After not fixing a major issue he experienced in 2024 Yamaha apologised to Alex Rins after the season finale.

Alex Rins revealed that after the MotoGP season finale, Yamaha 'apologised' for not improving their braking struggles.

The Spaniard joined Yamaha for the 2024 season after a difficult year with Honda and struggled with the braking capabilities of the M1 throughout the entire season.

Rins ended his debut year with Yamaha in 18th in the Championship and highlighted his main struggle in 2024 as a lack of rear contact when braking.

Rins went on to describe the Solidarity Grand Prix as “if not the worst, one of the worst races of my life”. After the race he claims that Yamahas management did apologise to him for not fixing the braking issues.

“If I have to choose one, Yamaha needs to improve, for me, the braking and the entry,” Rins stated when asked after the Barcelona Test what area Yamaha to make a step in for 2025.

“They weren’t able to give me a bike this year to be competitive in this area. I was struggling during all the races to have the rear contact and in the end when you don’t have rear contact you don’t stop the bike on braking side.

"It doesn’t matter the rest because you will go wide, or if I was able to stop the bike I overheated the front tyre and I broke the front tyre.

“After the race, I met with Max [Bartolini] and Massimo [Meregalli], I talk deeply with them and they apologised. So, I’m quite calm that they are working on this, but also we need to improve the power of the engine, the electronics also.”

'We are not ready to have this power.'

At the Barcelona Test last Tuesday, Yamaha had a busy day as both Rins and Fabio Quartararo had three Yamaha M1's in their garages.

Rins and Quartararo had a new chassis, a new engine and several setup ideas to test during the day.

Even though Rins was pleased with the new chassis he was underwhelmed by the braking and believed the new engine was too powerful for the current Yamaha.

“In set-up we did small steps, not all as I wanted," Rins explained. "But after the race, talking with the engineers, they say that with the things that we are going to test it will not be a big change, it will not be zero to 100, it will maybe be five, 10% change."

“I tried something that I didn’t try during the GP weekend on set-up that makes my life a little bit easier riding the bike.

“Apart from that, Yamaha brought some new stuff, like a new chassis, new engine, and I felt really good with this new chassis.

“I was able to hold more speed in the middle of the corner. I was expecting the braking side to be better, but it was a very small improvement.

“And regarding the engine, it’s true that it’s more powerful on the straight, exiting from the corners, but at least with my riding style we are not ready to have this power.

“The bike was quite aggressive, spinning a lot, so we need to adjust the electronics for this engine.

“We didn’t work so much on the electronics, because we didn’t have enough time. We focused on the new engine, the new chassis, a little bit of set-up.

“For me, we were missing another engine to test with a different configuration inside. Maybe this was the fifth or sixth new engine I’ve tested.”