Yamaha’s once leading light fighting for his MotoGP future

I wouldn’t say there are any rude riders in the MotoGP paddock. But there are definitely those who treat media duties as part of the job description. Franco Morbidelli is always the opposite. As he rocks up to the Yamaha hospitality at Le Mans, Morbidelli is keen to chat about life and his time off between the Spanish and French GPs.

He mentions how time off is necessary for all in the paddock and, unprompted, derides the current schedule and the fact nobody is getting paid enough to be doing so many races in such a tightly packed calendar.

Morbidelli is all too aware of the hard work and sacrifice that goes into racing, especially when it comes to those using their time to help your career. Taken under Valentino Rossi’s wing in 2014 through the VR46 Academy, it has helped mould Morbidelli into the Moto2 world champion he became in 2017, and then the MotoGP title runner-up in 2020.

Now, more than ever, Rossi’s help is proving vital.

“The best thing that the Academy, Vale and all the guys can do is give me battle,” Morbidelli tells Motorsport.com. “You really grow up by the adversities that you find. The more adversities that you find, you are able to overcome them and you are a better person, and a better rider in this case.

“So, what Vale does in a great way is giving me battle in every training. Even though he has stopped, he is always so competitive with go-karts and at the ranch and with the R1 bikes, with everything he jumps on the competition is as high as in racing. So, that’s the thing that really kept me alive last year because in the difficult moments I was having here, when I was training back at the ranch and everything we did I was seeing my potential was there.”

Adversity is something Morbidelli knows about all too well, having had to deal with the sudden death of his father when he was a teenager. This threatened to derail his motorcycle racing ambitions as times became financially tough. But the Italian Federation stepped in to help, before Morbidelli ended up on Rossi’s radar.

Morbidelli came just 13 points shy of the MotoGP title in 2020. It's gone wrong ever since

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

This life experience and the growth he has been able to make through Rossi’s mentorship has kept his chin up when times got tough in 2019 at Petronas SRT when rookie team-mate Fabio Quartararo – as he put it in an interview we did in Autumn of 2020 – kicked his butt. Then at the start of 2020, Yamaha made an eleventh-hour decision to strip Morbidelli of the factory-speed bike he was meant to run at SRT for the 2019-spec M1.

That he went on to win three races in the COVID-affected 2020 season and miss the championship by just 13 points, while Fabio Quartararo – who was already factory Yamaha-bound for 2021 – faded to eighth in the standings, showed just how mentally resilient Morbidelli is.

Now he is having to call on this again as he faces arguably the toughest moment of his MotoGP career. Since stepping into the factory Yamaha team in place of the ousted Maverick Vinales in September of 2021, Morbidelli has been a shadow of his former self. Yamaha’s lack of improvements on its M1 have hindered all, with even Quartararo struggling in 2023 on the bike. Thus, the woes for Morbidelli have been magnified.

Analysing why it’s gone so wrong over the last two years, Morbidelli said: “I think I had many changes between 2021 and 2022. The second half of the championship that I did in 2021 was a good adaptation, or a good taste, of what I would have faced in 2022. But then, in 2022 the crew chief changed again. So, we had one other change and I was getting back to my top shape [after injury in 2021]. So, the first half of the season in 2022 took time to really get to the best shape.”

“If I look at my team-mate, I see that the performances – especially in the important sessions, which are races and qualifying – are not that different” Franco Morbidelli

Morbidelli suffered a knee injury midway through 2021 which forced him onto the sidelines for five rounds. When he came back at the San Marino GP as a factory Yamaha rider, he was still well below 100% fitness while also trying to learn a bike that was a step of two years – and a big one, at that. To boot, he started 2021 with Ramon Forcada at SRT. He then worked with Silvano Galbusera at the factory squad before being partnered with Patrick Primmer for 2022 onwards.

“My feeling is that our opponents have improved more than what we did,” he says of Yamaha’s lack of progress. “They were able to make greater steps. That’s just how it looks, how it feels when you’re on track. That’s the situation we need to flip over. I don’t think we got worse. I mean, I’m sure we changed a lot and some big things got worse between the 19 bike and the 20 bike, which was a completely new philosophy and a completely new structure of bike. So, it was a revolution the one Yamaha did between 19 and 20 because top speed was a great issue and we need to follow that. It was a great evolution and some things got lost along the way.”

In his first full season at the factory Yamaha team, Morbidelli beat his world champion team-mate Fabio Quartararo just once in a grand prix (when both riders finished), with a best result of seventh in the wet Indonesian GP. In the standings, Morbidelli ended up with just 49 points while Quartararo had 248. Over the course of the season, Morbidelli’s deficit in qualifying to Quartararo was 0.798s.