Jorge Martin and Pramac breathed a big sigh of relief when they got the MotoGP 2024 title over the line - but they won't have been the only ones in the paddock to feel that way.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that Aprilia will have felt only marginally less nervous than Martin and his team during the Valencia showdown - and that those nerves would've had little to do with the prospect of running the #1 plate in 2025.
The #1, assuming Martin does take it (he still hasn't confirmed one way or the other but...come on), is a nice bonus. But it is not the main thing for the success of the programme.
"This was my dream, this was my fear," Martin told MotoGP.com after becoming champion. "Whatever comes now is a present - if I can win two, three, five titles, we will see during my future. I think I am still young, so I have still maybe six-eight-10 years, who knows?
"I won my title and I will live in peace the rest of my life."
A lot has been made of the pressure Aprilia will face in fielding the reigning world champion and, publicly, especially with the #1 plate, it will be considerable.
But it is nothing compared to the internal pressure that Aprilia has successfully avoided, that of fielding a rider who has had two titles snatched away from him and now desperately needs his new employer to somehow get him within striking range again.
Here's Martin again, on that initial 2023 defeat: "I didn't want to race anymore. I had a lot of fears that appeared, I don't know why. I did an amazing season so I didn't win - I was like, 'Maybe I will never be as fast as I was, or [maybe] I will never win this championship'.
"I remember coming to the test, I was not motivated. I was fast but no motivation. I was just doing my job; they were paying me, so I was doing my job. I said 'OK, I race, I get the money, and I will go home maybe at the end of the season'."
Martin got the motivation back, and says he did change a lot over those next few months. But his admission of that initial reaction backs up something that's already intuitively obvious: a close title defeat does a brutal number on a rider, especially when said rider hasn't scored that first title yet.
And that was defeat in a title race that should never really have been on - only made possible by Pecco Bagnaia's Barcelona injury. Now imagine Martin having let the title slip away after leading the way for so much of 2024.
It would have coloured everything about his Aprilia move immediately. Maybe he would've responded well to it, maybe as well as you could possibly imagine, but the mental challenge of a title defeat immediately followed by a switch to a worse bike is not one that he will have wanted to face - and is one that Aprilia will have been desperate for him not to face.
Aprilia is not in terrible shape, but it needs something of a mini-rebuild. It needs time. It has a new technical boss in Fabiano Sterlacchini, who told us at Barcelona that to have understood the project already in the time he's had "you don't need a person that is 'good', you need God" - meaning there's a transition period to be expected.
"I think a reasonable time could be between four to eight months, something like that," Sterlacchini said.
"This doesn't mean we don't start work to that moment. But in the meantime, to have an overall quite clear picture, that is the window of time."
Aprilia has lingering weaknesses that currently make a title challenge impossible, including a set-your-watch-by-it habit to lose performance in the second half of a campaign.
"It's like aligning the planets," Sterlacchini said of the next step Aprilia needs to take. "You have to understand the 'planets' are in some position - so the engine brake, then the traction control, the way you are using the bike in some corners, how you make the pick-up. This is the sort of process.
"Clearly the performance of the Aprilia is quite good. Obviously it's not enough - because all of us are here for just one position."
Sterlacchini said he encountered a Martin in the post-season test who was "a mixture of a champion and a leader" and "quite astonishing in the way he approached the job". Truthfully, he probably would've said similar had he worked with a Martin coming off another title heartbreak - but I am not sure he would've actually encountered the same Martin.
Aprilia has a better bike than Yamaha, but for the intents of challenging for a MotoGP title it might as well be Yamaha right now. And in that sense the outlook of Fabio Quartararo - who has found himself with an uncompetitive bike after frontrunning seasons, and then recommitted to Yamaha anyway - is an informative one.
Speaking to The Race for a special edition of our podcast, which you can hear in full as part of The Race Members' Club, Quartararo was asked whether it was easier to make that renewed commitment to Yamaha because that 2021 title was already his.
"Yes," he admitted. "Yes. It's much more easy."
The status of champion that he enjoys is a luxury and a pressure-reliever that can never be taken away from him.
Martin, now, is in the same club. Without that status, as great a rider as he is, he would've been a very questionable fit for an Aprilia that needs to reset itself, for a bike that might have to get worse before it gets better.
Now, it is a situation he can afford to accept - and Aprilia is much better off for it. The #1 plate is nothing compared to that.
