Fabio Quartararo had seen enough.
It’s a September 2023 night out at dinner in Barcelona, site of the upcoming Catalan Motorcycle Grand Prix, and Daniel Ricciardo just wasn’t himself. The Australian F1 ace had undergone surgery on a broken left metacarpal in the Spanish city days earlier after shattering his hand in a crash at the Dutch Grand Prix, and the two long-time friends got together, as they often do, to break bread and one another’s balls, not necessarily in that order.
Ricciardo was feeling sorry for himself, so Quartararo decided to snap him out of it. He grabbed Ricciardo’s left hand and twisted it around, moved it up and down and left Ricciardo with a wide-eyed facial expression that was part-terror, part-pain, his protestations drowned out by the escalating laughter. It had the desired effect.
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“He had the surgery and broke only the metacarpal, but he was acting like he was totally blocked from the shoulder and I asked him ‘how much have you broken?’,” Quartararo laughs.
“I thinking ‘maybe don’t move your hand, but at least move your arm!’ I was telling him ‘move this hand so you can be ready to come back as soon as possible’ so I had to grab it and make him use it. He was laughing so bad!”
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Ricciardo momentarily flinches as he recalls the moment.
“He gave me so much s**t that night about not being able to move my hand at dinner, he was saying I should be able to race the next weekend,” Ricciardo says.
“I don’t think he knew fully how bad the break was, but he made me feel like I was so pathetic … He reckons the way I was holding my hand like my entire arm was broken … he was definitely taking the piss out of me.
“Afterwards he told me he’d once pulled a screw out of his skin from some operation he’d had, just ripped it out of the tip of his finger … seriously, the bikes guys are just different. His mentality, his battle scars … they’re a different breed to us.”
Quartararo agrees, with a caveat.
“It’s true that with motorcycles, we are more used to breaking fingers or some other things,” he shrugs.
“But for one month he was such a baby, he was scared of using it. Not all Formula One drivers are soft, but I think he is!”
That Quartararo, the 2021 MotoGP world champion who also counts F1 drivers Charles Leclerc, Pierre Gasly and Lewis Hamilton as friends, and Ricciardo – a Valentino Rossi super-fan in his teens – would get along isn’t a surprise. But it’s an unlikely friendship given their 10-year age gap, their jam-packed schedules and considering the phase each is at in their own high-profile motorsport careers.
“I have good relationships with many [F1 drivers] but with Daniel, he’s the one I spend more time with,” Quartararo says.
BECOMING MATES AFTER MISERY
The Spanish Motorcycle Grand Prix of 2019 was when, as Quartararo describes it, life completely changed.
Back then, Quartararo had just turned 20 and looked to be belatedly capitalising on his potential. A junior prodigy on the Spanish domestic scene after moving from France when he was eight years old, Quartararo – as a 14-year-old – was being spoken of as the next Marc Marquez. But his first four world championship seasons across the Moto3 and Moto2 categories produced just a single victory, and he was hired more on promise than production by new MotoGP team Petronas Yamaha, and expected to play himself in slowly.
Quartararo had bigger ideas on the biggest bikes, though, qualifying fifth on his maiden MotoGP outing in Qatar, and taking top-10 results in the races in Argentina and Austin that followed.
Then came round four at Jerez, where he took a stunning pole position, the youngest rider ever to achieve the feat at 20 years, 14 days. He was sitting in second place in the race the next day when his Yamaha’s gearbox broke, Quartararo left devastated squatted trackside next to his broken bike as his podium dreams went up in smoke.
Ricciardo, on a break in the F1 schedule, was at Jerez that day, and remembers what happened next.
“He’s having the best race of his life at that point and the bike breaks down, it was brutal,” Ricciardo says.
“He’d been in MotoGP for only a few races so it was like ‘oh, this kid has got it’.
“The next week we’re racing in F1 in Barcelona and he’s there, and I see him and say ‘bad luck’ or something like that. Just a passing comment. I later find out we have a mutual friend who works for Alpinestars, so we meet up properly later on and we got along pretty much straight away. Young, determined, hungry … you could see he had everything you need.”
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Quartararo remembers life being very different after his gutting disappointment.
“I came from kind of nowhere to MotoGP, and then after this race where I make the pole position and fight for the victory I received these kinds of messages from people I didn’t even really know. I remember Daniel messaging me saying ‘stay strong, you were so fast’. I was ‘whoa, this is a big moment of my career’.”
As it turns out, the pair had actually met three years earlier. At Monaco in 2016, when Quartararo was a teenage Moto3 rider in his sophomore season, the Frenchman waited for Ricciardo to leave the F1 paddock on a weekend where he took pole position for Red Bull Racing, a catastrophic pit-stop blunder by the team denying him a maiden win in The Principality.
Asked when he first crossed paths with Quartararo, Ricciardo scrolls through his phone before finding what he was looking for. “417 weeks ago,” he laughs, finding the pic of a gap-toothed Quartararo grinning in a selfie as Ricciardo briefly paused, then moved on.
“He just came up to me at Monaco and asked me for a photo, and I didn’t even know who he was the time,” Ricciardo says.
“He told me he was in Moto3 and that was all I knew. He would have been 17 years old, I’m guessing. It was a few years later that I remembered it.”
A RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP
From 2019, and with Quartararo’s family in Nice and Ricciardo calling nearby Monaco home, the pair began to work out together for their respective sports when their schedules aligned.
“He’s an animal with his training and loves his fitness, so we had that in common and could relate on quite a few things,” Ricciardo says.
“It was easy to become good friends but it’s difficult to match our calendars because when he is racing, I am home and he is the opposite,” Quartararo adds.
“As soon as we can spend time together we organised something. I thought we were quite similar people and it was easy to get along with him, and he’s always someone who can make you laugh.”
Quartararo has also leaned on Ricciardo’s wisdom over the past two years, too – a time where his career arc abruptly changed course.
A MotoGP race-winner in 2020, he surged to the world championship the following season and looked set to double up by the mid-point of 2022, leading likely title rival Francesco Bagnaia by 91 points halfway through the 20-race season after winning in Germany.
But Ducati surged – and Bagnaia became more consistent – the longer 2022 went. As Yamaha lost its way, Quartararo’s title defence collapsed, Bagnaia taking Ducati’s first championship in 15 years in the Valencia season finale.
Quartararo hasn’t won a race since that June 2022 afternoon at the Sachsenring, while Bagnaia won last year’s title and Ducati riders occupy four of the top five positions in the standings this year.
Out of contract at the end of 2024 but with no other manufacturer with an available seat offering a faster track to the top, Quartararo doubled down and re-signed with Yamaha for two more years in April, looking to take on more of a leadership role than simply riding the bike as fast as it can go.
“Being in the position of leader is something that I want,” he says.
“I want to be a big part of Yamaha coming back. We have been to the top together, and we have been at the bottom. I think our way up has already started. It will take time but the project that Yamaha is building is huge. I really believe in the project and I’m looking forward to coming back, and we will come back – it will take many months but I’m ready for it. We are coming back step by step.
“I’m super happy because we are working really hard, and when I see people working that hard it gives me more motivation to really do the same.
“Between now and the end of the season, we will make some really good steps forward. By 2025 the bike will hopefully be there to be a really competitive bike, that for me is the number one goal. How [Yamaha is] working right now … I’ve never seen them that motivated and that much into it.”
Ricciardo has provided a wise head and a welcome distraction when they meet up.
“When we get together we speak a little bit about racing, but that’s only a small part of it,” Quartararo says.
“We each know that both of us are struggling a little bit and we understand what the other is going through.”
Ricciardo’s age, career longevity and life experience relative to Quartararo offers perspective. Aware that 14 years in F1 means he’s clearly closer to the end than the beginning, he’s happy to elaborate on his own experiences if they’re relevant, and if they help.
“He was ‘the guy’ and he’s now going through that period where the team has fallen back and he’s trying to change that and show he’s still one of the best guys, stay relevant if you like,” Ricciardo says of Quartararo.
“He’s put a lot of faith in [Yamaha] and shown the loyalty, and that’ll definitely pay him back down the road.
“We can always pick each other’s brains and ask things, and because I’m a lot older than him I’m happy to share advice and experience that you have just from being older.
“He’ll come to me with situations or things he’s experiencing and I know what they’re like and can tell him how I handled it, what I did right and wrong. He’s definitely someone who’s receptive to that and isn’t shy to ask.
“Yeah, it’s different sports but we can definitely relate. He likes a few too many shirtless photos for me, but otherwise he’s a good kid …”.