Rebooted and ready?
■ After a woeful 2020 campaign, expectation is mounting on Viñales to finally deliver
Watching Maverick Viñales during a wildly inconsistent 2020 made for very uncomfortable viewing.
The Spaniard switched between potential world-beater one week to anonymous no-hoper the next with alarming regularity.
And so despondent and disillusioned was he with his erratic form that he ended 2020 admitting it was the worst season of his career. Yamaha clearly share a portion of the blame for Viñales’ sporadic run of results last year.
Give a YZR-M1 clear track and the ability to utilise its renowned corner speed, and it’s without equal on the current grid.
But it lacks the horsepower to defend or gain position on long straights. And the lack of punch on corner exit makes it incredibly difficult to set up overtakes and defend in braking zones.
The numbers don’t lie. Yamaha scored 28 podiums in 2019 and 2020. And 24 of those came from front row starts. The other three were taken from qualifying in fourth position and a Yamaha has not won a race after starting away from the front row since Valentino Rossi’s most recent win at Assen in 2017. Yamaha’s fingerprints were all over Viñales’ woes in 2020. When he qualified off the front row in eight races, he finished no higher than seventh and three times didn’t even make the top 10.
But the onus is clearly not just on Yamaha to up their game. Yamaha manager Massimo Meregalli alluded to that with a telling comment made during the team launch last month when he said: “I think I believe in him more than he believes in himself.” Viñales has done exceptionally well to gain more control over his emotions and he’s certainly eradicated most of his very public moments of hot-headedness. “What I want now is to be calm, to have the mindset that we can’t have super results all the time and sometimes it’s OK to have a bad day,” said the 26-year-old. Recently married and a father-tobe, serenity off the track may well transfer to the tarmac as well. It’s an old cliché about a happy rider being a fast rider, but Yamaha will be hoping it rings true to ensure their Top Gun comes out fighting.
‘Sometimes it is OK to have a bad day in racing’