Marc Marquez is already set to enter the 2025 MotoGP season as a presumptive joint favourite for the title - at the very least - but back-to-back grand prix wins on his year-old Ducati mean he could still have a role to play in 2024, too.
But though a 53-point gap to first does not feel like that much when there's still 259 points on offer over the remaining rounds, by far the likeliest outcome is that Marquez's rest-of-2024 role will be title fight spoiler and aggressor rather than genuine title threat.
That doesn't feel quite right, mostly because over the past decade there has not been a rider who, championship-wise, is more intimidating when he gets on a roll.
Marquez is no stranger to breaking rivals with streaks of relentless points-scoring and, though he has never overcome a truly massive points deficit, he did win the 2017 title from 37 points back at the one-third mark.
But this is not quite 2017 - and though Marquez, thanks to well-documented wear and tear, is not quite the same rider he was back then, that's more to do with his opposition. His rivals in that era were, so much more than him, prone to massive round-to-round to variance - crucially, variance in performance rather than variance in scoring.
A dreadful, on-merit-ish run to 13th at Phillip Island kneecapped Andrea Dovizioso's charge in the aforementioned 2017 battle, while neither he with Ducati nor Maverick Vinales with Yamaha, nor anyone else, had the capacity to be up there week in, week out.
You know very well that is not the case for the two riders Marquez is chasing right now: Jorge Martin and Pecco Bagnaia. They are not late-2010s Dovizioso and Vinales - instead, they are 2015 Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi, two riders Marquez ultimately couldn't catch and didn't come particularly close to catching.
Both Bagnaia and Martin are more than capable of dropping points, but if they stay on the bike they will qualify in the top five every time. In a conventional race, they will finish in the top three every time.
The Ducati GP24 is too good, and they are too comfortable with it to be truly thrown off their game.
All of that is still true even while Marquez has made a step in the last couple of rounds. After "struggling a lot" at Silverstone, things clicked into gear following a crucial bike settings change.
It enabled him to be closer than expected at the Red Bull Ring, to dominate at Aragon and to pull a Misano win out of nowhere.
And it's meant that his rhetoric has changed a bit when discussing the championship; having previously not really even entertained the thought publicly, he tellingly said after the San Marino Grand Prix that he viewed his title hopes as being "more than last week".
"Because I'm closer," he smirked.
He also said: "During all the weekend I was fast. I was always in that top three, top four on the laptimes and this is the most important for the future races.
"It's true that still - if we want to fight for the championship, I need to improve those small mistakes."
At Misano, the relevant mistake was crashing in Q2 - an error Marquez had feared at the time would be weekend-ruining. But even still, that lap he had crashed on was only tracking for the second row after three sectors.
"Starting from ninth place, we can't wait for some rain every Sunday," he said. "If I want to fight with these two guys, I need to not do those small mistakes: on the sprints, in qualifying practice, in practice on Friday.
"This weekend I felt super good. That mistake in the qualifying practice can happen.
"The confidence is more and more and more. Some racetracks will arrive where I will struggle, yeah - but I can imagine, or I hope, that some races in Asia will be in rain conditions.
"Then everything is more open and everything can happen."
Marquez's admission that there will still be some tracks where he's on the back foot has to be paired up with the fact that, again, that's not really the case for Bagnaia and Martin.
He will not be able to rely on them being slow. Only on them messing up and dropping points by the handful.
Which, yes, they do both tend to do, but almost certainly not enough to offset a 53-point gap.
Seven rounds is still a lot. This season so far, the most points Martin has dropped to a theoretical 'perfect rival' (an imaginary rider who either wins or finishes second to Martin when Martin wins) is 96 points. For Bagnaia, that number is 83. So if Marquez wins every remaining race - yeah, the title is probably his.
But that's not a realistic expectation even if he was routinely beating those two - and it's certainly not something that you should see as plausible now that he's won two grands prix.
These wins have come at Aragon - a Marquez stronghold where the combination of intermittent rain and a new surface turned him from 'likely winner' into 'untouchable demigod' this year - and Misano - a victory that required a mid-race mini-shower.
There are no more Aragons left on the calendar - there are some good Marquez tracks like Motegi and Phillip Island and Misano again, but none at that kind of level. And while the weather in the Asian leg of competition does get weird, it won't get weird every Saturday and Sunday.
Instead, Marquez now is effectively in the same position as Enea Bastianini. There is a narrow band of respective circumstances - narrower for Bastianini than for Marquez - in which they can absolutely dominate Martin and Bagnaia, but it's narrow.
It will be different in 2025, with equal footing in terms of machinery and points. And Marquez's recent upturn in form boosts his already-formidable 2025 title prospects substantially.
But 2024 remains a red herring. Things can and do change very, very quickly in MotoGP, but right now Marquez is infinitely more likely to play kingmaker than to be king.
