A new MotoGP season means a new MotoGP season of rider rankings - albeit with a different person in charge this time, for I've long wanted to have a go.
And while the Buriram race weekend wasn't the most complicated in terms of race action, it immediately served up a brutal dilemma as to who to place first.
The idea behind the rider rankings is to grade riders' performances all through the MotoGP weekend - though primarily the sessions that actually count towards something - in how impressive they really were.
In my case, that is based on what I think I know about those riders' machinery, performance level and outside circumstances - but it's not an exact science, and your own ranking may of course differ hugely. It's often more fun if it does.
1 Ai Ogura
Qualified: 5th Sprint: 4th GP: 5th
There are two riders wholly deserving of the number one spot this week, but while Marc Marquez's triumph told us something we already knew, Ai Ogura's debut told us something we didn't.
Make no mistake - this is one of the most dazzling debuts in modern MotoGP history. Ogura was good in the pre-season, and his pre-MotoGP record is glistening, but a qualifying and two races have taken it from 'well, yeah, it's not surprising he's good' to 'oh my God how did Honda let him go?!'.
Ducati dunked on its rivals despite bringing a largely 2024-spec bike again. Without Ogura, the best Ducati to best-of-the-rest gap would've been 15 seconds on Sunday - but because of him it's just seven and a half.
This, too, on a track that Aprilia hasn't loved historically, full of the kind of straightline braking that was Ogura's weakness in his first days on a MotoGP bike.
2 Marc Marquez
Qualified: 1st Sprint: 1st GP: 1st
Marc Marquez was forced to tip his hand on Sunday over just how much he had in reserve due to struggling to get into the correct tyre pressure range - and so having to drop down to second place.
It should've been a huge drama. But it was just such a hilariously minor inconvenience instead, and Marquez sitting for lap after lap in the dirty air and heat of his brother's bike before pulling the pin.
It would've been a cop-out to have two riders in first place, and it wasn't a generational rookie performance by definition. Because of this he isn't my most impressive rider of the weekend - instead only the best, by a humongous margin.
3 Alex Marquez
Qualified: 2nd Sprint: 2nd GP: 2nd
The hand-me-down Ducati GP24, even though it's apparently in mid-season 2024 spec, has officially unlocked the once-Moto3 and Moto2 champion Alex Marquez.
Strong peak laptimes in the pre-season are one thing - they are to be expected of a rider with a hand-me-down bike who's not having to do development work - but the proof was going to be in the race pace.
Both in the sprint and in the race, it's almost like you were sitting there waiting for the pace 'cliff' to arrive. It never did, which suggests this step by Alex is for real.
4 Pecco Bagnaia
Qualified: 3rd Sprint: 3rd GP: 3rd
There is a gap the size of the Mariana Trench between third and fifth place on this ranking, and Pecco Bagnaia slots somewhere in the middle of that gap.
Bagnaia did well to recover from his abhorrent luck on Friday with the 'fake' yellow flag and the Franco Morbidelli impeding. I'm not at all sympathetic to his argument that his yellow flag lap should've been reinstated - but his pace did not warrant a Q1 appearance.
What will be a concern is that it didn't warrant a top-two either. Bagnaia felt the sprint performance pointed to a continuation of his long-term struggles with braking while using the sprint-spec 12-litre fuel tank, but he wasn't that much quicker with the 22-litre on Sunday in the end.
5 Jack Miller
Qualified: 4th Sprint: DNF GP: 11th
Jack Miller crashed in the sprint after, by his own admission, ignoring a couple of understeer 'warnings' from the bike, then spent the grand prix as a rolling roadblock. It's a very Miller weekend description, featuring tendencies he tends to get crucified for.
Maybe some other week. But I cannot overlook the pace this week. I cannot overlook putting the Yamaha fourth on the grid.
The fact his aero fairing came a bit loose on Sunday didn't help and won't have been his fault. Still, it would've been a bad weekend if he was a seasoned Yamaha veteran.
He isn't - he vastly outperformed my pace expectations through pre-season testing and now this race, and the credit that earns is being paid forward here with this charitable ranking.
6 Johann Zarco
Qualified: 12th Sprint: 10th GP: 7th
There's a pervasive feeling that has carried through the pre-season into this season opener that Johann Zarco's not there yet with the new Honda RC213V, at least relative to stablemate Joan Mir.
And he's basically admitted as much, putting it down to a riding style difference.
But Mir ended the weekend on the floor while Zarco ended it by giving Honda its best finish in any MotoGP race in over a year. That, of course, matters more than any 'pervasive feeling'.
7 Marco Bezzecchi
Qualified: 9th Sprint: 12th GP: 6th
The above results would've actually made for a pretty good Marco Bezzecchi weekend in 2024 - and they're broadly in line with what you'd want from a rider on a new bike.
Unfortunately for Bezzecchi, he'd raised expectations in the pre-season and now the dastardly Ogura has blasted those expectations into the sky.
Bezzecchi made life harder for himself than it needed to be with a crash in qualifying (his second Turn 3 fall of the weekend), then a horrible start from the dirty side of the grid ruined his sprint.
His Sunday recovery was reasonable, but he expects more will come in cleaner-air circumstances - which he'd denied himself in qualifying.
8 Joan Mir
Qualified: 11th Sprint: 9th GP: DNF
Mir is relentlessly building a reputation as MotoGP's pre-eminent crasher, but said the Thai GP exit was in part caused by getting burns from the bike - the worst he's ever felt it in any race - and that last corner being particularly bad for him.
Given it's not a new issue for the Honda in particular and given it's an issue other riders felt here, too, I am inclined to show grace.
The performance, ultimately, was good, genuinely around top-six good, and his recovery ride on Saturday after being slowed by Bezzecchi's sideways start is worth more than the one point he scored.
He was then irked at Bezzecchi on Sunday for overtaking him 'the easy way' - i.e. with little regard for the rival - and costing him positions, but rewatching that incident all seems above board.
9 Fabio Di Giannantonio
Qualified: 13th Sprint: DNF GP: 10th
If the circumstances of Fabio Di Giannantonio's injury - messing about on the bike in the pre-season - came into the calculation here, yeah, he'd be much lower.
But, taking a Thai GP-only view, ‘Diggia’ came in hurt and with minimal mileage on the bike, and toughed it out for a halfway-decent weekend.
With no power in his shoulder and burns from the bike on Saturday triggering his retirement, even just a six-point haul is honestly pretty awesome, and hints at a good season ahead.
10 Franco Morbidelli
Qualified: 6th Sprint: 5th GP: 4th
Morbidelli’s docked some 'ranking points' for impeding Bagnaia on Friday, which was a needless complication in both riders' weekend.
Pace-wise, though, this was fairly convincing, especially compared to last year on the same bike - though you'd really like for him to be giving Alex Marquez more of a fight right now for the position of lead Ducati satellite rider.
11 Enea Bastianini
Qualified: 20th Sprint: 18th GP: 9th
Enea Bastianini was pencilled in for a sub-20 place in these rankings after the sprint - yet in the end even 11th position feels almost low.
After admitting on Friday that his feeling on the Tech3 KTM was '1/10' and that he was messing up the final corner almost every time, and sounding like he needs fundamental changes to the bike's ergonomics to be competitive, he pulled out a fantastic salvage job on Sunday to finish just a tenth of a second off the lead KTM.
He's still lacking performance mid-corner - particularly on fresh tyres - but was able to flash some of that old Bastianini magic in the latter parts of the race by dialling out the engine brake.
12 Brad Binder
Qualified: 14th Sprint: 8th GP: 8th
Brad Binder lamented the fact he potentially chose the wrong rear tyre (medium over soft) for the grand prix, but it's hard to imagine his race coming out much better.
He was hamstrung by a familiar qualifying underperformance, which yellow flags didn't help but didn't fully account for, then had to be more gentle on the tyres then he would've liked given the KTM is by multiple accounts showing some nasty tyre-chewing tendencies.
13 Somkiat Chantra
Qualified: 21st Sprint: 19th GP: 18th
An impeding penalty on Friday aside, Somkiat Chantra gave a good first account of himself - especially considering the expectations that, relative to the two other rookies, are on the modest side.
The gap to the other, vastly more experienced Honda riders was never outrageous and in some moments actually quite promising.
And it's not a huge surprise that he struggled to access that last bit of qualifying performance (not yet used to braking in the slipstream, which you want to seek when you qualify a Honda) and didn't manage his tyres perfectly in the race - normal rookie stuff.
14 Fermin Aldeguer
Qualified: 15th Sprint: 13th GP: 13th
The intensity of a MotoGP weekend coupled with a full-distance race as hot as this one seemed to overwhelm Fermin Aldeguer a little, and he probably performed a touch below his true pace - having targeted a top-10.
What glimpses there were of that assumed true pace were indeed pretty encouraging - not Ogura-level, but certainly good enough for the average rookie.
15 Luca Marini
Qualified: 16th Sprint: 15th GP: 12th
A weekend in which Luca Marini seemed to lack that final percent of pace, though the result was reasonable in the end.
It was more reasonable in the context of him going close to last at the start after failing to do his start procedures correctly - but that's also his fault ultimately, so offsets the credit for his comeback.
16 Pedro Acosta
Qualified: 7th Sprint: 6th GP: 19th
I don't come out of this weekend worried about Pedro Acosta - only KTM.
After what he described as potentially his best Friday in MotoGP, Acosta's weekend just didn't really come together - first hindered by not managing to disengage his start device braking into Turn 1 in the sprint, then a crash on Sunday as the bike unloaded the rear tyre (which is apparently a tendency).
The evidence from Buriram is he's KTM's best guy, even with the crash - but it should be coming easier than this.
17 Fabio Quartararo
Qualified: 10th Sprint: 7th GP: 15th
Fabio Quartararo just looked not himself, as he had in the test.
Fellow Yamaha rider Miller's qualifying was inaccessible to him because he isn't as comfortable following another bike in qualifying (Miller was using Bagnaia as a reference very well) - but you would've really expected Quartararo to assert himself more in race trim, and that just didn't happen.
The front was an issue all weekend, the rear didn't agree with him on Sunday, especially in those early laps where he went 10th to nearly 20th. End result is a weekend to forget.
18 Miguel Oliveira
Qualified: 17th Sprint: 16th GP: 14th
Miguel Oliveira was lacking front grip through the weekend - a big limitation at Buriram - but at least seemed to make a decent step forward relative to the test.
It was looking like a long, long three days - and coming out of it with a couple of points while the learning process is still ongoing can be satisfactory.
19 Raul Fernandez
Qualified: 8th Sprint: 11th GP: DNF
In moments Raul Fernandez looked quite fast - though I'm not convinced that he was ever quite Ogura-fast - but has nothing to show for it.
On Saturday he paid the price for going deep-ish into Turn 3 early on and losing key ground, and on Sunday failing to clear Miller quick was his undoing - he went on to cook his front tyre behind Miller (very rapidly and to an extreme extent that confused him) and was forced to retire.
He just needs to show the MotoGP world he can actually string a race weekend together.
20 Lorenzo Savadori
Qualified: 22nd Sprint: 20th GP: 20th
Long-time readers of this column will know that my colleague Simon Patterson, who ranked riders last year, tended to be quite favourable towards test and replacement riders.
I'd like to think I am kind, too - but I'd struggle to rank them too high, just to emphasise how competitive the full-timers actually are these days.
Lorenzo Savadori had a solid weekend in relief of Jorge Martin that was never going to yield meaningful positions. But he can be very proud of the work he's done on what looks a much-improved 2025-spec Aprilia.
21 Maverick Vinales
Qualified: 18th Sprint: 14th GP: 16th
Maverick Vinales' veneer of positivity slipped for the first time in his KTM tenure after the chequered flag on Sunday. It was a bad race.
There are glimpses of good single-lap performance from him already, and he's capable of running at reasonable pace in clean air, but in the pack he has found himself edge grip-limited on the front - and thus frankly not competitive.
Taking a hard front was perhaps a mistake - given the race Tech3 team-mate Bastianini had on the soft - but it also must be acknowledged that struggling in race conditions is not an unfamiliar issue for the Vinales of recent years.
22 Alex Rins
Qualified: 19th Sprint: 17th GP: 17th
Excluding the life-altering Italian Grand Prix crash on the LCR Honda in 2023 - a crash that might or might not explain what's going on right now - and other weekends with outside circumstances, this might have been the worst weekend of Alex Rins' accomplished career.
Having his leg "fully burned" by the bike in the extreme heat on Sunday explains some of the final result, but getting outqualified by the two Yamaha newcomers at their first attempt is brutal.
If the rest of 2025 is at all like this, there should not be a 2026 for the Rins/Yamaha experience.
