The key takeaways from Yamaha’s first public outing with V4 MotoGP bike

It was a dramatic but encouraging first public outing for Yamaha’s new V4-powered MotoGP bike during practice for the San Marino Grand Prix on Friday.

Test rider Augusto Fernandez ended up 19th on the leaderboard at the end of the day’s running, but his lap times only told a part of the story.

As the track opened up for the first session on Friday, the cameras immediately pointed towards the predominantly blue M1 of Fernandez as he headed out on what was effectively a completely new prototype.

The Spaniard immediately managed to lap within a second of the ultimate pace in his first run, showing the ultimate potential of the bike.

There was drama midway through FP1 when he crawled to a halt due to a faulty sensor that was not reading the data correctly, forcing the bike into an automatic shutdown.

However, he was able to resume the session without losing too much after hopping on the second bike, ending up 21st on the timesheets with a best effort of 1m32.537s.

This was already within a second of the time posted by factory Yamaha rider Fabio Quartararo, who finished a strong second behind pacesetter Franco Morbidelli. Fernandez also managed to lap within the same tenth of Alex Rins, who finished 18th, and was only half a second off the pace of Pramac duo Jack Miller and Miguel Oliveira.

Later in the afternoon, Fernandez managed to complete another 20 laps in the main practice session before suffering a low-speed crash at Turn 2. While it did bring his day to a premature end, the 27-year-old still had plenty of positives to look at, having reduced the deficit to Yamaha’s benchmark Quartararo to six tenths on the soft rear tyre.

Although the reduced gap had a lot to do with Quartararo being unhappy with the unpredictable nature of his inline-four M1 in practice, as he slipped to 12th in the final ranking, even the Frenchman was impressed by the speed Fernandez showed on its V4-powered sibling.

“I mainly follow the lap times,” said Quartararo. “He was very fast, less than a tenth of a second behind the second Yamaha. 

“We know that Augusto is a fast rider. What’s more, with a new bike, I know there’s a lot of work to be done. There’s a lot of margin with this bike, especially in terms of settings. That’s where I think it could be pretty good.”

Fernandez himself was more than satisfied with the outing, highlighting how the V4 Yamaha has overcome some of the long-term weaknesses of its predecessors. However, he stressed that Yamaha still has a lot of work to do, with the current M1 still being faster in some areas.

“On the standard bike, we have some very positive things there. They are still a little bit better than the V4 right now,” he explained. “But we improved the rear part a lot. The main issue on the standard bike was the rear part, grip and management of the grip. 

“This is much better already, since the beginning, and now we are trying to find the balance of the bike to make the front work as [well as] the standard [bike], to get everything together and make the best of it.”

Augusto Fernandez, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

Having previously encountered issues with the M1-spec Yamaha in private testing at Misano, Yamaha introduced further changes to the bike in the lead-up to the San Marino GP – and managed to successfully address those problems.

“Today was a positive day because all the changes that we did, they worked,” he said. “This is nice because normally in testing, you make steps but [by] discarding things, ‘this is not good’ so you try to find a way like this. Today was the first day that I said, ‘wow, this is good’. So it’s a nice feeling as a rider.”

He added: “It was the first time that every change and every change of set-up and what we were trying, that we had in mind from the test, [they worked].

“Honestly, we’ve been struggling the last time we were here testing. It was the first time that we were struggling with the bike; setup-wise, the balance and everything. 

“So we had some big things in mind. We made [the changes] in the morning and in the afternoon. It was like a test day, like big changes and it worked.”

Fernandez’s one-lap pace in practice was even more impressive as he hadn’t been able to complete time attacks in testing due to track conditions and limited availability of tyres.

Augusto Fernandez, Yamaha Factory Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

While MotoGP concessions offer Yamaha considerable freedom with regards to private testing, the point raised by Fernandez highlighted a major limitation faced by the Japanese manufacturer in its quest to return to the front.

“I made a small mistake on the second time-attack because today was the first real time attack that we did with this bike; with a soft tyre and not a lot of fuel,” he said.

“It’s not easy [to do time attacks in testing] because the track is not always safe to do a proper time attack, unlike here in the GPs because you don’t find the same grip, the conditions and the kerbs. When I was here [for testing], I couldn’t use the kerbs because they were super slippery. So to go out and do a time attack, it’s too risky. 

“So sometimes, I understand that we don’t do a proper time attack. It’s nice to do some to understand where we are, but in the end, we more or less understand where we are without doing it.”

He added: “Also, it’s not that we can’t play with the tyres. We use very used tyres in testing. It’s not that we can’t throw away one soft tyre.”

Yamaha will be getting more conclusive data from the new M1 in the sprint and the grand prix itself on Sunday, especially in regards to how it behaves in dirty air from other bikes. A further race outing is also planned for the Malaysian Grand Prix in October to give the Iwata-based brand a chance to evaluate the bike in hot conditions.