For most of the three and a half years since his last MotoGP victory in the penultimate round of the 2020 season, Franco Morbidelli has been unrecognisable from the rider whose three wins that year with Petronas Yamaha took him to second place in the championship battle behind Joan Mir.
But after a long and significant performance drop, there’s been an uptick in recent races that looks like it’s come in time to save the 29-year-old Italian-Brazilian’s MotoGP career.
It’s hard to trace back exactly to where everything went so wrong for Morbidelli, with multiple factors combining.
Part of it, of course, came from the declining form of the Yamaha M1 over the past few seasons. The bike hasn’t been the machine it once was for quite some time. Extenuating factors initially explained away the gap between Morbidelli and team-mate Fabio Quartararo, and that gap did narrow over their time together in factory colours.
But it was starkest in 2022 when Quartararo fought Pecco Bagnaia for the title right until the closing stages of the year and ended the season in second, while Morbidelli was a disastrous 19th in the championship.
However, the story was somewhat different in 2023 with only three places separating them in 10th and 13th - a sign that it was absolutely the bike and not the riders that was causing problems, something that’s been reinforced in 2024 with the arrival of Alex Rins to replace Morbidelli at Yamaha only to find himself in a similar performance place relative to Quartararo.
But part of Morbidelli’s form issues, of course, can be traced back to the knee injury he sustained part-way through the 2021 season.
Badly damaging himself while flat track training at mentor Valentino Rossi’s ranch not long before switching from satellite to factory colours to replace the departing Maverick Vinales mid-season, the after-effects of the injury and surgery sabotaged the best part of two full seasons for Morbidelli.
It also meant that there was a permanent question mark hanging over him as he tried his best on the Yamaha: was the problem really all with the bike, or was there a lingering side effect to his riding performance from his rebuilt (but weaker) knee?
That was a question we all hoped his rather fortunate switch to Pramac for 2024 would answer.
There was a degree to which Morbidelli lucked into a ride on one of only four top-spec Ducatis on the grid. Had Johann Zarco not accepted Honda’s big overtures or Marco Bezzecchi accepted Ducati’s efforts to transfer him from VR46 to Pramac or Marc Marquez been open to a Pramac seat instead of Gresini then Morbidelli probably wouldn’t have been able to pull off the feat of getting the best bike on the grid after finishing 17th, 19th and 13th in the preceding three years’ championships.
But it wasn’t just fortuitous timing. It was also down to a certain faction of the paddock recognising that talent simply doesn’t go away regardless of how bad the bike is or what circumstances a rider is compromised by.
Of course, that career reboot plan also went immediately awry for the luckless Morbidelli. Crashing during training at Portimao on a street bike and leaving himself with a concussion so bad that he was forced to forgo riding for the entire 2024 pre-season meant an inevitably slow and uncertain start to life at Pramac Ducati when he could finally get to know his new bike.
However, despite the considerable disadvantage of missing out on so much track time at both Sepang and Lusail right as he needed it the most to adapt from the inline four Yamaha to the V4 Ducati, things are finally starting to come right for him at the halfway point in the season.
While admittedly still very much the fourth of the four GP24 machines on the grid and still a distant 11th in the championship standings, he ended the first part of the season with a run of strong form, coming home inside the top 10 in both the races and the sprints at Mugello, Assen and the Sachsenring.
It’s obviously not quite the performances that he was hired to deliver and it’s against the backdrop of team-mate Jorge Martin fighting for the championship. But it’s still his best run of form since that title-contending 2020 season, and is a hint that the Pramac gamble to bet on his recovery was the right one.
There’s still something missing from his form, mind you - with his pre-race prediction of being unable to maintain his race pace very evident at the Sachsenring, where he quickly dropped from the battle for the lead to outside the podium fight.
Whether that’s an ongoing physical limitation (something that at this point seems unlikely) or still just an example of him not being fully up to speed with how to manage tyres on the Ducati remains to be seen. A bike experience/tyre management issue seems significantly more likely given what we’ve seen from others who’ve made the switch to the Ducati in the past.
It’s another element of his bike transition which will just take more time, and most likely a consequence of his lack of pre-season testing.
And it now seems he’s going to be given the time to rectify the problem and really figure out the Ducati.
That’s because the new form he’s found has come at the right time to probably help secure his MotoGP future as he looks at a move to Rossi’s VR46 Ducati team for next year.
Frankly, given Rossi’s love for him, he probably would’ve been given one last MotoGP chance there anyway even if he’d struggled all season at Pramac. Better form certainly eases his route to another Ducati satellite seat, though.
He’s likely to remain on his current 2024-spec bike next year rather than receiving the newest-spec Ducati (as those are reassigned across VR46 and Gresini following Pramac’s switch to Yamaha).
But, with Morbidelli also just now back on the path that he should be on, year-old bikes are a fair deal given his form this year.
Still the likely VR46 chance is an equally fair reflection that there’s definitely still more to come from Morbidelli in MotoGP, even if the question of where his true talent level sits is another to hopefully be answered in 2025 and beyond.
The reality is likely to be somewhere in between the highs and lows we’ve so far seen from him.
Morbidelli’s incredible 2020 season was in part a result of the odd form fluctuations throughout the paddock in the turbulent COVID-struck season and the collapse of team-mate Quartararo’s title charge at the halfway point, plus Morbidelli’s well-sorted old-spec Yamaha being one of the better packages in the field as several factories lost their way. But the confident and often dominant race winner that we saw at times that year was evidence of Morbidelli’s talent.
He might have lost out on what’s likely to have been his only real shot at a MotoGP title, but there’s absolutely a place for him within Ducati’s ranks as a regular podium contender and occasional race winner, a status that all signs indicate should be more than possible if the past few years’ struggles are behind him now.
