‘Really difficult’ - Quartararo 15sec slower than last year

It was the second time in a row that the 2021 world champion has been unable to match past performances on the M1, having also set a slower race time than last year at Le Mans (+13.092s).

A possible factor was the switch from the soft rear tyre he had used on his way to tenth place in the Saturday Sprint, to a medium for the full-length race. Team-mate Franco Morbidelli remained on the soft and finished a fraction ahead of Quartararo.

“Really difficult,” Quartararo said. “I was feeling much better with soft, but we talked with the team, that the soft was not going to handle the race. I was feeling great, but we chose the medium that for me was not the best decision.

“But we took that and it was difficult. I was behind Enea all the race and I could not even try to overtake.

“Then with the hard front, the temperature, the pressure was a little bit too high, but it's difficult to control when you make all the race stuck behind [other riders].”

Morbidelli said of his tyre choice: "I was able to be quick also with the medium in practice, but I decided to gamble and go with the soft. It dropped at the end, but the front was more the problem than the rear."

Either way, although a repeat of last year’s speed would have been good enough for Quartararo to claim fourth on Sunday, a repeat of his 2021 race time (41m 16.344s) would have seen him take victory by half-a-second.

“What is true is that the lap time I made in 2021 was much better than this year,” Quartararo said. “So if I did better, I don't know, but the lap time is what counts, and the results.

“Of course it's a totally different era, because already in 2021 I was doing 1m 46s in the race and was super fast. Today I didn't do one 1m 47s low. So it's difficult.”

Quartararo’s best race lap in 2021 was a 1m 46.836s (second best lap of the race after Johann Zarco), followed by a similar 1m 46.868s in 2022 (beaten only by Bagnaia and Bezzecchi) and then a 1m 47.624s (16th best) on Sunday. Morbidelli set a 47.344s (11th best).

That is despite Quartararo's race top speed, along the fastest straight of the season, increasing from 343.9km/h (2021) to 350.6km/h (2022) and 356.4km/h. His weekend best was an impressive 360.0km/h, joint seventh and only 6.1km/h from the new all-time record by KTM's Brad Binder.

Increasing top speed from the M1 engine had been Quartararo's top priority over the winter, but Mugello added further weight to the theory the power increase has been at the cost of performance in other areas.

"Unfortunately, everybody else improved much more than what we did. And to give more power to the engine, we lost some rideability, unfortunately, and that thing is killing us right now," Morbidelli said earlier in the weekend.

"So we wanted more top speed. We have more top speed, but unfortunately we lost some rideability along the way, and that's killing us."

Past lap time comparisons underline why Quartararo, after trying various parts and set-ups in winter testing and the early rounds, has now effectively settled on pairing the new engine with last year’s chassis and aero, plus a base set-up from the past.

However, “even if we put the same setup, the bike is different. So we cannot compare with 2021, and even with the 2022.”

“From the beginning of the year, we are trying to improve, but made one step forward, one step backward, we never really found a solution, so we decided to go with a setup that we know,” he added.

Leading the world championship after Mugello last season, Quartararo - who announced a surprise split from manager Eric Mahe over the Mugello weekend - is just eighth in this year’s standings, with one podium (COTA).

The Frenchman now heads for the Sachsenring, where he took victory one year ago.

“It's difficult to expect something when you make this kind of race [at Mugello],” he said. “We are missing turning, that is something that, especially in the last corner I was struggling, and Sachsenring is a track where you have to turn a lot. So hopefully we can really find something in Germany.”