Marc Marquez's 2024 MotoGP title prospects have looked more and more like an impossible dream with virtually every round of the season so far, but now even finishing the season in the top three appears a long shot.
Such an assertion is, in a way, counter-intuitive. Marquez is coming away from a track that has never favoured him too much, Silverstone, where he's won just twice - once in 125cc and once in MotoGP - since 2010, when Silverstone replaced Donington as British Grand Prix venue.
He's also still a work in progress on the Ducati, and he's only 13 points off Enea Bastianini.
But overturning that 13-point deficit over the second half of the season may well be as difficult as it will be for Bastianini himself to close a 49-point gap to the championship lead. Both of these possibilities are now long shots.
It is telling that Marquez spoke during the Silverstone weekend no longer of just two riders who are consistently finding more pace than him - Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin - but of three riders. While he and Bastianini were never too far apart in the standings this season, the performance trend is now clearly breaking the Italian's way.
And Marquez is having to over-ride to get himself into positions that would've been taken for granted in some earlier phases of the season. After a crash-disrupted Sachsenring where injuries ensured defeat but there was no performance cushion to ever take it easy, Marquez snuck by into Q2 on Friday at Silverstone, had to look for a tow in making his qualifying lap and then crashed out from a relatively flattering fourth in the sprint.
He bailed the weekend out with a respectable run on Sunday, in which he was "surprised" to keep pace with the GP24s early on but also rode 'quite conservatively' to fourth to avoid drawing a blank for the weekend.
"Without the crash of yesterday, maybe today the podium was possible - or another crash, you never know," he explained on Sunday.
All the while, though, Bastianini was in another galaxy performance-wise, destined to score big from the moment he qualified on the front row.
"His riding style is quite strange, but at the same time it's very efficient," said Marquez of Bastianini. "In the beginning with a new tyre he's struggling a bit more than Pecco and Martin but always with the used tyre he's extremely fast, because he's able to turn the bike with not a lot of angle. He's doing so well there.
"At the same time he's braking late, he picks up the bike well. In this track, honestly speaking, when I was behind him, he was riding super good, never smoked the tyre, he was just efficient. Fast but not a lot of movement.
"He made a massive difference. And we've seen in the past, he's a rider that, when he has the day, is unbeatable."
But more good days are coming for Bastianini even when he's not at his absolute best, because the 2024-spec Ducati appears to be spreading its wings relative to the rest of the pack - including the 2023-spec fellow Desmosedici.
Marquez still anchored the GP23s' challenge at Silverstone, though wasn't as far ahead as he has sometimes been this season - which is likely explained by Silverstone being a relatively unfavourable track, one with a slight bias towards right-handers, too.
But given Ducati has broken the resistance of other manufacturers - it has now locked out the grand prix podium seven times in a row - and no longer seems to have those form oscillations that earlier in the season were being put down to rear tyre vibrations, its riders are benefitting from cleaner weekends, and Bastianini perhaps is benefitting more than anyone.
Both he and Marquez often don't hit the ground running to start off weekends this season. For Marquez, the explanation is simple: he's a first-year Ducati rider. "You know the bike and you know the circuit [but not the combination]. In some tracks we start, like Jerez, and we don't touch anything, and here we start with our base but we change completely the bike. In the end we improve, but you don't know, always it's a question mark."
But for Bastianini it seems something more inherent to him as a rider, and something that sprint weekends by their nature don't really help. Though at Silverstone he was potent throughout, his overall formula for success in MotoGP is to avoid minimising the damage through 90% of the weekend and then make everyone else pay in the final 10%.
Ducati's rate of improvement has given him more margin to work with. He is now in a better position to avoid all the ways his weekend can be ruined: get knocked out of the top 10 on Friday, err while under pressure in Q2, get roughed up in the early laps. Other manufacturers being left behind is giving him space to work with - space that Marquez doesn't need as much but also isn't getting.
The GP24 might not pull further clear of the GP23 over the rest of the season, but it doesn't really need to.
"It's the first year that we've seen a step like this," said Marquez's brother Alex. "From the old bike to the new one.
"We hope that maybe [Ducati technical chief Gigi] Dall'Igna takes some holidays now, until the end of the season!
"And then they don't improve a lot and we can be close also next year, be more equal like last year."
"The performance is there [for the GP23] but looks like the '24 bikes in some race tracks are super fast - and especially in this one, where you have long straights, with that rear device, with more top speed, the difference is a bit bigger," Marc himself said. It doesn't make keeping up with those bikes totally impossible, but it requires perfect weekends and being "always on the limit".
It means a first Ducati win for Marquez now looks a much longer shot than earlier in the season.
"At the moment the average we are four-five seconds slower in the race. We need to improve more than two-three tenths per lap; it's a lot," he said. "Looks not so bad, but it's a lot.
"Our target is one more time to be on that top five, four and, if we can, fight for the podium as we did in other races."
But only occasional podium bids won't cut it against Bastianini, meaning it is entirely plausible now that if the season unfolds as normal from here on out fourth is both the ceiling and the floor for Marquez in the riders' championship.
Yet, at the same time, with Bastianini reminding MotoGP of what he can do this weekend, perhaps Marquez will have smiled to himself that the Italian is off to ride a satellite KTM in 2025 - while Marquez himself has bagged one of a diminishing number of works-spec Ducatis.
