“The bullying didn’t make me feel good at all. I really felt the need to be accepted and I wasn’t accepted at all,” he told me a couple of years back. “The lesson I learned very quickly was that it’s not nice being pushed aside, so I try never to do that to anyone, whether in racing or outside.”
His Misano helmet tackled the problem head-on.
“When I decided to make a special helmet for this event I wanted to deal with a big matter, which is racism,” he explained at the time. “There’s a Spike Lee movie that treats this matter in a great way, which I recommend to you. In the movie he [radio DJ Señor Love Daddy, played by Samuel L Jackson] says, ‘Stop all this BS! Stop hating each other!’, so I decided to put myself in his shoes.”
Again, I’ve never seen a GP rider make a statement about racism.
And what about his second MotoGP victory at Aragon in October 2020, when he was fighting for the title aboard a YZR-M1 that suited his riding technique? He led every lap that day and didn’t let anyone even get close. Afterwards he described his race like a hippy might describe a good night out.
“It really was a trip” Franco Morbidelli
“It really was a trip,” he grinned. “Meaning, how can I say…”
“You felt pretty high?” prompted a journalist.
“Yes, I felt great. It wasn’t a journey it was a trip,” he added.
Morbidelli didn’t lead Sunday’s Argentine GP from lap one to the chequered flag, but he was in the podium fight until the last few laps when Johann Zarco came storming past, repeating his Portimao late surge.
For a rider who finished outside the top ten in 18 of last year’s 20 races, while team-mate Fabio Quartararo fought for the title, fourth in both the sprint and GP races was a massive deal.
Bezzecchi led Sunday’s GP race from Turn One to the chequered flag. He is the third VR46 rider to win a MotoGP race, after Morbidelli and Bagnaia
VR46
But do his Termas results actually mean anything in the greater scheme of things?
For the aforementioned reasons, I really hope so, but Termas is a strange place. The circuit is one of MotoGP’s least grippy, because it’s used so little, which might have suited Morbidelli. He’s a smooth rider, much less aggressive with the bike than Quartararo, who wrestled his YZR-M1 to the 2021 crown, extracting grip from the tyres that Morbidelli could only dream of.
Morbidelli is working hard to become more of an animal on the motorcycle, so that he can generate Quartararo-like grip from the tyres, but in the dry at Termas no one could put a lot of force through their tyres, because there was so little grip. In fact the track was even slower than last year, when Morbidelli was less competitive, so it’s likely he was fast because his gentler riding style worked better while skipping across the slippery, bumpy asphalt.
Quartararo, who struggled through much of the weekend, certainly thought so.
“Franco and me have two riding styles that are totally different,” explained the Frenchman. “At tracks with low grip, like Barcelona, at the first tests at Sepang and here, he’s always fast. I’m usually really aggressive on the brakes and use a lot of corner speed but here I’m struggling to do that.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0QULHnqDkQ
What about Yamaha’s speed in Sunday’s soaking GP race? Sometimes the M1 is a disaster in the rain, because it needs edge grip to go fast and obviously there’s little edge grip to be found in the rain. But once again Termas is weird – slippery in the dry and relatively grippy in the wet, which is why Morbidelli was in podium contention for so long and why Quartararo was able to charge through to seventh, after being punted to 16th by Nakagami on the first lap.
Of course, Morbidelli hopes that his Termas trend is the start of a turnaround, as he fights to keep his Yamaha ride into 2024. His current contract expires at the end of this season.
“We need to think about having this kind of performance at Austin [venue for the next GP on 16th April] and then we can think about building and creating some performance from this good base.”
Many people were also impressed by the Yamaha’s straight-line speed during Saturday’s dry sprint race, when even the Ducatis struggled to overtake Morbidelli on the back straight.
“In the sprint I was thinking about all the engineers and engineer Marmorini [former Ferrari Formula 1 engineer Luca Marmorini, who has worked on M1 engine development for the last 14 months] who had help me in the straight to keep my position,” added Morbidelli. “We were able to be difficult to overtake and this is a positive, because last year we got smoked on straights.”
A touch of the Simoncelli about him – mad-haired Bezzecchi celebrates with an Argentina football shirt, signed by Lionel Messi
VR46
Again, I’m not so sure that this performance will transfer to Austin two weeks from now, although once again I hope I’m proved wrong.
The back straight at Termas is preceded by a long, long right-hander, where corner speed creates good straight-line speed, hence Morbidelli’s apparently surprising top speed. On the other hand the back straight at Austin is preceded by a dead-stop hairpin, so top speed there is all about brute horsepower and anti-wheelie downforce aero, both of which the Aprilia, Ducati, Honda and KTM have more of than the Yamaha.
Sunday’s conditions were treacherous but Bezzecchi never put a foot wrong – it was an ominous performance from a first-time winner