Morbidelli seeking ‘redemption’: ‘They say you learn when you lose…’

After suffering his worst MotoGP season, dropping below even his rookie 2015 championship ranking on a Marc VDS Honda, Franco Morbidelli starts his second full campaign for the factory Yamaha team seeking ‘redemption’.

Peter McLaren

17 Jan 2023

The SRT title runner-up was promoted to the official Monster outfit, alongside soon-to-be world champion Fabio Quartararo, following the mid-2021 exit of Maverick Vinales.

While Morbidelli spent the remainder of that season recovering from knee surgery, it was technical rather than physical difficulties that left him just 19th in last year’s standings.

In a season that saw Quartararo win three races and fight for the title until the final round, eventually losing out to Ducati’s Francesco Bagnaia, Morbidelli only finished inside the top ten in 2 of 20 races.

“They say that when you lose, is when you learn the most… I learned quite a lot last year then!” he smiled at Tuesday’s Monster Yamaha team presentation in Jakarta. “So yeah, I'm looking forward to bouncing back.

“I discovered a new spec bike [at the factory team] and I had to readapt to a new package and it took some time. But especially towards the end of last season, I felt something [positive]. So I really want to bring it over to this year.”

He added: “As I said, I'm looking for some redemption this year. I feel that I'm working well, I'm in tune with my people at home and with my crew. I have one more year experience and everything feels like it’s going upwards.

“I'm missing the podium as well because it’s been over one complete year without getting any champagne sprayed on me. I miss it quite a lot. So let's see.

“Everything has gone back to zero and anything is possible this season, so that is an exciting prospect.”

Although he slipped back to eleventh due to a double long-lap penalty, Morbidelli took a step closer to Quartararo’s pace during the penultimate Sepang round. He then finished the year with his best dry result of the season, in tenth, at Valencia.

Morbidelli and his Yamaha team now hope that a more competitive M1 can also help rediscover his searing 2020 form.

What were Morbidelli's issues in 2022?

“To make the Yamaha perform well, you need to be aggressive on the brakes and you need to enter the corner fast,” Yamaha managing director Lin Jarvis told Crash.net recently.

“But you need a lot of confidence to do that, and that's something which I would say is Fabio’s forte. He has a lot of confidence with the front end of the bike and Frankie has just been struggling to find that.

“Frankie's been looking for different solutions and trying to change settings and setups and it just hasn't worked out.

"We know Frankie can be fast. He's a race winner in MotoGP, and he’s a vice-champion in MotoGP, so the capacity is there. But he has to rediscover himself and we have to give him better tools to help him in that process.

“Our target is obviously to give him a better bike for the future.

“We have to make the bike more user-friendly. But part of that will be creating a little bit more margin in the performance I think. Because now in order to keep top speed, you need to be able to exit the corners super-fast as well because we don't have the pure horsepower, which means you need to carry more speed in the corner.

“Fabio is very clever to extract the maximum potential out of the package. So let's see. Frankie can do it, but he must rediscover his confidence.”