If you want to improve your stock as a MotoGP rider right now, going to Honda isn't the way to do it. To paraphrase Joan Mir, its flagship rider, nobody signs for Honda and then ends up with better career prospects at the conclusion of the deal.
It is true of Mir, was true of Pol Espargaro and Jorge Lorenzo before him, and must be a big part of why long-term Honda project Ai Ogura is apparently choosing to forge his future with Aprilia's satellite team instead.
But if the bike isn't there for any heroics right now, all a rider can do is avoid catastrophic damage to their future prospects.
One Honda rider looked to be doing exactly that kind of damage at the start of the year, but now looks to have dramatically righted the ship.
In terms of riders showing a clear upward performance trend so far in 2024, Pramac Ducati's Franco Morbidelli would be an obvious candidate to highlight - having started from the nadir of a brain injury and derailed pre-season and having now got himself to genuine competitiveness. But it was an unusual circumstance to begin with, and Morbidelli continues to struggle with weekend execution.
After Silverstone, you'd be hard-pressed to name him as the most improved rider. Another Valentino Rossi protege fits that bill instead.
Pace-wise, Luca Marini was nowhere at the start of his first season as a Honda rider, having been brought in as a Marc Marquez replacement - a certain level of pressure, sure, even though nobody pretended it was going to be a like-for-like replacement.
Still, over the first few races Marini was regularly qualifying last or close to last, struggling to run the same laptimes as his fellow Honda riders, getting beaten by them by double-digit seconds in races. The new Honda RC213V was quickly exposed as a pretty miserable product, but Johann Zarco, Mir and even the less-consistent Takaaki Nakagami were having a markedly less miserable time on it than Marini. Test rider Stefan Bradl, too, was showing up Marini on his appearances.
To illustrate the situation, let's go behind the scenes for a second. The original version of our championship graphic had 22 rows built in, for each of the full-time riders. Dani Pedrosa scoring as a wildcard should've made it untenable - but the 22-row template remained good enough to use for several rounds after, without much of a concern, because Marini never particularly looked like scoring.
He is on that graphic now, with just one point - having gained one via a post-race tyre pressure penalty for Augusto Fernandez at the Sachsenring. He lost what would've been a second point to a post-race tyre pressure penalty of his own at Silverstone. In both cases, Marini's demeanour made it clear he wasn't bothered in the least.
After all, two points is zero points, is five points, is 10 points for Honda right now. It is all the same number: a reflection of pure statistical variance for a package that has to rely on the charity of rival manufacturers' penalties, crashes and failures to score anything at all.
The points did, at least, accurately reflect the truth that both Zarco and Mir lorded over Marini in terms of performance. And for all of the Marini selling point, that of a cerebral rider brought in from the Ducati set-up to steer development and help Honda find the way rather than chase meaningless single-digit points scores, that truth of the performance gap was an uncomfortable one.
As of 10 rounds into the 20-round season, it is a truth no longer.
Marini seemed to arrive at the same level as Mir and Zarco around Assen at the end of June. He then backed it up at two very different tracks: the Sachsenring and Silverstone.
There was much talk at the second of those weekends over whether he and Mir were on a level playing field with Zarco - who is running a different spec of engine, "a little bit more powerful but very difficult to ride" - and there's been so much Honda spec mix-and-matching going on that any comparisons there have to come with substantial asterisks. But Marini's been at the right level.
"I made a huge step with my riding style," he insisted. "I tried to adapt a lot on what the Honda requires to be fast.
"Because it's really difficult, when you come from another manufacturer, at the beginning when you go just with your instincts, you just do the same things as the year before. But maybe it's not the best way to perform with our bike at the moment.
"Now I've reached a very good level on this, and I can use the bike in its strongest point, try to avoid the weakness. But also the bike has changed a lot.
"With the setting we've made a big improvement. Now the bike is more...not easy to ride, I would say 'more enjoyable'.
"The concept of a bike that I have in my mind, when I want to ride, is now closer [to what we now have]."
In the meantime, Marini has been dropping not-so-subtle hints that he's been leading development direction.
"Every time that we try something [new], we try with very good attention, and when I'm sure that something works and it's better, the things [in use] before are gone for me. It doesn't make sense at the moment to change every time many things, many pieces.
"For me, when it's clear that one engine is better than the other, keep working with this and try to develop this engine better than the other.
"Now everybody is going in my direction, finally. So I think this will help also Honda to have more clear information, to focus only on one thing, and be faster."
Mir, Zarco and Nakagami would all probably have something to say about that, but Marini's words do carry more weight than before - given the performance that he's achieving now while retaining a lower crash rate than his peers.
He'd started way off, but making up ground was never guaranteed. Espargaro was never better at Honda than pre-seasons and season openers. Mir has arguably ended up at the same level he was at when he first got to learning the bike. Alex Rins, now at Yamaha, peaked early in his sole Honda season last year and then had any possibility of progression wrecked by injury.
Honda riders have tended to stagnate. Marini has not. And all the while he has remained enthusiastic and on point with his public messaging, and every indication is he's still that analytical mind that Honda prioritised in filling its Marquez void.
There's still miles and miles for Marini and Honda to go, and with his Honda contract up at the end of next year there'll be pretenders for his seat. The trend could yet break, and break hard - it's much easier to go from 50 seconds off to 30 than from 30 to even 15.
But Marini's improving - clearly and obviously improving - and in Honda's current state that is all you can ask for.
