Is MotoGP 2024 about to get another new frontrunner?

Because of the admittedly very particular circumstances of his off-season, Franco Morbidelli is something of a walking contradiction in terms of his MotoGP status right now.

On the one hand, with the rider market permanently in gear, he is already inevitably on a ‘hot seat’ of sorts with his future beyond 2024 highly uncertain.

Assuming his current Pramac team continues with Ducati, one of the seats within it has already been filled by Moto2 hotshot Fermin Aldeguer.

The other is vacant but seems a logical spot for either one of the two star riders who by necessity will miss out in the Enea Bastianini/Jorge Martin/Marc Marquez battle for the second Ducati works ride in 2025, or a top outside recruit. It is, after all, such a good seat, even if Morbidelli’s team-mate Martin seems willing to give it up.

On the other hand… again, it is such a good seat – so good that there’s a strong argument to be made that Morbidelli has enjoyed the biggest machinery upgrade from 2023 to 2024 up and down the MotoGP grid. The only other contenders there are probably Pedro Acosta (a pure technicality – yes, the MotoGP bike is much faster than his Moto2 bike, but in terms of competitiveness his Ajo-run KTM-coloured Kalex was a great machine) and Marc Marquez (the ’23 Honda was probably worse than Morbidelli’s ’23 Yamaha, but maybe not by as much in the long run as the ’23 Ducati is compared to the ’24 Ducati).

The question up to now this season has been – and remains – to what extent Morbidelli can actually use that elite machine at his disposal. And the primary culprit behind that question hasn’t been Morbidelli’s track record, but instead the injury he sustained in road bike testing at Portimao that denied him the entire pre-season and left him hopelessly outmatched in the season opener in Qatar.

That was entirely predictable. He rocked up to Lusail with minimal knowledge of the bike and a two-day Qatar-specific mileage deficit to literally everyone else on the grid. He qualified two seconds off and didn’t really trouble the points in either race, and all you could do is shrug and say ‘fair enough’.

But while Morbidelli himself was understandably very cagey and vague on when he expected to be on pace – and, really, perhaps he truly had no idea – his 2024 season flickered into life at Portimao.

The points did not reflect it, as Morbidelli produced another ‘bagel’, but you really didn’t have to dig much deeper to see credible signs that Ducati’s mighty MotoGP line-up is about to get even stronger.

He belongs now

Morbidelli was top-five in the grip-deficient opening session of the weekend, and was mounting a credible Q2 challenge in second Friday practice before a crash wrote it off.

He was buoyant by the day’s work despite that, saying his performance had surpassed his expectations – though it then dipped below expectations on Saturday as the track gripped up.

So the progress wasn’t exactly linear. But on Sunday, the…