2023 will be a crucial year for Franco Morbidelli, since he’ll have to prove that he has found his bearings again after an underwhelming season. Once a shining star with the Petronas team in 2020, the rider from Rome ended his season behind Joan Mir. After a knee injury and his transfer to the official team, at the end of 2021, Frankie’s shine began to fade, forcing him to appear as just an extra in 2022. In fact, he scored only 42 points, against Fabio Quartararo’s 248. Was this caused by the after-effects of the ligament surgery he underwent, or are there other reasons?
“The knee injury was a turning point only to the extent that Franco was out for five races, then we promoted him to the factory team after the Vinales incident,” Lin Jarvis commented in an interview with Crash.net. “We were faced with an extraordinary situation, so we put Frankie on the official team in Misano in 2021, and he competed with us in the last five races of the season, but he wasn’t in good shape. He agreed, but it was probably too soon. He wasn’t able to race at that stage, and that explains last year’s performance, but he was missing something and never managed to find the right confidence with the bike.”
According to the Managing Director, it’s Yamaha that’s sending Morbido over the edge, like the difficulty he had adapting to the new M1. A lack of feeling, compared to what he had with the 2019 bike, which prevented him from getting the maximum potential out of the Yamaha, the same the bike was able to express when ridden by Quartararo.
“To make the Yamaha work well, you have to be aggressive in braking and fast in entering corners. But, to do that, you need a lot of confidence, and that’s Fabio's strong point. He has a lot of confidence with the front of the bike, while Franco struggled to find that. He looked for different solutions and tried to change the settings and set-up, but it didn’t work,” Jarvis explained. “Frankie won a race in the MotoGP and was vice-champion, so we know he has the skills and can be fast, but he has to rediscover himself. We need to help him in this process and give him a better and easier bike. To do that, I think we need a bit more margin in performance, because now, not having pure power, we have to compensate by bringing more speed when entering corners, in order to maintain top speed.”
Fabio's mastery of the M1 may have helped make an already complicated moment even more difficult, further undermining Morbidelli’s confidence. Something Jarvis had already seen in the Yamaha garage, as he did with Honda, where Marc Marquez’s superiority has overshadowed his teammates.
“Fabio is very capable of getting the maximum potential from the package, and having such a fast teammate isn’t easy. I’ve seen it with other riders. When a teammate is particularly fast, it’s difficult to be on the other side of the garage, look at the data, and ask yourself ‘how is that possible?’ ”, the British manager stated. “I think there are similarities with the Honda. I think Marc has been an extraordinary rider in recent years, capable of doing things other riders haven’t been able to repeat.”