Paris (AFP)
Fabio Quartararo, sparkling for his first season in MotoGP last year, is now only waiting for a victory this year to rise to the level of the greatest.
Fifth in the championship ranking thanks to seven podiums including five second places, the "rookie of the year" last year has the future ahead of it, at just 21 years old.
Especially since he will join the Yamaha factory stable next year, inheriting the handlebars from the idol of his childhood, the Italian veteran Valentino Rossi.
This year, he will still wear the colors of the SRT team, the brand's satellite in tune. With however a state-of-the-art machine "loaned" by the factory and which could allow him to earn the few hundredths that he missed last year to style Marc Marquez at the post.
"I'm going to get back on my + beast + in a few days, I can't take it anymore!" Exclaimed the Frenchman on Twitter before the very delayed start of the championship on July 19 on the Jerez circuit (Spain).
In Andorra, where he resides, Fabio spent months of inactivity perfecting his physical condition through exercises ranging from flights of stairs to jump rope at a fast pace, via motocross.
If he wants to one day succeed Marquez (27) and his Honda in the MotoGP list, Quartararo must show that he can beat him, and thus bring France a first MotoGP victory since that of Régis Laconi in 1999.
The six-time Spanish world champion made no mistake in identifying the Frenchman as one of his main rivals this year.
After fighting with him during the entire Thai Grand Prix in early October before passing him on the last lap, Marquez said: "Fabio is getting stronger every time and he will be a serious rival for the championship next year ".
Nicknamed "el Diablo" (the devil), what he displays on the back of his leather suit, it is rather a good little devil that he is. Smiling, joking and modest, the young man goes fast, as evidenced by his six pole positions in 2019.
- "Super fast adaptation" -
"I did not expect such a season," he said during an interview with AFP at the end of the year, noting that he had made "a super fast adaptation to MotoGP".
After exploding as a young teenager in the Spanish motorcycle championship, Quartararo has had difficult seasons in Moto3 and Moto2, the ranks leading to MotoGP. He thus won only one Moto2 victory at the Catalonia GP in 2018, while Marquez was him world champion in this category in 2012, at 19 years old.
But Wilco Zeelenberg, the boss of the Malaysian Yamaha-SRT team, judged that the style and the morphology of the French pilot, who measures 1m77, would lend themselves more to the power and the higher weight of MotoGP. And he set his sights on Fabio for the team's debut in the queen category last year.
The result was largely correct: the novice quickly proved to be just as fast - if not more - than factory pilots Valentino Rossi and Maverick Vinales, whom he will now want to beat this season on equal terms.
Above all, he shows a surprising maturity which should enable him now to find in the last lap of a qualifying session the hundredth which will allow him to be the fastest and to resist without falling during a whole race to Marquez's assaults.
A strength that Johann Zarco, the other French rider in MotoGP, attributes to his sawtooth course in the lower categories.
"From 15 years old, he exploded everything. At 16-17 years old, he did nothing more. At 18-19 years old, he regained his level and, at 20 years old, it explodes again with madness", underlines the one who was twice Moto2 world champion but had a difficult 2019 year.
© 2020 AFP