MotoGP: Yamaha explains Rossi and Lorenzo engine failures

Yamaha have released a statement explaining the cause of the engine failures that saw Valentino Rossi drop out of the fight for the lead two weekends ago in Mugello and teammate Jorge Lorenzo narrowly avoid the same fate after his let go in warm-up.

Speaking in a statement released by the team M1 project leader Kouji Tsuya explained the cause as a consequence of the nature of Mugello and the new control electronics.

“Valentino‘s failure was caused by an accidental over rev in acceleration that occurred jumping over a crest with full throttle at the end of the straight. There were no special mapping settings used for Mugello; we used the same precise mapping as always.

“We have a strong history of engine reliability and this fact does not change after this incident; the engines had no problems, but we were not aware of the different behaviour of the standard ECU software, that made the rev limiter work in a different way compared to last year.

“We set the rev limiter using last year‘s data in exactly the same way as we did last year, but we could not be aware that the software worked in a different way.”