Morbidelli: There won’t be a magic fix at Yamaha

Like Fabio Quartararo, who rode to tenth, Morbidelli had failed to reach Qualifying 2 and began the race just ahead of his team-mate in 14th.

But Morbidelli’s home sprint soon became even tougher when a set-up change backfired.

Afterwards, the #21 spelt out the size of the task faced by the Monster Yamaha team as they try to get back on terms with the ‘top guys’.

“We tried something to increase the front performance, but instead it was much worse and I couldn't feel anything,” Morbidelli said. “That's it, basically. That's pretty much our day. We need to keep our heads down and keep digging, keep working, keep believing as well.”

“We're not going to solve our problems in in one day,” Morbidelli added. “Our situation is that if we make unbelievable performances, we can hope to get into the top ten.

“We need to be conscious about it. We are conscious about it. And we need to keep believing in ourselves and keep on working with trust that we are going to solve our problems.

“I don't know if in this year we're going to be able to make them go away. But if we work in the right direction, for sure they're going to affect us less and less.

“Sincerely, my performance today I would say was very good. Quartararo is a rider that had the all-time lap record here before Pecco. And I out-qualified him.

“OK, by one millisecond. But I was with him, you know? And Quartararo didn't get [slow] between one year and another.

"I can assure you that we are riding fast. I can assure you that we are giving our 100%, but the situation is like this at the moment.

“We cannot hope or think that something magical is going to happen between today and tomorrow. It's also, I would say, counterproductive to think that we have the potential to be with the top guys, because we don’t have.

“So we need to be conscious about it. And we need to put our heads down. I know that the team is already on it and we need to keep doing like this and we need to keep growing. That's the only way.”

Morbidelli also brushed off the third and fourth places he and Quartararo had claimed in Saturday morning’s final practice:

“It’s a free practice and we both used fresh soft tyres… Yeah, we are up there in FP3, which is a useless practice. But what counts is qualifying, Sprint race and race. And in qualifying, Sprint race and race we are down there. That's the honest truth.”

Earlier in the weekend, the former MotoGP title runner-up described how unleashing more power from this year's M1 engine had been at the expense of rideability.

“To give more power to the engine, we lost some rideability, unfortunately, and that thing is killing us right now,” he said.

Quartararo is ninth in the world championship with Morbidelli nine points behind in 13th heading into this afternoon’s grand prix.