Why ‘coming home’ could fire up MotoGP’s forgotten title fighter

Franco Morbidelli is the VR46 Academy rider. From humble beginnings, Morbidelli ground away in the Moto2 class under Valentino Rossi’s mentorship until he became a dominant title winner in 2017 with the Marc VDS squad.

That marked the VR46 Academy’s first world title in grand prix racing. Morbidelli then became its first MotoGP rider, stepping up to the premier class in 2018 with the Marc VDS Honda squad before moving to the Petronas SRT Yamaha outfit in 2019.

A thorough “ass-kicking”, as he described it to this writer a few years ago, from rookie sensation team-mate Fabio Quartararo provided a necessary reality check that allowed Morbidelli to dig deeper in 2020. At the Czech GP, he scored his - and the VR46 Academy’s - first MotoGP podium. He then got a maiden win for both on home soil at the San Marino GP.

Two more wins followed for Morbidelli, who ultimately came away from 2020 just 13 points shy of beating Suzuki’s Joan Mir to the championship. And all of that came after Yamaha elected pre-season to snatch the factory M1 he was meant to ride away from him, leaving him with its ‘A-spec’ machine; in other words, its older model.

The ass-kicking that had been unleashed upon him by Quartararo was returned in 2020. And all of a sudden Morbidelli’s stock in MotoGP was just a little bit higher. Staying on the same 2019 bike for 2021 stunted his progress, though, while a knee injury further thwarted things before he returned later in the season as a factory Yamaha rider in place of the ousted Maverick Vinales.

And really, nothing went well for Morbidelli after that point. The best result he had at Yamaha’s factory squad was a brace of fourths in a wet Argentina weekend in 2023. And that was his only top five in two and a half years by the end of that season.

A move to the Pramac Ducati squad for 2024 was set to put Morbidelli back on the right trajectory. But then he suffered a serious concussion in a pre-season training incident. Missing all of testing on the GP24 - as well as going through a scary stretch where he had no memory recall - Morbidelli was on the back foot for most of the season.

It wouldn’t be until the French GP that he would score points with a seventh on the Sunday. Barring a DNF in Barcelona, he was consistently in the top 10 from Mugello to Aragon. In the latter stages of the campaign he managed a sprint podium at the San Marino GP and a run of fifth, fourth, fifth, sixth from Emilia Romagna to Australia.

Valentino Rossi to thank for Franco Morbidelli's 2025 ride

In the first 10 rounds, Morbidelli’s points-per-round average was 6.1. In the final half of the season, it rose sharply to 11.2 to give him 173 for the year. That said, he is still without a grand prix podium since the 2021 Spanish GP.

And let’s not sugarcoat this: Morbidelli probably isn’t on the 2025 grid if his great friend and mentor Rossi doesn’t have a team with a slot available for him. It’s hard not to look at Morbidelli in VR46 colours for 2025 as really the last hurrah of a MotoGP career that has promised so much but - for much of it through no fault of his own - delivered so little.

“Vale, he loves Franco because he has a very, very good relationship,” said team director Uccio Salucci in response to a question from Crash.net following VR46’s 2025 launch. There’s no doubt Rossi has done a lot for Morbidelli over the years, and Morbidelli has also done a lot for the VR46 Academy.

And while this is very much a marriage borne out of privilege, VR46 isn’t going to sit by and simply let Morbidelli ride around until he decides he’s had enough. Already, the work to get him to get more out of the GP24 he’ll continue to race this year has begun.

“First of all, I’m very happy that Franco is with our team this year,” Salucci added. “He’s a very good rider. I’ve known Franco very well. For me, in the last part of the 2024 season, Franco for sure improved a lot. For me, he needs something on his riding style, something to be modified, because for me in the last part of 2024 he had a good improvement.

“And he arrives into our team, our team is like a family for him. We also have Idalio Gavira, he’s our rider coach, and for sure we already start to change something in his riding style. It’s the right team in this moment for Franco. For sure, we give 100%, we have a very good bike because we have the 2024 bike for him.”

The ‘right place, right time’ mantra is something Morbidelli himself acknowledged during VR46’s launch event.

“For me, it’s a very big deal to race for Pertamina VR46 Racing Team,” he said. “It’s a very big deal because everybody inside the team I know, I’ve known every single person for a long time. I was raised by the guys of the team, mainly.

“It’s a great honour for me to carry those colours. We are from the same village, even if I was born in Rome I was raised in Tavullia. All my friends are from Tavullia; I’m more a Tavullian than a Roman. So, the fact of bringing Valentino’s colours is a big responsibility to do good things and do the best I can.”

Read more: Inside Valentino Rossi's chase for a tenth world title

As Salucci points out, qualifying was a considerable weakness for Morbidelli last year. He scored one front row start in 20, at the San Marino GP. But over the course of the year, his average qualifying result was ninth. New team-mate Fabio Di Giannantonio, who missed three rounds with injury and was on a year-old bike, achieved the same. In the final two rounds, Morbidelli stacked back-to-back top five qualifying results, marking the first time all season he was able to do this and hinting at genuine improvement.

“I think, now with the same bike he had last year, we can learn a lot to try to make something very, very good in the first part of the season because always when you get the back from last year you have some advantages in the first part because the factory bikes always have to take some time to get to the right moment,” team manager Pablo Nieto commented.

“So, I think with Franco we have to make something that looks like we are not doing anything but in the end is important because I think we can be in the top five with him in each race.”

The jump between the GP23 and the GP24 caught everyone by surprise, but that same gulf isn’t likely to develop again this year given just how big an impact the 2024 Michelin rear tyre had on the pecking order. So sticking with one of MotoGP’s most dominant bikes is something that will likely work to Morbidelli’s advantage as he looks to build on the end-of-season progress from last year.

“GP24, it’s a great bike. It was born great, it won the first race of its life, and the test in Malaysia it was unbelievably fast already the first time that bike was on track,” he said. “So, I believe a lot in that GP24 package. It’s a great machine, it’s one of the greatest packages we’ve seen.”

Morbidelli is set to benefit, too, from a greater presence at MotoGP rounds this year by Rossi. Having scaled back his car racing commitments for 2025, Rossi is aiming to attend “six, seven races minimum” this season. As all VR46 Academy riders note when Rossi turns up, it always provides them with a boost.

And while Morbidelli only has a 2025 contract in place, Salucci noted that the team sees this as a longer-term project. Ideally, it would like him to continue with VR46 and be successful there. But if its efforts to transform his career prove successful, the team will not begrudge him moving to any interested factory team.

Morbidelli has lofty ambitions of getting back to the top step of the podium in 2025 and VR46 is clearly confident it can help him in this task. And while he won’t be looked at for a title charge - that very much being left to Bagnaia - there will be no shortage of pride within the VR46 camp should it prove successful in firing up one of its most-loved sons…