Yamaha theory forwarded for brutal Sepang test crashes

The opening day of the official MotoGP Sepang test saw a number of crashes, something which Yamaha’s Alex Rins put down to the windy conditions at the Malaysian venue.

Rins, who finished the opening day 14th overall after taking part in the second and third days of last weekend’s Shakedown test in Sepang, noted that, during that Shakedown, there were few crashes across the whole test – in contrast to the multiple falls seen on the first day of the official test.

The crashes included one for Raul Fernandez that ruled him out of the remainder of the test with a fracture in his left hand, and another for reigning World Champion Jorge Martin, who sustained hand and foot fractures in a turn two high-side and has therefore also been ruled out of the second and third days of the test.

“Honestly, in the Shakedown we didn’t see any crash, or almost any crash,” Rins said after the first day of the official test in Sepang.

“I will [point] to the wind, because it was a really strong wind.

“I was a little bit angry because I only did 41 laps – if I was able to do 42 it would be nice.

“But I only make 41 laps and there was a lot of free time waiting for the wind to go down.”

Rins went on to detail the areas of the track which were most affected by the wind.

“The wind especially bad was turn four, turn five was quite strong, turn nine, 11, 13 after the change of direction where [Pedro] Acosta crashed – I don’t know if he crashed for the wind or not,” he said.

A change of Yamaha plans

Rins not only suggested that the wind was the cause of the quantity of crashes on day one in Sepang, but also a change of testing plan for himself and Yamaha.

“Honestly, today, this strong wind has changed a little bit the plan,” he said.

“In the Shakedown we were able to test many things; a little bit setup, some new items like the chassis.

“The result of the chassis in the Shakedown was not super-good, but Yamaha was able to do a step up on the chassis. So, today we were planning to test the new chassis, modified a little bit, and then a new upper wing on the fairing.

“But we couldn’t for this wind.”

While Rins was limited by the wind, his teammate Fabio Quartararo had a different perspective on the conditions.

“There are 15 corners, and I think it the wind was disturbing me in four or five corners,” he said.

“So I think the other 10 you can know if [a new component] was better or not.”

In any case, Rins’ apprehension about the conditions led him to change his plan, and instead of testing new components from Yamaha he focused on tyres.

“We make a change on our plan and we test the Michelin [front] tyres, the three different Michelin tyres that they bring,” he said.

“It was three different types: one is similar to the soft [compound] that we have here, with another construction that was not bad; and then these next two were this different casing, different sized casing.”

Rins said that the two tyres with the different sized casing were the development tyres expected for 2026, while he was unsure if the third tyre would be raced in 2025 or not.

Looking towards the remaining two days of the test, the Spaniard is aiming to get his testing plan back on track.

“I couldn’t make so much work apart from that,” he continued.

“For sure, we have two more days, I didn’t put any qualifying tyre to do a good lap time because it was not the right moment, this is what we discussed with our team.

“Tomorrow we will test the chassis and also the fairing, and let’s see if we can find something.”

Quartararo again was contrary to Rins, putting one new tyre at the end to aim at a lap time, one which, in the end, was marginally better than that he managed in Q2 at last year’s Malaysian Grand Prix: a 1:57.592 last November comparing against a 1:57.555 set on day one of this year’s test.

“I think it’s positive,” he said. “It’s better than being slower. Also we didn’t really focus on a time attack, so this is the positive that we were already [...] faster than the qualifying.

“But I was feeling quite good; during qualifying you really focus on making the lap time and now we were just trying many things and put a new tyre at the end to try to make a good lap time.

“I think already riding for two days, two days of rest, and coming back of course it’s helping the lap time, but I think we did a good job.”