Maverick Vinales, speaking for the first time since his announcement of leaving the Yamaha Factory Racing team at the end of the MotoGP season in 2021, said the decision was “spiritually liberating” for him.
Before the summer break, Vinales confirmed that he had reached an agreement with Yamaha that would leave him a year earlier than foreseen in his contract.
It comes in the middle of a season of inconsistent form that started with a win at the opener in Qatar, collapsed with his last place in the German MotoGP, but caught up with a pole position at the last Dutch TT and finished second.
On the subject of matching items
However, it’s an odd roller coaster of results that has followed him throughout his time at Yamaha.
In fact, Vinales has openly expressed his frustration with Yamaha’s development, saying that the engineers simply “don’t know” how to help him find a comfortable and consistent setup on the M1.
The pressure mounts after his new team-mate Fabio Quartararo takes a comfortable championship lead while Vinales says the exit is a tough decision given the potential of the machine under him, but he has no regrets.
“I know it won’t be easy, but mentally it was liberating to go,” he told Moto.it. “That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m not grateful to Yamaha for the opportunities it gave me and that I bet on myself. I think I was able to make my contribution to the development of the bike, although I would have liked to have done more … “
“I’ll always do my best, I want to win at any cost, then we’ll see. What if Yamaha doesn’t follow me that often? I don’t know, I can’t answer, you should pass the question on to her. I just give everything when I lower the visor. “
While his form recovered in Assen, Vinales says that even that feat has negative connotations because he was afraid to tweak the setup after FP1, something he shouldn’t come to terms with.
“The problem is this: the fact that I know where I can go, but at the same time I also know that I won’t get there with this bike and this team. I have to find a way, the right way to get there. And it’s not even a question of the environment: I just have to trust the team and accept it, it’s very important to me. We made a lot of mistakes this year and that inevitably affects you, the situation has become very difficult. “
“For one thing, the bike worked very well in Assen in FP1 and we never touched it again for fear that it would get worse. In today’s MotoGP you can’t ride like that, you always have to look for something to get around to The problem here is, if there is no trust, it is impossible to work like this, even if things went well at Assen, the bike worked and I could give and give everything. “
Will Maverick Vinales team up with Aprilia or Suzuki for MotoGP 2022?
When news of Vinales’ impending departure became known in Assen over the weekend, he was immediately associated with a move to the last remaining factory seat on the Aprilia grid.
However, Vinales insists that he leave the negotiations to his management team, but says he believes the Aprilia RS-GP has “great potential”.
“Not at the moment, we’ll see later. But I want to take it slow, weigh the decisions carefully. Of course, my management will take care of it, because at the moment I just want to switch off my head and enjoy the summer: I’m really tired for this and the past.
“A driver has to be satisfied every season, otherwise something is wrong. I know few would have done what I did, but there was no point moving on to a situation that obviously wasn’t working.
“The bike has great potential, it’s not a question of the team or the bike, it’s because I don’t adapt to either of them and I have to find a solution in order to be able to give my best again. The only goal of this decision is to reach my full potential again, nothing else. “
He also downplayed talk of returning to Suzuki after the possibility arose that he might try to reconnect with the team he made his MotoGP debut with in 2015, but downplayed.
“Return to Suzuki? I didn’t really think about it. Planning for 2022 doesn’t really make sense at the moment: Now I just want to rest, enjoy the summer, train and come back as strong as possible. “
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