Ridiculous. Useless. Frustrating. Irrelevant. A f**king nightmare.
They’re all short and not particularly sweet descriptions of Yamaha’s brutal underperformance at last weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, but don’t take our word for it.
Every MotoGP qualifying, practice and race LIVE and ad-break free from lights out to the chequered flag. New to Kayo? Start Your Free Trial Today >
They’re the words of Fabio Quartararo, Miguel Oliveira and Australia’s Jack Miller after spending three days trying – and mostly failing – to wring a respectable lap time out of Yamaha’s YZR-M1 machine in what must surely be one of the Japanese giant’s most bruising MotoGP weekends.
How was it that a bike capable of a quartet of pole positions and a podium for Quartararo earlier this season, let alone second-row grid slots and a top-five finish for Miller, could be this dire?
The ‘why’ takes some digging into, but the ‘what’ is easier to ascertain.
MORE MOTOGP NEWS
TALKING POINTS Spaniard matches 2014 streak, rookie turns heads, Miller’s lost cause
SPIELBERG RACE REPORT Marquez buries hoodoo, Aussie struggles to last
At the Red Bull Ring last weekend, Yamaha’s riders qualified 16th (Quartararo), 17th (his factory Yamaha teammate Alex Rins), 18th (Oliveira) and 20th (Miller) on a 20-bike grid. Miller’s starting position was his worst since the final round of his 2015 rookie season for Honda in Valencia, 172 races ago.
In the sprint race, Quartararo gained places when Ducati pair Francesco Bagnaia and Fermin Aldeguer both had wheel-spinning launches from the dirty side of the grid not on the racing line, the Frenchman advancing to finish 11th. Rins, Miller and Oliveira finished in the final three places.
In Sunday’s Grand Prix over 28 laps, the four Yamahas occupied the final four places, miles behind even the slowest of the other manufacturers. Thanks to a crash for Aprilia’s Jorge Martin and an engine failure for Ducati’s Fabio Di Giannantonio, Quartararo came 15th to snare a single point to ensure Yamaha at least troubled the scorers for the weekend.
It was bad, really really bad. But a set of situations and circumstances conspired to turn what was always going to be a tricky race weekend for Yamaha into a nightmare.
While Yamaha isn’t about to be challenging Ducati for victories any time soon – no other manufacturer is, given Marc Marquez has swept the past six race weekends – it’s not a nightmare that’s likely to linger. And for Yamaha, that’s just as well after an Austrian Grand Prix that was chastening at best, and borderline embarrassing at worst.
WHY DOESN’T AUSTRIA WORK FOR YAMAHA?
The Red Bull Ring, ever since it returned to the MotoGP calendar in 2016 after the sport made a couple of stops there in the 1990s, is akin to a picturesque super-sized go-kart track in the Styrian Mountains.
It’s a relatively simple 10-turn track layout with a series of long straights into slow, 90-degree corners that require heavy braking on the way in, and an ability to get your bike’s power down as soon as you square off one corner to head to the next.
For years, Yamaha’s supple YZR-M1 is a machine that excels on flowing layouts with direction change and sweeping interlinked corners, of which the Spielberg track has precisely none.
MORE MOTOGP NEWS
ONES TO WATCH The five MotoGP storylines set to shape the rest of 2025
SPRINT REPORT Spaniard’s Saturday mastery continues as Aussie slumps to 10-year low
The Red Bull Ring is a one-of-one circuit on the calendar, and was Ducati’s outlier track for years before it became the sport’s benchmark brand from 2022 onwards. Before it became a title-winning juggernaut, Ducati riders would unleash the top speed and stopping power of their Desmosedici machines in Austria more than any other track. Even when Marquez was winning titles for Honda for fun, he couldn’t beat Ducati in Austria, losing last-lap battles three years running from 2017-19.
The Achilles’ heel of Yamaha’s 2025 bike is a lack of straight-line grunt and top speed, and a struggle to deploy traction on the exit of corners after heavy braking. The Red Bull Ring requires heavier braking than any other track, with five of the 10 corners requiring serious stopping power. It’s a recipe for disaster that was made worse by last weekend’s tyre allocation from Michelin.
To cope with the braking and traction requirements of the circuit, Michelin brings a special harder rear tyre to Austria that isn’t necessary at most tracks, and is a compromise for all five MotoGP manufacturers. Safety and durability takes precedence, relatively speaking, over performance. Rear grip becomes harder to access. Fuel consumption skyrockets.
It’s a peculiar track with a very specific sweet spot that needs to be found. Last weekend, Yamaha was so busy fire-fighting problems with its bike that simply circulating was enough of a challenge.
As for actually racing other bikes, forget it.
HOW BAD WAS IT, REALLY?
Yamaha’s stats from Spielberg are enough to make you cover your eyes and ears.
In qualifying, one-lap maestro Quartararo could manage only 16th to be the best Yamaha on the grid, seven-tenths of a second slower than the pole time set by Marco Bezzecchi’s Aprilia.
Three races earlier, Quartararo qualified on pole in Assen. Three races before that, the 2021 world champion was putting the finishing touches on a hat-trick of poles from Jerez to Silverstone.
In the sprint over 14 laps, Quartararo (11th, 13.387secs behind winner Marc Marquez) was the only Yamaha rider not to ship a second per lap of time to the rider up front. In the 28-lap Grand Prix, Quartararo (15th, +25.256secs to Marquez) was, again, the only Yamaha rider less than a second per lap slower over the race distance to the winner.
Aprilia’s Ai Ogura, a rookie, was one place and six seconds ahead of Quartararo as the four Yamahas sadly circulated at the back in a slow-speed parade of gloom.
Miller, who bullied his way to 16th on lap one before dropping backwards the longer the race went, was the only Yamaha rider whose best race lap was within one second of Bezzecchi’s fastest lap of the race (a 1:29.533 on lap 4). By the end of the race, Miller’s speed was such that he was constantly lapping in the 1min 32secs bracket; of the 20 total laps spent mired in the 32s, 16 of them were by Yamaha riders as they faded further and further back.
Afterwards, Quartararo didn’t hold back.
“You can see four [Yamaha] bikes in the same position, the last four … it’s pretty ridiculous,” he said.
“Nothing to learn, nothing I could feel. It was pretty useless. I didn’t feel I am going away from Austria with something I’ve learned.
“I felt no potential from the beginning of the weekend, and we didn’t improve. Also if you check the pace we had … Friday afternoon looks good, then on the race it completely changes and we are so far, so far away. I didn’t have a good feeling in the race. I overtook Jack [Miller]and that’s all.”
Oliveira, who has started 108 premier-class races, was struggling to think of a worse one on Sunday as he spent 27 of the 28 laps in the bottom two positions.
“The ranking doesn’t really matter, who was the first Yamaha, the second, the third, because
when you’re at the bottom of the timetables, it’s quite irrelevant,” the Portuguese rider said.
“We have no grip. We have no grip to accelerate out of the corners. We lack a lot of help from the rear to just dip into the corners and actually turn faster. It’s the reality.
“We lack a lot of support from the rear to lean into the corner and turn faster. I think one of the biggest issues with this bike is the stopping. Fabio [Quartararo] makes a huge difference on the brakes, but that’s down to him – he’s the one making the difference.”
Miller – more calm than many expected when he met the press after the race – echoed his Pramac Yamaha teammate’s comments.
“Our bike doesn’t gel together well with this rear tyre … the construction, the way it is … it just doesn’t work [for us],” he said.
“There’s no way to find traction. In the race I tried everything I possibly know how to do to find traction, whether it be short-shifting, whether it be being super patient on the throttle, whatever. Doesn’t matter what it did, you arrive to a certain point, and I feel – I’m not a human speedometer – but it feels like around 120-130km/h, once the forward momentum is kind of enough, we just start to lose load on the rear, the bike starts to spin like mad, and you can’t do anything about it. The last corner was a f**king nightmare, trying to get the thing off the last corner.
“As soon as you brake uphill at turn one and turn three, it’s inevitable … sometimes earlier, sometimes later, but the f**king thing collapses, and that doesn’t breed massive confidence.
“When there’s four of you [at the back]for example in qualifying we are all within three tenths [of a second of one another]and Fabio [Quartararo] is probably one of the best in the world on one lap, it says a lot.”
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Yamaha’s rider quartet has combined for 26 MotoGP wins, 80 podiums and a world championship (Quartararo in 2021), so it’s not the quality of who is on board the bike that’s the issue.
Where said bike is racing, as 2025 has intermittently shown, appears to be the key, and with a brand-new circuit for MotoGP coming onto the calendar this weekend at Balaton Park in Hungary, Quartararo’s likely relief to not be saddling up again at the Red Bull Ring is tempered by a step into the unknown.
“I watched the World Superbikes races at Balaton Park, and it looked a bit stop-and-go, which is usually not good for us,” he said.
“But, we will see. We’re ready to build from here and take steps forward.”
Miller, similarly, was keen to look more forward than back at one of his more challenging MotoGP weekends since his earliest days in the sport.
“What are you going to do, you’ve got no choice … you put the boots back on and go again,” he said, lamenting a weekend of a lack of performance coupled with an engine failure in Friday practice and a snapped throttle cable in Sunday’s pre-race warm-up session before he ran out of fuel after he crossed the line in last place.
“We need to work hard to try to understand. Balaton will be different … different tyre, new asphalt, completely different layout. This game is like that. It’s a tough weekend, and the way I look at it, you get all of the bad luck out of the way now and hopefully we can go forward.”