#hey rio would've been interesting. anti-clockwise but valentino was pretty goated there like he loved that track

[batsplat]

been reading through your old posts (<3) and i do love how marc’s worst tracks are vale’s best or favourite ones (sepang assen catalunya etc) and they’re arguably the two best ever to do it. like they’re so similar and yet also not!

not going to answer this properly since there is a literal thesis length ask response in my drafts with an obscene number of bar charts i just need to sit down and actually finish about each of the aliens' best and worst tracks, but yup!! assen, catalunya and mugello are all top five vale tracks and you could make an argument that they're pretty close to the bottom of the order for marc tracks. sepang is like... it's certainly a track vale LIKES though it's more top ten than top five i'd say, and with valentino there's a pretty direct relationship between 'thinking a track is fun' and 'being good at a track'. on the flip side, there's an argument to be made that aragon is valentino's worst track - it is an argument with its issues since the obvious caveat is that it was only introduced in 2010. like, obviously if he'd raced there in the noughties he would've won there at SOME point. bUT i have done the maths for how valentino's performance at a specific circuit compares to his average finishing position in any given year (aka it's a measure that tries to account for season-to-season fluctuation of overall performance level) - and by that metric, aragon still does really poorly. valencia isn't a marc specialist track but it IS a track he's pretty handy at, and i would make that valentino's outright worst track of the lot. the marc specialist track valentino has the best record at is sachsenring... which he already thought of as a kind of meh track way back in 2001 when he panicked a bit after a poor race there, but does enjoy racing at and won quite a few very close races at (2002, 2005, 2006, 2009). and another top... uh, seven-ish marc track is motegi, which is also a top three terrible valentino track. and so on

anyway the general pattern is that valentino is good at fast, flowing circuits with long fast corners that are also rich in overtaking opportunities - aka ones he also enjoys riding at, which I feel like is a bigger factor with him than it is with some other riders lol. marc is good at more technical circuits, more stop-and-go heavy ones, obviously anti-clockwise though that's not inherently something valentino struggles with. while marc tends to be good at low grip tracks, dusty tracks aren't as immediate and obvious a boost as they are for, say, casey (who is strong at the dusty treble of aragon, valencia, and qatar, whereas marc isn't a massive qatar fan). obvious caveat here is that to some extent I am also just describing the profile of honda's strong + weak circuits, which is still a bit tricky to untangle from marc's profile as a rider though we're getting more data soon... part of the reason why catalunya and sepang stand out as problem tracks is by checking dani's record at those circuits, especially sepang where he's very good at

so yeah, it's not one-to-one, but there definitely is a fun situation marc and valentino have got going on where some of marc's strongest circuits are valentino's weakest and vice versa. obviously they do also have their idiosyncrasies in how they express what their 'strongest' and 'weakest' circuits were - with marc, his super dominant tracks are the ones where he disappears two minutes off in the distance, whereas valentino.... uh, tended to just stage a bajillion intense late race duels at his specialist circuits, for dramatic effect. (my personal guess is that the reasons for this relate to how a) it's not a coincidence that the type of circuits where this type of race was even possible with any regularity are also seen as the strongest valentino circuits, since that of course plays to his biggest strengths, and b) these circuits also disproportionately play to his ability at handling late-race situations - for instance catalunya is a high tyre-deg circuit that demanded valentino could still duel late in races with little in the way of grip, which he's particularly good at. so that's why valentino didn't dominate at these circuits - he was better at tracks that didn't really punish him for taking a more languid approach to getting going in races, where he could reliably faff about and focus on having enough to fuck over his opponents at the very end. on the flip side, if you're stuck in the pack in a place like valencia, you are kinda fucked, right. idk if this is actually the reason but it's the most common sense explanation to me for why valentino only rarely seemed to dominate at what should on paper be his strongest tracks.) basically if they'd competed in their prime, marc would've still won sachsenring and whatever american circuits they had lying around by about a minute, and valentino would've consistently won a bunch of extremely close duels at mugello and catalunya and assen and so on. there's one circuit that makes both of their top 5-7 lists where I reckon they would've been pretty evenly matched if they'd competed there in their primes: phillip island. so that would've been a really exciting fight for second place once casey showed up