MotoGP's newest team Trackhouse Aprilia has taken just half a year to shake up the rider market and buck paddock convention, by snapping up a rider not many would have expected to be on its radar just a handful of months earlier.
Instead of settling for line-up continuity or finding an equally experienced replacement to Miguel Oliveira, the Justin Marks-owned, Davide Brivio-headed American outfit has gone for a rookie signing - but ignored the clamour to pick up American Joe Roberts in favour of snatching Ai Ogura from under the noses of his long-time backer Honda.
It is a genuinely bold move, one that should have ramifications down the line for parties beyond just the figures involved.
Here is our take on the winners and losers from the latest MotoGP silly season bombshell.
Winner: Trackhouse
You would be a brave person right now to claim with any certainty Ogura is an upgrade on Oliveira even in the medium-term - the Portuguese is a five-time MotoGP race winner after all - but Ogura is a useful injection of new blood.
Trackhouse probably won't have been best served by keeping the same line-up going forward, and having a rookie on board will relieve some of the demands that will have come from Oliveira's pedigree and some of the pressure that came from his boisterous fanbase.
Ogura's credentials in grand prix racing so far are strong. He is not just the best Japanese paddock regular in a long time, but a rider who was firmly in contention for titles in both his second season of Moto3 and his second season in Moto2. He lost both of those titles, Moto2 in a genuinely humiliating fashion, but the body of work overall is there.
And it is a statement of intent, too, from Trackhouse to be able to lure away a rider who has so far been synonymous with Honda in his career. For all the current travails of the Honda RC213V, that's a mighty powerful foe to defeat on the rider market.
Loser: Honda
For the longest time, Ogura has been Honda’s appointed successor to Takaaki Nakagami, set to be the racer, who would take over that Idemitsu-backed LCR seat eventually.
Given the current state of the bike, Honda should by now be well used to facing embarrassment, yet this latest one should sting just a little bit more than the others given the money that it's invested in building up Ogura.
It won’t be the wake-up call that Honda has long needed - if that didn’t come with Marc Marquez’s departure, it never will. But it might help make the Japanese big bosses realise just how deep the rot goes.
Winner: Ai Ogura
Ogura is taking a big punt on a relatively unproven team, and forfeiting a factory contract in the process (Trackhouse riders are signed directly to the team in 2025, whereas at LCR Honda he will have surely had a works deal).
But the RC213V is just not the bike to be on right now, and tying your wagon to Honda for your first steps in the premier class is a path fraught with peril. If Ogura didn't feel that way, he would have debuted as an LCR Honda rider two years ago already.
Now he is in possession of a two-year deal on a competitive bike against a team-mate that Ogura will see as beatable. It could be just the right path to launch him into MotoGP superstardom - and if Honda is back to the front soon enough, that particular bridge can probably be rebuilt given Ogura remains the best Japanese prospect around by a healthy margin.
It is also, as Nakagami put it, a nice outcome for the state of the Japanese rider development pipeline - a rider from there getting a MotoGP call-up not because of any Idemitsu-related reason but because a European team with no prior connection to Ogura has seen him as good enough against very credible opposition.
Loser: Joe Roberts
The most obvious loser to the deal is Roberts, who many had presumed was preordained to take the second Trackhouse seat given both his nationality and his quite impressive start to the 2024 season in the middleweight class.
But, anyone who’s been paying attention to the team since Trackhouse's arrival in MotoGP should be aware that their priority is success, not flying the flag - and despite Roberts’ best-ever start to a grand prix season in 2024, he’s also been something of a hit or miss character for his 120 races in Moto2.
Trackhouse would rather invest in growing US talent at a grassroots level and allow the success to follow naturally, given that that strategy stands to pay out better in the long run - but it means the clearest path for Roberts to make his MotoGP dream come true is not coming off.
Winner: Raul Fernandez
Ogura will not be an easy team-mate, and a poor showing against him could well end Fernandez's MotoGP career down the line. It is one thing to run there or thereabout with Oliveira given an experience deficit - but repeating the same results against a rookie would be ruinous.
But the fact Trackhouse has gone for a rookie as Fernandez's team-mate, and offered both of them two-year-deals, shows that both Trackhouse and its manufacturer partner Aprilia mean it when they talk about their excitement over Fernandez's still-untapped potential.
There is security here for the Spaniard, ap expectation to lead but also the belief that he can, and a team that will be tailored around him.
It could work out really well. Unless Ogura turns out a little too strong.
Loser: Trackhouse (from a PR standpoint)
Obviously signing a Moto2 frontrunner who everyone expects to adapt well to MotoGP is a smart move for a team looking for results - but there’s one aspect to this new deal that might work less well for the other side of Trackhouse’s mission in bike racing.
A team that’s all about content creation and digital media storytelling, it might find that that’s something that’s considerably harder to do with the notoriously media-shy Ogura as its new signing.
Certainly, he’s not going to be the easy sell to the US fanbase that a character like the also-available Jack Miller would have been, given the Australian’s reputation for outspokenness. Maybe Trackhouse has got a diamond in the rough with Ogura, but it could be that the marketing team’s job has become slightly tougher.
