During the 2022 season, the factory Yamaha team had Fabio Quartararo and Franco Morbidelli for another MotoGP season. However, these two riders performed completely differently: Quartararo fought for the championship and spent most of the season in the lead, while Morbidelli had constant difficulties in becoming competitive. The best result for Valentino Rossi’s pupil was a seventh place in Mandalika and in a wet race.
In the opinion of Lin Jarvis – Managing Director at Yamaha Motor Racing and Team Principal at Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP – Morbidelli knows what it takes to be fast on the M1. Even so, the lack of confidence in front of the bike prevents the rider from matching his teammate’s performances.
‘Frankie just hasn’t been able to have that same speed, aggression on braking and fast corner speed, which you need for the Yamaha. To make the Yamaha perform well, you need to be aggressive on the brakes and you need to enter the corner fast. 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’, he told crash.net, and continued:
– 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.
Aware of the current state of the M1, Jarvis knows that Yamaha also have a say in Morbidelli’s lack of competitiveness:
– 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.
And added: ‘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’.