There were some truly lopsided line-ups on the 2024 MotoGP grid, but for most of them, you would've seen it coming from past career record - or at least the pre-season.
Pedro Acosta was always going to dominate Augusto Fernandez at Tech3 once the pre-season showed Fernandez just couldn't cope with the carbon chassis RC16. Jorge Martin was always going to trounce Ducati newcomer Franco Morbidelli at Pramac even before a horror crash wrote off Morbidelli's winter programme.
The clear outlier here, in terms of expectations versus reality, is Yamaha.
Alex Rins was a deeply impressive recruitment move for the Japanese manufacturer, lured away from the Honda camp after dragging an RC213V to a Grand Prix of the Americas win, but absolutely could not lay a glove on Fabio Quartararo .
There was maybe a glimpse or two early in the season of Rins potentially making Quartararo's life difficult, but an injury at Assen and an illness during the Misano double-header snuffed out any momentum - and the momentum wasn't that strong to begin with,
Rins scored 31 points to Quartararo's 131 - not quite a repeat of the disastrous ratio Yamaha predecessor Morbidelli had put up in 2022, but certainly close enough to worry. Across all the sprints and grands prix, he was running ahead of Quartararo just 14 percent of the total laps - a brutal number that is even inflated, somehow, by Quartararo riding around at the back at Buriram in the grand prix after being taken out of the fight out front.
"The bike that we have, right now it's not a bike to fight for victory," said Rins during the season-concluding Solidarity Grand Prix weekend.
"For sure this season so far I worked so hard on myself - at home, on my head - because I finished my season with Suzuki winning, I jumped on the Honda, I won a race but it was also hard. I jumped on the Yamaha and my best result was in Sepang, P8.
"Many people know at which level is the bike."
But why has the level of the bike in Rins' hands not matched up what Quartararo has been doing?
The Race probed him on that exact topic in Barcelona, and Rins insisted he and Quartararo have "pushed each other".
"The real difference between him and me is the bike," he then said.
"We are two talented riders. He's in Yamaha since when, 2019, so this bike is for him. I need to do my own bike right now.
"This year it was a little bit hard to do this. Because, as Yamaha knows and as you know, I was coming from another team and it takes more time.
"I'm happy because I gave my point of view and they were listening to me, and it's clear that we [Quartararo and I] cannot use the same set-up. When I try to put his set-up, I am not fast. We have two different riding styles.
"I'm happy with my progression, and I think Yamaha [is] too."
That was in-weekend. What followed was a race Rins would describe as "if not the worst, one of the worst races of my life" - in which he ended up collecting long-lap penalties like Pokémon and not actually serving them until post-race, which made no difference anyway.
It underlined a season where a top rider just never ever found his groove.
"I'm a little bit lost with my set-up," he added.
"When I stop after the race, I say the same to my engineers. Same as I was saying in Qatar [for the opener]. Still this year we weren't able to find the right set-up for me.
"Honestly, I'm overriding the bike. I cannot go with the flow. This one, it's negative, because ... I ask more of the tyres, I make more mistakes. When you don't have your bike in your hands, it's worse."
Rins clearly knows the optics of his season are not great and his messaging in Barcelona indirectly addressed that.
"For me, Yamaha needs to improve the braking and entry," he said after the post-season test.
"They weren't able to give me a bike this year to be competitive in this area. I was struggling during all the races, to have the rear contact and in the end when you don't have rear contact you don't stop the bike on the braking side. It doesn't matter the rest, because you will go wide, or if I was able to stop the bike I overheated the front tyre and I broke it.
"So... and they recognised [that], after the race I met [Yamaha chiefs] Max [Bartolini] and Maio [Meregalli] and I was talking deeply with them, and they apologised. So, for this part, I'm quite calm, that they understand me and they are working on this."
The test items sampled that Tuesday by Rins included a new chassis that helped corner speed - but not so much with that braking issue - and a new more powerful engine, but one where "at least with my riding style, we are not ready to have this power" because of how aggressive the delivery was.
The thing is, as far as rear contact is concerned, that's a drum Quartararo spent much of the season beating, too. The Frenchman emphasised multiple times that the M1 was not getting any help from the rear tyre coming into the corner - so for Rins, the inference is that Quartararo's more aggressive style is better designed to mitigate that issue.
So far, so logical. But does it really explain a gap this big?
If you got this far into this column, chances are you have spent a good chunk of it thinking 'OK, but what about the injury?". Not the Assen one - the dreadful Mugello one on the Honda last year that wrote off the second half of Rins's 2023, kept him dubiously-fit heading into 2024 and still impacts his day-to-day life.
It is absolutely the elephant in the room. But Rins has long insisted it is no longer a factor on the bike. You may well doubt that, but certainly he has a much better idea than most.
If it's primarily a bike fit thing, a much more drastic development step is coming for the start of testing next year at Sepang - both Rins and Quartararo have attested to that - and Rins very clearly hopes it will be what finally brings the M1 a lot more towards him.
The last time a manufacturer's development was substantially dictated by Rins's preferences, it gave Suzuki a championship-winning bike... in Joan Mir's hands.
Rins is safe at Yamaha, with a two-year deal in hand covering the rest of this rules cycle, but if his theory that it's just the bike making the difference here is even a little incorrect, any development successes that await him at Yamaha may end up as work done for Quartararo's glory instead.
