Excluding seasons ravaged or curtailed by terrible injuries or worse, or seasons impacted by the sort of none-of-our-business personal tragedy or hardship that have played their part in many a sporting career, Augusto Fernandez's 2024 in MotoGP has a claim for being the saddest campaign of the championship's modern era.
There's stern competition, as ever. Even in recent years it is easy to point to Tom Luthi's rotten sole year in MotoGP, or Johann Zarco's KTM collapse, or anything Joan Mir's done as of late.
But there's a unique anguish to what Fernandez went through with Tech3 and the Gas Gas-badged KTM RC16 in 2024 - a 40-race gauntlet in a contract year that was doomed from race zero.
Fernandez, truthfully, is at least a little fortunate to have had that '24 Tech3 gig in the first place, as it took not just a Moto2 title but a breakdown in the relationship between KTM and Remy Gardner to bring him in, and then took KTM sidelining Pol Espargaro rather than Fernandez in making room for Pedro Acosta.
But Fernandez had also shown impressive peaks in his career, including in his first MotoGP season, so it was far from unthinkable that he could earn himself another KTM contract.
That hope would be extinguished in brutal fashion by 2024 - and, in hindsight but even at the time, it was very clear already which way thing were trending come pre-season.
KTM had switched its works RC16s to carbon chassis mid-2023, which both Brad Binder and Jack Miller preferred. But the Tech3 team ran the rest of that season with the conventional steel trellis KTM frame. Fernandez and newcomer Acosta were upgraded for 2024 - and, in Fernandez's case, the 'upgrade' ended his KTM career.
He never felt right with the 'softer' carbon bike, never comfortable with what it asked of him. It's not that he didn't improve - it's that he began the year so hopelessly far, far not just from Binder and Miller but far from debutant Acosta.
"Being last is just the same as not being," Fernandez said after the season finale, having been last a whole lot in 2024 - usually last of the KTMs, sometimes last of everyone. "It is how it is.
"This year just was a combination of a lot of things. Of course maybe the bike was not done for my style - but I'm not this kind of rider, I tried to adapt myself, I can change my style, I'm not this kind of rider 'oh, this is not my style' and all this.
"I work a lot - and this is my job, this is my life. At home I just worked to be fast on whatever bike I have. I try to adapt my style to every bike I'm riding. But, yeah, we didn't... we didn't do it here. I tried, but we didn't get to a competitive pace at any point."
A total of 27 points - less than half of his 2023 rookie tally - meant the ignominy of being outscored by two Hondas and two Yamahas. And a continued performance bias towards race pace over qualifying pace, in addition to the overall lack of performance, meant the worse ignominy of being 20-0'd in qualifying by the phenom Acosta.
He just got absolutely battered.
"It's been hard. But every Thursday starting the weekend I was fully confident to have a good one.
"And that's been every weekend, honestly. Trying to - once I was back home - recharge my level of confidence and everything, to trust again. And that's been my season."
All throughout that wretched season, meanwhile, Fernandez remained a consummate professional - always engaged in his media sessions, never ducking out quietly after a bad day, never putting KTM on blast, never hitting out when the company publicly admitted his seat was in danger, never questioning the decision when that seat was formally lost.
This, though it gives no tenths on the race track, is a remarkable accomplishment. That's 20 weekends of facing the journalists four times across four days and usually having to publicly account for a lack of on-track performance.
Only one real gripe got through that professional veneer all season. Fernandez spent most of his Tech3 tenure working with Alex Merhand as his crew chief, after Merhand had debuted in the role alongside Gardner in 2022.
By the end of 2024, though, KTM would replace Merhand with Alberto Giribuola, in preparation with Giribuola's reunion with new hire Enea Bastianini after they had great success together at Gresini.
But it was also something Fernandez had personally pushed for - and he said it took granting a different crew change (sending his data engineer to Acosta's side) as a trade-off for KTM to greenlight it.
Fernandez would end up feeling that the move to Giribuola revitalised his season somewhat. In his exclusive interview with The Race MotoGP Podcast, he said: "In the end, now recently I had the help that I was asking for, the last- not two years but at least a year and a half I would say, one year. And I got it when everything was done in terms of contracts.
"For me it's good to at least recover some confidence, recover my riding, and for the future make sure I am fast and the Augusto I know I am. It's good to finish like this but for sure I was asking for this a long time ago.
"The crew chief nowadays is very-very important. We see, like, all the top riders, they have their crew chiefs for a long time - luckily they've been with them since the first year in MotoGP, or even before, even from Moto2 they come with their crew chief.
"Even Marc [Marquez], how many years has Marc been with his Santi [Hernandez]? Now he's changed, but even he took a little bit to arrive to the level.
"We need the crew chiefs. We riders are particular and we need the person who connects with us, knows what we need... just by feeling, it's not even words. So, you need this kind of connection.
"And I lived in the past in Moto2 more or less the same thing. When I moved to Marc VDS, I didn't have the feeling with the crew chief. Even though the team was world champion. Then as soon as I moved to KTM, to Ajo, I connected with the crew chief and I won the championship. And I was the same as the year before.
"We are particular, and we need the person who understand everything from us. And of course the experience - like Albi [Giribuola] has in MotoGP - is everything. Because we're fighting with not only the best riders but the best crew chiefs, and the best teams, and the best manufacturers.
"The best everything. So we need also the best crew chief. It's a lot of years- look at [Cristian Gabarrini] the crew chief of Pecco [Bagnaia]. He was with [Casey] Stoner... if you want to fight against that, you need level."
The interview with Fernandez is available in full - along with other rider interviews - on The Race's Members Club, accessible through the website or through our Patreon
We don't know Merhand's side of this story - certainly, if he wishes, he could point to the fact that, as much as Fernandez enjoyed working with Giribuola, his results were hardly transformed.
But it's understandable in any case that Fernandez would pinpoint a reason that wasn't just "I couldn't hack it". Because this was a unique mental toll.
Riders have bad seasons. But a season that's unsalvageable from day one - and some part of Fernandez must've known it was - yet spans 10 months and 40 race starts is a particularly cruel proposition.
And Fernandez's year is the kind of year that really makes you feel that the modern calendar is too long, too packed - 40 race starts is a whole career by older standards, and if Fernandez's 40 this year were indeed like a whole career they were a really, really bad one.
He's faced it stoically and with an optimism that sometimes waned but never truly faded, one that he's totally regained now in becoming Yamaha's test rider and expressing a full confidence that this will bring him back into a full-time MotoGP ride sooner or later.
Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. and Yamaha Motor Racing are delighted to announce that @Afernandez37 will be reinforcing the Yamaha Factory Racing MotoGP Test Team for the 2025 season 🦾
— Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP (@YamahaMotoGP) December 17, 2024
📰 https://t.co/LHFGBisV9E#YamahaFactoryRacing | #RevsYourHeart | #MotoGP | #AF37 pic.twitter.com/MB2GB1ScUs
"It's just... I don't know how to say. It wasn't meant to be.
"My career keeps going, in a different way than expected - but it keeps going. I'm still alive. I'll be back, I'm 100 percent sure."
If he does return, it will be so much sweeter given the season he'd had to endure.
