Alex Rins's rotten luck with injury has been the defining, all-affecting aspect of his Yamaha MotoGP stint - but there is only so much time that can buy as an excuse before it becomes a problem instead.
Rins was "devastated" at the end of the Japanese Grand Prix - a bad race at the end of a bad weekend for Yamaha, in which the M1s struggled to perform session after session.
The lack of rear contact - the rear kicking up under braking - was name-checked as a culprit, and lead rider Fabio Quartararo was surly throughout, irritated by what he felt was further evidence to his theory that Yamaha's performance is too conditioned (or, even, wholly conditioned) by the level of grip offered by the track.
He had starred, relatively speaking, at the high-grip Misano, but Mandalika and Motegi hadn't offered the same bite from the surface - even though the latter would be considered a relatively high-grip venue for most MotoGP manufacturers - and he largely toiled.
Rins was likewise unimpressed with the M1 at Motegi: "zero edge grip", "massive spin" on the throttle, front moving into the corner, the rear kicking up so much he felt it spent more than three seconds of laptime in the air.
But his tone as the weekend progressed increasingly suggested a realisation that Yamaha's struggles cannot be used as a shield because his team-mate is annihilating him.
Even a grumpy, visibly irritated Quartararo was still running up the score on Rins all weekend. He was three quarters of a second faster in Q1, 10 seconds ahead in the sprint, eight seconds ahead in the main race - which he finished in 12th, four places ahead of Rins.
For much of the weekend, performance-wise, Rins was basically right in the middle between Quartararo and Yamaha's wildcard Remy Gardner rather than challenging his full-time team-mate.
It's not how it should be.
"Really tough race. I don't know what to say, I'm devastated," Rins lamented after the grand prix.
"Doing all the laps at 190bpm heart rate, giving my maximum for this. It was so difficult.
"The first part of the race was not so bad, we started the race with the set-up from Austria to see if on the braking side we were able to improve and have more rear contact. More or less it was a little bit better, I was able to feel the bike a bit better. But 10 laps to the end, as soon as the [rear] tyre drops, it was almost impossible to control the spin, even [when the bike was] straight.
"I don't know what to say. We need to find something because for sure it’s not the way. I'm not happy with the work that we are doing."
Rins then acknowledged that his "maximum rival" is Quartararo right now and that "this weekend he was a little bit faster than us" - a bit of an understatement.
"Maybe Fabio had more contact with the rear on the braking area, maybe he has a better set-up than us. Many years with the same bike.
"I don't know; I don't want to find excuses, he was just faster than Remy and myself. So we need to find something."
Quartararo has 86 points in the standings to Rins's 20. Feel free to tack on another 10 or so to Rins's tally for the races he's missed - Assen and Silverstone due to hand and foot fractures, Misano II due to a high fever - and it's still fairly grim reading.
Rins vs Quartararo in qualifying*
last relevant session (Practice, Q1 or Q2)
Overall: Quartararo 0.307s faster
Before Assen injury: Quartararo 0.115s faster
Since Assen injury: Quartararo 0.613s faster
Those things have given his campaign an unwanted stop-start nature and have clearly sapped his momentum in learning what is still a relatively unfamiliar bike while going up against one of the grid's best riders.
But they aren't what's casting the biggest shadow over his 2024. That would be the awful double leg break he suffered last May at Misano, while still an LCR Honda rider not far removed from a fairytale Grand Prix of the Americas win.
That injury wrote off Rins's 2023 and was still clearly hindering him as he began his Yamaha adaptation. He insists now that it's no longer a limitation on the bike, but when you watch him limp in the paddock you struggle to believe that it isn't putting at least an indirect cap on his performance.
At a certain point though, that doesn't really matter.
There were lots of doubts about how long Rins's predecessor Franco Morbidelli's knee injury lingered into his works Yamaha stint, how much of it was Quartararo destroying Morbidelli on merit and how much of it was Morbidelli no longer being the same rider that compared to him well in 2019 and particularly 2020.
But even as Morbidelli improved and drew closer to Quartararo, he never did so by enough to change his status as someone expendable, to repair the Yamaha bosses' shaken faith. Rins was brought in as a no-brainer upgrade, a rider flirting with 'elite' status replacing one who was clearly limited.
A year on, he has not been a clear upgrade. Morbidelli scored 59% of Quartararo's tally last year, while Rins is on 23% now.
If you're being extremely charitable, you can say it's been a wash given Rins's injuries. He was on an OK trajectory before the Assen injuries, albeit still being reliably outperformed by Quartararo over race distances (unless Quartararo's arm ran out of stamina).
Morbidelli can point to weekends here and there in 2023 where he was genuinely showing up Quartararo. Rins, as his points tally very clearly demonstrates, cannot - not really.
Yamaha has already granted him a two-year extension - rightly so, knowing his ceiling - but this is getting existential. It is not his fault, but MotoGP has not seen much in the way of glimpses even of pre-leg break Rins since the injury.
If he runs like this in 2025, with two more Yamahas on the grid thanks to the Pramac tie-in, it will not be pretty. Yamaha has bigger issues to worry about right now, but that did not save Morbidelli's future with the firm a year ago.
Rins cannot assume he will get a longer leash.
