The physical attrition inherent in top-level motorcycle racing means that every season in MotoGP there is at least one rider whose campaign carries a massive asterisk.
In 2024 that asterisk belonged to Franco Morbidelli's season, even though Morbidelli, unlike nearly half of his peers, ran in every sprint and every grand prix race.
A bad crash during road bike training at Portimao caused a brain injury and completely wrote off a pre-season that the Italian was supposed to spend not only getting into racing shape, but learning a Ducati bike totally foreign to him basically from scratch after his switch from Yamaha.
So in the early rounds there was really no way of knowing how one was supposed to feel about Morbidelli's performances - was he impressing, was he underwhelming, could it even be fair at all to talk in terms of 'impressing' and 'underwhelming' given the traumatic brain injury he'd suffered?
Morbidelli ended the season with a clean bill of health but the picture of his year didn't exactly clear up. Of course, assessing a MotoGP rider's performance is educated guesswork at the best of times, but it becomes a random number generator when you take an external factor like this and try to somehow account for it.
This is how you get my colleague Simon Patterson placing Morbidelli eighth in his end-of-season assessment for The Race, while I had him 16th in my own ranking.
"A head injury is something delicate," said Morbidelli at the Barcelona finale when asked by The Race if he was still feeling the after-effects of what happened at the start of the year.
"I have nothing...I mean, I brought nothing, no permanent damage in my brain. So, yeah, I'm OK on that side."
But is it still impacting the performance? Is it still, by virtue of the time lost early in the year, robbing him of the chance to take on Pecco Bagnaia and Jorge Martin?
"We caught up big time. But not completely," he added.
"We didn't reach Pecco and Jorge's level apart from Misano 1 [the first of two weekends at the venue]. But apart from Misano 1 we were either close to them or a bit further, so therefore close to P3 or P6 at the worst. But we never were the reference this year. Apart from Misano 1 and some sessions.
"So, what we are aiming to do for next year is to step this thing up and try to be the reference."
We at least got some clarity on the kind of Ducati rider Morbidelli is currently tracking to be in the second part of 2024. For all the uncertainties of his campaign the performance pattern seemed ever clearer: there was a marked improvement in single-lap pace, and the occasional ability to mix with the other GP24s up front, yet it always looked too tall an order come Sunday's full-distance race.
The longer-run race pace let him down consistently, which Morbidelli put down to "a combination of everything" and pinpointed as a top priority to improve in 2025.
"It always seems that I've got the speed but always missing something in a race," he said. "Probably I need to work better with the team, work better for arranging the setting and the things for the race."
Of course, the management over a race distance is something that feels intuitively linked to experience and knowledge reserves. And this is not the first time MotoGP has seen a Yamaha-to-Ducati transition where a rider quickly brings single-lap performance to an acceptable level yet struggles to maintain it over distances.
That was exactly the pattern Jorge Lorenzo's first season at Ducati followed back in 2017, and by 2018 Lorenzo - aided by changes to the bike - was finally a potent all-round threat, though was quickly subdued by injuries.
That Ducati, of course, wasn't this Ducati, the Ducati Lorenzo helped make - the more versatile, more potent package that some riders say is particularly notable for suiting a variety of riding styles. But Lorenzo also hadn't suffered a brain injury coming into his first Ducati season.
Ducati riders by average 2024 race position (grands prix only)
Pecco Bagnaia - 2.1
Jorge Martin - 2.3
Marc Marquez - 4.7
Enea Bastianini - 5.7
Franco Morbidelli (2nd half of 2024) - 7.0
Fabio Di Giannantonio - 8.5
Alex Marquez - 8.7
Franco Morbidelli (total) - 9.1
Marco Bezzecchi - 9.6
Franco Morbidelli (1st half of 2024) - 11.1
Morbidelli's own assessment of how much the injury setback cost him, performance-wise, is an interesting one.
"I lost some points," he adds. "I think I could've fought for P5 for the championship. Not P4, not P3, neither P2 or P1. But P5, yeah, I could've fought for it."
In a vacuum, with a bike like the Ducati GP24, fifth is obviously not enough (nor therefore his actual position of ninth). But we don't really know what to expect from riders making the switch from another manufacturer to a Ducati these days; the only truly recent example is Marc Marquez, and he, as always, is a special case, and on an older-spec bike.
There were moments in 2024 where it felt like Morbidelli was truly kicking on, but also moments where it felt like stagnation. And in any of those latter moments you inevitably had to ask - is it the injury and the lost time, or is he bumping up against some more fundamental limitation?
Only the upcoming season - in the familiar confines of VR46 Ducati, crew-chiefed by Matteo Flamigni, who Morbidelli described as "one of the first heroes for me in this sport" - will really help us understand things better.
Because, yes, 'did Franco Morbidelli have a decent 2024 or was he poor?' is not that important a question in its own right - but clearing up the answer to it will go hand in hand with determining what the three-time grand prix winner's long-term MotoGP future actually looks like.
