.

Its best result for the year was an eighth in wet conditions in Thailand, courtesy of LCR’s Johann Zarco, who was also its leading rider in the standings in 17th.

Yamaha didn’t fair much better. Held back by only having two bikes on the grid, it managed 124 points in the constructors’ standings. But a late season step saw it consistently battling for the top 10, with Fabio Quartararo scoring a season-best sixth at the Malaysian GP.

Going into the winter, of the two, Yamaha looked best-placed to make a decent step forward for 2025, especially with its development work now aided by the addition of two factory bikes at Pramac.

And the pre-season went in that direction, with Yamaha showing very well in Malaysia and a little less well in Thailand. But from the hop in the Thai Grand Prix, Honda had made a clear step while Yamaha looked to be much where it was.

By the end of the Qatar GP, they were more or less on level terms as far pecking order goes. Both had achieved top fives: Zarco in Qatar, and Jack Miller in Austin, both taking the chequered flag in fifth but the former promoted to fourth courtesy of a tyre pressure penalty for Maverick Vinales.

But at Jerez, the race to get back to the podium went in Yamaha’s favour. From FP1, Quartararo looked strong and ultimately put his M1 on pole with a new lap record. Though crashing out of the sprint on lap two, he was able to get to second in the grand prix having led for the first 10 laps for the first time since he was last a grand prix winner at the 2022 German GP.

The leading Honda was Zarco, around 15s adrift down in 11th, in what proved to be a tough weekend for Honda. But for all of Yamaha’s celebration, it’s hard to look past the key asset it had on its side at Jerez: 2021 world champion Quartararo.

Quartararo put his money where his mouth is at Jerez

Quartararo has always maintained on the Yamaha that if he can qualify well and get into a position where he can utilise the strength of the M1, he will be able to put in a good race pace and come away with a strong result.

A demon in qualifying trim in the early part of his MotoGP career, the limitations of the Yamaha - its lack of rear grip and low power - meant not even that was on show in the last couple of seasons as the M1 quite sharply dropped off the pace.

That has been something that has improved in 2025. Quartararo has made it into Q2 in all rounds so far, though he was bested by Pramac’s Jack Miller in two of the first five qualifyings. In Qatar, Quartararo put his M1 onto the front row in third and followed it up in Spain with a first pole since Indonesia 2022 - 1134 days prior.

In Qatar, Quartararo was 0.675s clear of the next Yamaha on the grid (Alex Rins, 9th) and was almost a second clear of the next fastest M1 (Miller in 14th) at Jerez when he busted the lap record for pole.

From there, he led the opening 10 laps of the grand prix before ultimately taking the chequered flag in second after putting in a performance to defend Ducati’s Pecco Bagnaia that drew praise from the Italian.

“That with a slower bike than mine – mine is a bike that allows me to win or to overtake easily every rider – he was doing an amazing job,” Bagnaia said. “Even if I was arriving to him, like 0.0 seconds, I was quite sure that exiting from the last corner or on the other straight I was overtaking him easily on the straight. But it was not the case because everywhere he was exiting so smooth, so fast, and he was really strong.”

The average pace difference between the pair for the duration of the 25-lap grand prix was just 0.001s in the Yamaha's favour. From lap six to the end, Bagnaia was exactly 0.100s per lap quicker than Quartararo. This highlights just how good a job Quartararo was doing to defend on an M1 that was bottom of the speed traps all weekend. Even on a track as hard to overtake on as Jerez, Alex Marquez proved on the Sunday and Marc Marquez did so in the sprint before Quartararo crashed that passing a Yamaha on a Ducati is still pretty easy.

Yamaha tested a new engine - not its V4 - at Jerez on the Monday aimed at giving some more power back to its riders and the feedback on it was positive. So much so that the engine will be raced from next weekend’s French GP. That should concern a few people if Quartararo has access to horsepower that can aid him in his defensive riding pursuits.

But it seems the biggest help Quartararo got at Jerez was, really, a lack of meddling by Yamaha. After the first two rounds, the Frenchman felt that the brand was trying too many different things to unlock more potential from the bike. And what he needed was time to just understand what he had underneath him and find a competitive base set-up.

“It’s the same bike as Austin,” he said on Sunday after the grand prix. “We just stopped making many set-up [changes] during a weekend, trying to not change everything, but just trying to keep the same bike and myself trying to put the bike on the limit. Right now we don’t have anything that will make us do a step forward.”

Quartararo suggests he was a little fortunate at the start of the Spanish GP that Marc Marquez and Pecco Bagnaia fought with each other over second place like they did on the opening lap. This gave him some free air to mitigate the fact that “we still struggle in the beginning of races”, something he explained is down to the change in track grip created by Moto2 Pirelli rubber.

Quartararo is earning his €12 million blockbuster contract

If you actually look at the start of 2025, the Jerez result somewhat shifts the spotlight from the fact that he was last of the Yamahas in Thailand, last again in Argentina and bested in America. However, it is worth also pointing out that he was nerfed at Turn 1 in Argentina by Marco Bezzecchi and had to race the wrong bike for dry conditions in America after crashing in the wet on the sighting lap.

Qatar offered a truer reflection of what Quartararo is still capable of on the Yamaha, which has now been deemed categorically unquestionable after Jerez.

It’s the kind of result that Yamaha knew was possible when it put his blockbuster €12 million contract for 2025/26 in front of him. With Aprilia sounding him out last year for this season, it couldn’t stump up the capital Yamaha could. To say that he only stayed because of money would be unfair, however.

He has made no secret of the fact he has bought into technical director Max Bartolini’s vision for where Yamaha can go. That is clearly bearing fruit now. But this is also a manufacturer that has given him so much over the years, and that isn’t something he has forgotten about.

Yamaha may have paid a lot to keep its prized asset, but it’s money well spent. He’s currently sixth in the standings and 31 points clear of the next-best Yamaha, while he was 82 ahead of team-mate Alex Rins last season having beaten him 10 times in the 12 races that they both saw the chequered flag.

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In 2023 he was 70 points clear of Franco Morbidelli in the championship with a 14-5 race record, while he achieved three podiums where his team-mate could manage a solitary top five result in Argentina.

In 2022, Quartararo fought to the final round for a championship he ultimately had to concede against Pecco Bagnaia on a Ducati that was miles ahead of a Yamaha visibly in free fall down the order. He was 206 points clear of the next-best Yamaha in the standings. The year before that saw him win the championship, but by the time Maverick Vinales was kicked out of the factory Yamaha squad after the Styrian GP Quartararo was already 77 points ahead of him.

This is a rider who drew puzzled looks when he was signed by Petronas SRT for his rookie 2019 season after a lacklustre time in the lower categories to then finish just 19 points back of the top Yamaha in the standings with a haul of seven podiums.

The battles at Misano and Buriram between Quartararo and Marc Marquez made for incredible viewing in 2019. But it was when Quartararo goaded Marquez into the mistake that saw him partially dislocate his shoulder in a massive crash during Malaysian GP qualifying where the threat to the Spaniard’s reign looked legitimate. That battle never came to pass, sadly, as a result of Marquez’s injury at Jerez in 2020, but what Quartararo did in 2019 ultimately gained him Yamaha's trust to deem him the heir to Valentino Rossi's seat at the factory team for 2021.

At 26, Quartararo has barely entered the peak years of his career potential. Once more in 2025, he’s proving why he’s a vitally important element of Yamaha’s hopes of fighting for titles. That keeps his 2027 contract valuation high within Yamaha, but he'll also have no shortage of competitive bikes offered to him on the open market when discussions get underway early next year...