It’s been a tough start to the 2021 MotoGP season for Petronas SRT Yamaha rider Franco Morbidelli.
Bad luck has seemed to stalk last year’s championship runner-up at every opportunity, leaving him with only 33 points after the opening six races of the year.
From mechanical problems in Qatar sabotaging his race before he had even started the warm-up lap to getting caught up in incidents with Pol Espargaro at Le Mans and Marc Marquez at Mugello, it all means that Morbidelli’s only finished in the points in half of this year’s races.
That’s effectively ending any hopes of a title charge by leaving him a distant 72 points from former team-mate and fellow Yamaha rider Fabio Quartararo.
Yet when he has finished, Morbidelli has finished well, showing what we all know he’s capable of with fourth and then third at Portimao and Jerez indicative of his real pace on his now-two-year-old and decidedly second-hand satellite Yamaha M1.
And the reality right now is that the string of bad luck that marked his start to the year might actually go a long way towards solving a headache for Yamaha Racing boss Lin Jarvis – by essentially preventing any need for team orders within the camp as Quartararo gets on with the business of winning the title.
New factory rider Quartararo has enjoyed an impressive start to 2021, winning three of the opening six races and going into this weekend’s Catalan Grand Prix 24 points clear of fellow Frenchman Johann Zarco in the title standings.
That might mean that there’ll be no need within the Yamaha camp to have a difficult conversation about team orders, with the sizable points gap enjoyed by Quartararo meaning that Morbidelli can instead be given a free rein to do his own thing in the coming rounds.
That’s a prescient thing ahead of this weekend’s race at Barcelona, because after the opening day of practice it looks entirely possible that Morbidelli could find himself inserted directly into the fight for the win for the first time this season.
Second fastest at the end of the day and a mere 0.021s behind the Ducati of Zarco, Morbidelli was the only rider of the day able to dip into the 1m39 laps without resorting to sticking in soft tyres, completing a longer run in FP2 on a medium-hard tyre combination that could well give his rivals some pause for thought.
However, with typical Morbidelli chill, the Italian-Brazilian racer didn’t get too carried away at the end of the day, simply admitting that while it was his best opening day of any race of the year, it doesn’t mean much until things start getting really serious in qualifying.
“It’s always important to start well, and I think we did it,” he said after practice.
“We had a chance to try different tyres front and rear, and I found some good potential with the whole specification.
“It’ll be important to choose the best, but I’d say we’re already on a good level and already able to work for the race.
“It’s definitely the best Friday that I’ve had this year. It doesn’t mean anything, but yes, it was good.”
Keeping Morbidelli happy right now isn’t a terrible strategy for Yamaha, either.
He’s made it increasingly clear in the past weeks that he’s not happy with his current situation as the firm’s only bottom tier rider – with none of the factory support enjoyed by 2020 team-mate Quartararo (who he beat by six places in the championship standings last year) or by his currently underperforming Petronas team-mate Valentino Rossi, who inherited Quartararo’s spot.
Though Morbidelli already has a deal of some sort in place to keep him with the Petronas team for next year (even if the exact details aren’t clear to us), it doesn’t mean there isn’t interest from other parties.
Aprilia in particular is believed to be testing the waters to see what it would take to lure Morbidelli across to become Aleix Espargaro’s partner.
However, with it looking increasingly likely that Rossi will step down at the end of the 2021 season, a little love from Yamaha to Morbidelli right now, combined with the promise of taking on Rossi’s factory support for 2022, could be exactly the right tonic needed to secure his future with the manufacturer.
