Quartararo at Yamaha is becoming inevitably toxic

Fabio Quartararo and Yamaha are staring at an unpleasant, drawn-out, eight-month MotoGP divorce, in which neither party is really the bad guy.

Sure, Quartararo - whose commitment to Honda for 2027 and 2028 is by now an open secret - could be more kind and judicious in his comments about the state of the Yamaha bike and the Yamaha project, and more enthusiastic about the duties for which he is being handsomely recompensed.

And, sure, Yamaha could have made more progress with its new V4-engined bike, or made that switch earlier, or kept the inline-four for one final year before pivoting for 2027 - a decision that would've absolutely been the wrong one but would've maybe made these months less brutal.

Ultimately, Yamaha helped Quartararo become MotoGP champion, rewarded him accordingly in financial terms, but just couldn't deliver the bike to keep him at the front. It happens. 'So long, thanks for everything, best of luck to the future'.

But the vagaries of the MotoGP contract negotiation cycles mean that before that 'so long' both parties will have to grind out 19 rounds of nothingness - a process that Quartararo feels uniquely ill-suited to.

His sixth place in the Brazil sprint was a real high point, but it feels like the high watermark of what's achievable right now. And it's just not much in the context of what Yamaha and Quartararo had achieved in the past. It's hard for it to really matter.

At the Circuit of the Americas last time out, the Yamaha appeared fairly consistently - day to day, session to session - a nice-and-round one second off the pace. For a bike that's so new, over a 120-second lap, that is hardly disgusting - but in the current MotoGP it's just not competitive.

And Quartararo was not taking it well. He said on Friday: "Doesn't really matter which [rear tyre] casing we have or which track, the feeling is the same. We don't understand how the bike works.

"We can change the bike - long, short, low - and the feelings are the same. For me this is more than that the bike doesn't work - it is [that] we are making some big changes, so why are we not able to see a difference? Even if it's worse [it would be at least something].

"But we are not able to see."

At the conclusion of the three days, he described hanging out with injured motocross superstar Jett Lawrence as his "best moment of the weekend" and sort of hinted that he's checked out from the moment-to-moment of the bike development.

"I think that now I try to be a little bit out of the development, because I think I've already said what we need, what they have to do. But I will not repeat it every time.

"Right now every time they know what I said, they know what all the riders said. And yeah, that's it."

You might not read that as the most sympathetic, and you might not be wrong - but as well-compensated as Quartararo is being, this is not what he signed up for at the time.

He's at six points after three rounds, more than all the other Yamaha riders combined and yet fewer than he'd ever had three rounds into a season before (16 was the previous low mark, from last year).

His season's over. His time at Yamaha is over. Whatever phoenix rises from this Yamaha reset, Quartararo will not be riding it.

Publicly, it might genuinely be best for everyone if he stays at home for the next 19 rounds.

That is not feasible - Yamaha doesn't have another rider of that level to slot into its line-up, and Quartararo needs to stay race fit for Honda - but, honestly, it doesn't feel totally out of the realm of possibility.

In any case, though, this isn't ending on good terms. And not because anyone is really in the wrong - just because this is how things have to be sometimes.