Marc Marquez's race-losing error in the Grand Prix of the Americas means this weekend's Qatar Grand Prix effectively begins the title battle anew.
Marquez himself acknowledged that in the aftermath of the Circuit of the Americas crash, remarking with a chuckle: "The championship restarts." But while he was speaking about the one-point gap to his brother Alex, he would be wise to still consider Pecco Bagnaia, his factory Ducati team-mate, as the one to pay most attention to.
A win would've taken Marquez 41 points clear of Bagnaia. The crash made it an 11-point gap.
From a purely mathematical standpoint, one race can only mean so much in a 22-round, 44-race championship. But Qatar will mean a lot more than your average race - not in terms of momentum or other nebulous concepts of the sort, but in what it will tell us about the 2025 season.
The moment of truth?
An 11-point gap obviously flatters the performance of Bagnaia relative to his team-mate Marquez so far this season. The qualifying head-to-head is 3-0 in Marquez's favour, with an average gap of 0.349s, and apart from those laps he spent riding a hobbled bike around COTA post-crash he has been ahead of Bagnaia across the line every lap in all six races.
Bagnaia feels he has got himself to a better place on corner entry with the Ducati GP25, or whatever it is that the Ducati 'GP25' actually is right now, but he was going to lose at COTA, too, had Marquez just taken a bit more care.
But that would've been hardly damning. Bagnaia would've never realistically expected to beat Marquez in a straight fight at COTA, and if COTA was representative of the MotoGP calendar as a whole...well, Maverick Vinales would've been champion by August last year, and Marquez would've have long retired of boredom after reeling off 100 successive victories in the last decade.
COTA is not great evidence for the bigger picture. Neither is Termas de Rio Hondo, the previous round, where Bagnaia has been consistently mediocre.
Buriram is more of a bellwether, though it's also ultimately seen as a place that favours Marquez over Bagnaia - though I have to wonder how much of that was hindsight after Marquez's strong pre-season form at the track.
In any case, there's less ambiguity about this weekend's venue Lusail, which Bagnaia described as "a very good track for me" but which Marquez hasn't had a tonne of success at in the premier class save for his win in 2014 to kick off a 10-win streak.
Marquez and Bagnaia in Qatar
Marquez (10 starts)
Average qualifying gap to team-mate: -0.338s
Average gap to pole: +0.313s
Points per team-mate point: 1.49
Bagnaia (6 starts)
Average qualifying gap to team-mate: -0.011s
Average gap to pole: +0.381s
Points per team-mate point: 2.14
The pure numbers suggest Qatar's status as a Marquez bogey track is exaggerated, yes, but in the context of his overall stranglehold over all of his Honda peers, his Lusail successes have felt on the lesser side. After those initial years of Dani Pedrosa going toe to toe with him, it was Lusail that provided that super-rare occurrence of a Marquez Honda team-mate actually showing him up in a round - that team-mate being Pol Espargaro in the 2022 opener. Espargaro is no scrub - but he was then basically terrible on all the other tracks for the rest of that season.
Bagnaia, meanwhile, had re-announced himself as Ducati's great new hope on his works Ducati debut in Qatar the year prior, and has been a consistent fixture at or near the front at the track since.
Taking aside the question of how sizeable Bagnaia's progress in 2025 has truly been, the Qatar gap between the two will say a lot about the season that awaits MotoGP.
If it's still those three tenths in qualifying and Marquez convincingly ahead in the race, that perhaps would indicate that Marquez's performance is now more uniform across the range of circuits than in the past - but it would also suggest that, even with the COTA crash, he still is by and large in control.
And over 22 round, that will be difficult to fight against.
But if it's even between the pair, or if Bagnaia is ahead, then that will point to a season that those who do believe in a title fight expected - that of Marquez and Bagnaia exchanging blows depending on the track, Marquez thriving at your Sachsenrings and Aragons and Bagnaia getting his at your Assens and Mugellos.
The performance level isn't locked in for the season, of course, so it's not like you can crown the champion in Qatar, but the picture will become the clearest it has been so far in 2025.
And there's another rider that should add to that clarity.
That rider isn't Jorge Martin, whose return is a welcome one for Aprilia and who will be fast eventually in 2025 - but who right now is unlikely to be fit and, points-wise, is already a non-factor.
That rider instead is Fabio Di Giannantonio.
The VR46 Ducati man has looked gradually stronger and stronger while recovering from his pre-season injury, and - unlike Alex Marquez - has the same status machinery-wise as the factory team.
So if whatever the 'GP25' is will jump clear of the GP24 at one point this season, Di Giannantonio will benefit as well - and he already looks potent.
Alex Marquez is in the conversation right now, and will remain there as long as his brother and/or Bagnaia don't take a big step, but Di Giannantonio isn't so far back as to be a write-off, and comes to a circuit where he rescued his MotoGP career with a 'where the **** did that come from' win in 2023.
Does he see himself as being in the mix for the title? "Well, the goal was it, honestly. We have the same bike as the first four guys in the championship [GP25s and GP24s].
"For sure, we have the potential and the package to do it. For sure we started this championship quite uphill because of the injuries, but we are recovering quite well.
"For sure we know that for fighting for the championship, you don't need just a podium, you need to win, to start making many podiums and many wins."
It feels fanciful right now, and Di Giannantonio is already in a 40-point hole, but Qatar will reveal whether making up that 40-point gap is completely impossible - or actually within the realm of imagination.
