At 21, the Niçois walks in the footsteps of the seven-time Italian world champion Valentino Rossi, whom he will replace next year in the Yamaha factory team, or even the Spanish Marc Marquez, crowned six times in MotoGP since 2013. On his motorcycle from the Yamaha-SRT satellite team, he is already at the level of the best riders of the official teams and has completely eclipsed the legend Rossi, today twice as old as him but who is still racing .
Sunday, it's Marquez, 27, who bit the dust while trying to catch him on the circuit of Jerez where disputed the 1st round of the world championship 2020. Fifth of the classification of the pilots last year and "rookie of the year ”, the Frenchman took the lead on Sunday and hopes to keep it until the end of a season which may however be cut short by the coronavirus epidemic. His victory is the first for a Frenchman since 1999 and only the 4th for a French driver at the highest level of motorcycle sport. When Régis Laconi had won in September 1999, Fabio was not even six months old and it was very emotional that he listened to the Marseillaise played on Sunday finally again for a tri-color victory.
Mark: "a serious rival ..."
From his arrival in MotoGP, Fabio has attracted the sympathy of the public but also of his rivals. He is certainly nicknamed "El Diablo" (the devil) and displays it on the backside of his leather suit, but it is rather a good little devil that he is. Smiling, joking and modest, the young man quickly gained respect last year with pole positions (six) and podiums (five second places and two third places). After fighting with the Frenchman during the whole Thai Grand Prix at the beginning of October, before passing him on the last lap, Marquez himself was not mistaken: "Fabio is getting stronger every time and he will be a serious rival for the championship next year, "he said. Ecstatic on the finish line in Jerez, Fabio allowed himself to utter rudeness - in English - betraying that he is still only a very young man barely out of adolescence and whose big " friend 'on the circuits is the Australian Jack Miller, famous for his escapades.
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When he arrived in the ultimate category, few believed in such meteoric progression. After exploding when he was still a teenager in the very tough Spanish 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 owner of the Malaysian Yamaha-SRT stable, a satellite of the factory one, judged that the style and the morphology of the French rider (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 proved him right: the novice quickly proved to be just as fast - if not faster - than factory pilots Valentino Rossi and Maverick Vinales.
Above all, he demonstrated a surprising maturity which enabled him to find in the last lap of a qualifying session the hundredth which would allow him to be the fastest and to resist without falling during an entire 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 the age of 15, he exploded everything. At 16-17 years old, he did nothing more. At 18-19, he took the level and, at 20, it explodes again with madness ", underlines the one who was himself twice Moto2 world champion and is racing today in MotoGP. He came to congratulate him at a press conference.
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