P112
CN
III IN THE PADDOCK
BY MICHAEL SCOTT
T
hey are calling it Quarter-
gate. Or perhaps Fabio-
gate. 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 at Jerez.
It's to do with breaking testing
regs while trying to stay sharp in
these extraordinary times, 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 Rossi-replacing Fabio
Quartararo.
Nobody much cares about the
first one: Moto3 kids are expect-
ed to be naughty and always in
trouble, and he's only 17. Plenty
of time to live and learn.
It's a bit different for French
Fabio, though. The crepe
suzette flambe of MotoGP is a
special case. Not for nothing is
he widely regarded as the main
challenge to Marc Marquez this
year (next year, sometime, nev-
er?). So when he is in trouble,
it's significant. What Quartararo
does matters.
According to those uncon-
firmed reports, it seems his
offense was not that he went
private testing at Paul Ricard in
June, on a Yamaha R1—that's
allowed and was not done in
secret. The problem was that
the motorbike was a modified
R1, with Superbike electronics,
in a state of tune allowed by the
French National Championship.
A relatively minor transgression,
you might think, given the small
though obviously important dif-
ferences between a showroom
bike and a Superbike racer, and
the yawning gulf between each
of them and a full-on MotoGP
prototype. But there remain sev-
eral implications.
Some concern the "real-thing"
performance of the electron-
ics, bearing some relation to a
proper MotoGP bike in terms
of scope and adjustability. This
The
Quartergate
SCANDAL
