MotoGP – Viñales ends Yamaha winless streak with Australia win

Bruno Gomes

October 28, 2018

Last time Yamaha celebrated a victory in MotoGP was at the Dutch GP back in 2017, and the Japanese team has been struggling since then to get the best performance out of their M1 prototype, with both Valentino Rossi and Maverick Viñales making public comments about Yamaha’s lack of performance.

But all that seems to have come to an end when Viñales decided to run away to grab a fantastic win at the Australian GP today at Phillip Island, followed by Andrea Iannone (Ecstar Suzuki) and Andrea Dovizioso (Ducati Factory).

Maverick Viñales took the lead still on the early stages of the race, at the time followed by his teammate Valentino Rossi. But the Spanish rider soon started to put the hammer down and secured a safe margin of just over 4 seconds to his pursuers, and that was enough to let hime cruise to the line with 1,5 seconds advantage over Iannone.

Meanwhile, at lap six, MotoGP newly crowned champion Marc Marquez, had to retire after a horrific incident with Johann Zarco (Tech3 Yamaha). The pair had a brief contact when Marquez tried to defend the line from a charging Zarco, with the Frenchman crashing at 300 km/h and Marquez having to limp back to the pit lane with his Repsol Honda badly damaged.

As for Hafizh Syahrin (Tech3 Yamaha), the Malaysian rider had a great start from tenth on the grid. He was riding well inside the Top 10, in eight, trying to close down the gap to Suzuki’s Alex Rins. But the impressive race from the Malaysian start came to an abrupt end when, on lap 19, he crashed out of the race and scored zero points.

Syahrin will have an opportunity to fight back from this bad result at the next race which will be in front of his home fans, in Sepang, when the MotoGP returns to Malaysia for the Malaysian GP.