‘The Quartergate lockdown scandal’
They are calling it Quartergate. Or perhaps Fabiogate. Whatever the name, there is a whole lot of blame being flung around in advance of a special official hearing before the first MotoGP race of the season.
It’s to do with breaking testing regs while trying to stay sharp, and while officially there are only vague allegations concerning an unspecified number of unnamed riders, “unconfirmed reports” (don’t you love that phrase?) put the bite on Spanish Moto3 sophomore Sergio Garcia and Yamaha’s Rossireplacing Fabio Quartararo.
Nobody much cares about the first one: Moto3 kids are expected to be naughty, and he’s only 17.
It’s a bit different for Fabio, though. The flaming crepe suzette of MotoGP is widely regarded as the main challenge to Marquez this year (next year, sometime, never?).
It seems his offence was not to go testing, at Paul Ricard, on an R1 – that’s allowed, but to do it on an R1 with Superbike electronics. A minor transgression, you might think; but with several implications.
Some concern the ‘realthing’ performance; others the punishment, which given the FIM Stewards’ recent to-the-book record is potentially severe. Still more concern other riders, who may likewise fall foul of the possibly rather vague and definitely ad-hoc corona regulations.
For example, at the end of May the permitted allocation of private test days for the smaller classes was cancelled. Teams that hadn’t used their full seven days lost out.
Other riders? Italian website GPOne reported that Taka Nakagami had been testing on Alvaro Bautista’s Honda CBR1000R-RR Superbike, which would seem to be nudging dangerously towards the same transgression as Quartararo.
Some four months without serious race-speed saddle time is a major setback, and it’s cruel and arguably even dangerous to deny the opportunity to get reflexes back up to speed before hostilities resume.
In fairness Fast Fabio should escape with no worse than a rap on the knuckles for his misdemeanour. Which is a great deal better than the punishment suffered by Dovizioso, when he entered a motocross race to get his racing Mojo working.
Unlucky Dovi crashed and broke his collarbone, and will start the belated 2020 season recovering from that injury.
‘His offence? Ridingan R1 at Paul Ricard’