The luck of the Italian is that his contract with the tuning fork brand expires at the end of 2023. Otherwise, nobody would understand that he could keep his current position for another season if we take into account the results he has obtained in the last year and a half.
Since he returned from the operation on his left knee to which he underwent at the end of June 2021, Franco Morbidelli’s best performance took place in that chaotic Indonesian Grand Prix, the second stop on the 2022 calendar, in which he finished the seventh.
At the gates of the World Cup being resumed next weekend at Silverstone, the Roman occupies 19th place in the general table, with only 25 points in his locker. His poor performance becomes even more evident when compared to that of Fabio Quartararo, his neighbor in the workshop, the current world champion and the undisputed reference on the current grid.
If the Devil has found a way to squeeze the full potential of the Yamaha to the last thousandth, his partner is unable to take advantage of the strengths of a prototype that not long ago (2020) led him to conquer the runner-up position.
To find Morbidelli ‘s last podium one must go back to last year’s Jerez Grand Prix (he finished third), when he was still racing in the Sepang Racing Team (SRT) suit, and before the surgery that saw him miss five careers and that meant a turning point for the worse in his career.
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When the interested party is asked, he explains his lack of punch based on the margin he still has to fully adapt to his bike.
“The most important thing is that I need to find speed with this bike, and to achieve it with this bike you have to be aggressive. And that’s not my style. I will try to use this summer to be more aggressive,” he acknowledged after the last test, in Assen, in which he went to the ground.
“Yamaha tries to bring the bike to my field, and I try to get a little closer to what it needs from me,” adds Morbidelli, who since the start of this exercise has had Patrick Primmer, former suspension chief for Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo, as technical manager on your side of the garage.
After staying away from the paddock during the pandemic, the Australian was recruited by the Japanese manufacturer to fill a position new to him, a move that came as some surprise to several of his professional colleagues.
As much as it is not expressed publicly, in Yamaha there are those who believe that the main hurdle that #21 must overcome to get out of the hole in which it is stuck lies within.
“Franco must click in his head. The bike has not changed so much as to justify that it is costing him so much. The essence of the M1 is the same as in recent years. And with it he achieved good results,” he tells Motorsport.com a Yamaha source who knows the racer well.
