When The Race asked Miguel Oliveira whether he was leaving the Aprilia MotoGP stable with a sense of unfinished business, he met the question with a hearty chuckle - probably because the answer was simply too obvious.
"For sure, yeah," he confirmed.
"When I left KTM, I left with that feeling also. But with Aprilia the feeling is even higher. For sure. But it is what it is."
As far as his KTM tenure is concerned, in the cold light of hindsight you would probably make the argument that both the rider and the manufacturer got out of it what they would've reasonably expected.
He had given Tech3 its first-ever win and stocked KTM's trophy cabinets further in here-and-there moments of inspiration, in the dry and in the wet. Amid all that, though, he did also get by and large relegated to second fiddle behind Brad Binder.
Oliveira will probably feel - and KTM may well feel - that replacing him with Jack Miller in that factory roster didn't really accomplish much. Maybe so - although Miller will dispute that - but in any case it would only change the name on the chopping block for the inevitable arrival of Pedro Acosta.
The end of Oliveira-KTM shouldn't gnaw too much at anyone two years on. Especially not at Oliveira, not now that we all know how KTM is doing financially.
The end of Oliveira-Aprilia is much more regrettable - not in the sense, necessarily, that the two parties were definitely wrong to move on, but more that there was clearly much more on offer in this Murphy's law-ravaged two-year stint.
You know this very well already, but just to recap quickly: Oliveira spent way too much of his stint as an Aprilia rider hurt. The infamous Marc Marquez bowling incident at Portimao messed up his hip and snuffed out his early momentum; Fabio Quartararo's Jerez shunt dislocated his shoulder; a bad error in Qatar broke Oliveira's shoulder blade in a collision with Aleix Espargaro.
That was all at RNF in 2023 - then 2024 served up an electrical glitch as a parting gift that broke his wrist and wrote off the final rounds of his season with Trackhouse.
None of these were career-altering injuries in terms of overall fitness, thankfully, but in modern MotoGP you can barely afford one weekend off; riders seem to really, really struggle to regroup. And you just cannot have it happen regularly.
The 2023 injuries brutalised a genuinely promising season on a year-old Aprilia, a bike Oliveira had impressed on from the very first contact. The one long period of full fitness Oliveira had at Aprilia instead was with the 2024 bike - after a two-spec jump - that he just couldn't quite make work right away.
It was a more capricious bike than its predecessors - Oliveira was not alone in feeling that way. The 2024 RS-GP gave Maverick Vinales that Circuit of the Americas double, yet speaking after the season Vinales was blunt in feeling that it would've been a better year if Aprilia had simply provided him an updated version of the 2023 bike instead.
"I was trying to analyse kind of my career through Aprilia," said Oliveira after concluding his final race on the RS-GP.
"I jumped from a 2022 spec to a '24 - I did a test on the '23 and the bike was actually super good, it was amazing.
"It [the switch to the '24] was tricky, it was complicated. It's a bike that, when you click and everything aligns, the bike is really, really amazing.
"But if you're a little bit out, seems to be difficult. Seems to be hard to make the difference."
Does it have a particularly low performance floor, The Race asked. "Maybe, yeah, maybe. So, that's it.
"It's not up to me anymore to understand the bike. I gave the feedback and that's it, we'll leave it in other hands."
Late in the season - when the Aprilias collectively sagged and showed that low performance floor, when Raul Fernandez switched over from the year-old bike to the new one and started to struggle more, when both Vinales and Aleix Espargaro found that they could barely string a weekend together - Oliveira kind of came to the fore.
"To be honest, with Miguel, it's a bit of a pity - if you consider how Miguel started with us," said Aprilia Racing CEO Massimo Rivola on an appearance on The Race MotoGP Podcast at the Sachsenring.
"If I think about the Valencia test, if I think about Portimao - after Portimao he came back and in Austin he was already fast... then we had Jerez and another very big crash, then at the end of the season another very big crash. It's very difficult for us to understand why we are missing that last couple of tenths. And in fact the race pace is not so bad. When you start behind, it's difficult to have your pace. But... I still think Miguel has a huge talent. I would like to see him in front.
"He's riding well. He's just missing a bit of confidence in some fast parts. I don't know. Also I have to say, Trackhouse I think will become a better team - maybe we need to help them more."
Rivola said in that moment that he hoped the Sachsenring race would be wet, so that Oliveira would get a chance to thrive in his conditions and rebuild his confidence.
It quickly turned out he needn't have wished for rain, because Oliveira was fantastic at the Sachsenring in the dry - second in qualifying, second in the sprint, sixth behind five Ducatis in the main race, combining for what in hindsight was one of the best weekends of the season from anybody.
It parlayed itself into a run of form where Oliveira was putting up a real fight against the works bikes, but by then a common future for him and Aprilia was already ruled out.
It was just rotten timing, seemingly not helped - although we can only speculate here - by the general vibe behind the scenes, for there would've absolutely been a performance case to at least keep Oliveira at Trackhouse and yet both team and rider seemed perfectly content to move on.
Both sides have already recovered from this. Trackhouse has secured one of Moto2's most impressive champions in recent memory in Ai Ogura, while Oliveira has put pen to paper with a multi-year works Yamaha deal with Pramac - and already had a positive first contact with the bike in post-season testing.
And he says he took away from his Aprilia stint a riding style transformation.
"I ride in a different way than I was riding two years ago. And I think this will be useful for me. Especially because I could adapt. And that's the most important thing."
Maybe so. But this should've been so much better still.
What the ceiling for Oliveira and Aprilia was is impossible to say - although he will have clearly been in the running for a works promotion, at least - but it was higher than the mountain of hospital bills ever allowed to show.
