- VR46 confirmed Franco Morbidelli will leave the team at the end of 2026, ending a partnership that began when he was the academy’s first-ever rider.
- Morbidelli will swap seats with WorldSBK champion-elect Nicolo Bulega, moving to the factory Aruba.it Ducati squad as his MotoGP career winds down.
- The news lands the same week Morbidelli races his final home round for VR46 at Misano, sitting 16th in the championship on a satellite bike.
The Rider Who Started It All Is the One Walking Away
Franco Morbidelli was never just another signing for VR46. He was the first rider Valentino Rossi’s academy ever brought in, the first VR46 rider to win a world championship, and the first to win a MotoGP race. Nine years after that beginning, the team confirmed on Tuesday that his time with them ends when the 2026 season does, closing a chapter that started with a teenager chasing Rossi’s blessing and finishes with a 31-year-old fighting to stay relevant on the grid.
VR46 broke the news with a message posted to its social channels, one written with the warmth of people who had clearly enjoyed the ride. “At the end of this season, our journey with Franky will come to an end,” the team wrote. “There have been podiums, battles and plenty of moments to celebrate, but what we’ll take with us goes far beyond the track. Glad we got to share this journey with you, Franky.”
From Moto2 Champion to MotoGP’s Nearly Man
Morbidelli won the Moto2 title in 2017 and stepped up to MotoGP the following year, launching a career that would take him through Marc VDS Honda, Petronas Yamaha, Monster Yamaha, Pramac Ducati, and finally VR46 Ducati once he signed with his childhood academy full time last year. His best season arrived in 2020, an improbable year in which he won three grands prix and finished runner-up in the world championship for Petronas Yamaha, a satellite team competing against factory machinery. It remains the high-water mark of a career that has spent far more time chasing that form than repeating it.
What followed was brutal by comparison. A three-year podium drought swallowed the rest of his factory Yamaha spell, a stretch so barren that by the time he finally returned to the rostrum at the 2024 Misano sprint with Pramac, riders and journalists alike had started to write his prime off as a closed door. Joining VR46 for 2025 offered a reset. He claimed three early podiums that season and looked, briefly, like the rider from 2020 again.
A Difficult Season on a Bike Built for Someone Else’s Future
This year has not offered the same reprieve. Morbidelli has rarely broken into the top ten on VR46’s satellite-spec GP25, with a wet sprint rostrum at Jerez standing as his only real highlight. He starts this weekend’s home round at Misano ranked 16th in the world championship, a difficult number for a rider who once finished a season as the closest challenger to a world champion. The timing sharpens the moment: Misano is the round where his academy roots run deepest, and it will now double as one of his final home races wearing VR46 colors.
His seat does not stay empty long. Nicolo Bulega, the WorldSBK champion-elect, will complete Ducati’s 2027 MotoGP rider line-up and become the only Italian on a factory-adjacent Desmosedici when the 850cc, Pirelli-shod era begins. Morbidelli heads the other direction, joining the factory Aruba.it Ducati squad in WorldSBK, taking the seat being vacated as part of the same reshuffle. It is, in effect, a straight swap: two Italians, two categories, two careers moving in opposite directions through the same door.
Not the Only Face Leaving VR46’s Garage
Morbidelli will not be the only rider missing from VR46’s 2027 garage. His current teammate, Fabio Di Giannantonio, is also departing, headed to Red Bull KTM after building some of his best results of the season with the Italian squad. Fermin Aldeguer arrives from Gresini to take one of the two open seats, with Bulega filling the other. For a team built around the idea of grooming Italian talent from the ground up, the changeover strips out two riders with genuine history at the outfit and replaces them with two more chasing their own fresh starts.
A Career Spent Chasing One Perfect Season
Few riders on the current grid understand the gap between potential and delivery quite like Morbidelli does. His 2020 campaign remains one of the most statistically strange seasons in recent MotoGP history: three wins on a satellite Yamaha, a runner-up championship finish ahead of factory-backed riders with far larger budgets, and a level of speed that made him look like the heir apparent to the sport’s next generation of champions. Then a knee injury, a switch to factory Yamaha machinery that never suited his riding style, and years of underperformance buried that version of him so thoroughly that by the time VR46 offered him a lifeline, most of the paddock had stopped expecting a repeat.
The academy connection made the reunion feel inevitable rather than charitable. Valentino Rossi built VR46 around the idea of giving young Italian talent a structured path into MotoGP, and Morbidelli was the proof of concept before the program had produced anything else. Bringing him back for what amounted to a final act carried symbolic value that a results-only view of the signing never fully captured. It let the rider who validated the entire project finish his story wearing the same colors he wore at the start of it, regardless of what the results in between looked like.
What Nine Years Actually Bought Him
Judged purely on the results column, Morbidelli’s second act with VR46 will read as a disappointment: a handful of podiums, one rain-soaked highlight, and a slide to the back half of the standings. Judged against where he started, as a teenager plucked out of relative obscurity by a nine-time world champion who saw something worth building, the story is harder to file away so simply. He was there before the academy had a single trophy to its name. He was there when it won its first one. Whatever comes next in WorldSBK, that part of the record does not change.
Misano will offer VR46’s fans one more chance to see him in their colors before the swap becomes official. What happens after that, on a factory Ducati Panigale rather than a Desmosedici, is a new story entirely. But the one that began with a teenage rider joining a fledgling academy nine years ago is finally reaching its last chapter, and both sides seem to know it.
Bulega arrives with a very different kind of pressure. He walks away from a WorldSBK title fight as the reigning class of the field, stepping into a MotoGP paddock that will expect him to justify the hype immediately rather than grow into it the way Morbidelli once did. Where Morbidelli got nine years, three different manufacturers, and a career-defining runner-up season to find his level, Bulega inherits a satellite Ducati seat under a spotlight built entirely on what he has already proven on a different bike, in a different championship, against different competition entirely.
Whether Bulega can replicate anything close to Morbidelli’s 2020 peak remains an open question that will not be answered until next season begins. What is already certain is the shape of the trade: a proven winner with a complicated recent history hands his seat to a rider who has never raced a premier-class grand prix motorcycle in anger, betting that fresh talent outweighs experience at exactly the moment VR46 needs a result to build its next chapter around.
Riders who have shared a garage with Morbidelli over the years describe him less as a talent who wasted his prime and more as one who simply ran out of machinery capable of matching his best days. The 2020 Yamaha that carried him to three wins was, by most technical accounts, an outlier package that never returned in that form again. Nine years, five teams, and one runner-up championship later, that single season remains the clearest evidence of what he was capable of when everything lined up in his favor.
