#scrolling through these tweets made me discover i had accused a certain world number one of doping way back in *july*

[batsplat]

could you say that marc is the best flag to flag pilot, at least in modern motogp?

idk if it's recency bias or what but I just rewatched misano 2015 and brno 2017 and like beyond his actual skill in the wet (which I think is pretty up there) honda and him usually nailed the strategy i think

misano 2014 was obv not great bc he came in too late but I think on the whole

oh yeah, it's not particularly close. and 'modern motogp' is in this case a completely unnecessary caveat! f2f was only introduced in 2005 as a more tv-friendly format and the first f2f race was phillip island 2006. until 2015, there's not like... any real patterns amongst the winners - and generally they're rare enough that you can't draw that many conclusions from who's winning them. marc's first f2f is technically phillip island 2013, which wasn't a weather-related bike switch but did of course feature the notable team fuck up that got him disqualified and could have cost him the title. then it's aragon 2014 where he fucks it and crashes because he didn't switch bikes when he should have, yes. but after that, the record's flawless: wins misano 2015, argentina 2016 (also a tyre-related bike swap), sachsenring 2016, brno 2017 - the full set until 2021. I do have another ask sitting in my drafts sent well before misano, which requires a longer response because it's about what makes a rider good or bad at f2f... so I'll go into more detail there. for now, yes there's a little bit of luck involved in some of these wins, a gamble or two that paid off because his race wasn't actually going all that great until he swapped bikes, but it's a record that kinda speaks for itself. it also probably speaks for itself that I spent much of the season pre-aragon attempting to singlehandedly manifest rain clouds. representative sample included here of my dispassionate analysis of the situation:

which made me initially quite irritable when the rain showed up at the race after aragon, but that's neither here nor there. anyway, I will go into this in a little more detail for that other ask, but I do think it's the f2f format specifically that suits marc. it's just those specific conditions where it's not wet wet but kinda slippery and gross where he really thrives - which of course you also see with stuff like his affinity for low grip conditions in general. plus, he developed a knack for picking the correct strategies in this genre of races. his record in proper wet races is significantly worse... if I had to make a list of the best wet weather riders this century, a few names would sneak ahead (dovi, casey and valentino being the obvious picks, and some of those riders were..... not so great at f2f). here's the comparison:

so yup - he's not a bad wet weather rider by any stretch of the imagination, but it's the type of mess thrown up by f2f where he really thrives. neat skill to have