Aprilia MotoGP racer Marco Bezzecchi's strong (and somewhat unexpected) fourth place in Saturday's sprint race at Silverstone isn't just Bezzecchi's best result to date for his new factory - it has also sent an important message to his absent team-mate Jorge Martin at a particularly important time for his fractured relationship with the team.
Bezzecchi didn't exactly look set for a strong sprint given that qualifying had left him a somewhat distant 11th on the grid - a circumstance that immediately went from bad to worse when the lights went out.
Unable to disengage his front start device, he immediately went backwards, falling as far down the order as 19th on the first lap before launching his recovery.
Able to lap at the same pace as race leaders Alex and Marc Marquez once he got clear air and to find his way through the pack with relative ease, though, it didn't take Bezzecchi long to get going - and to bring himself into the fight for the podium in the final laps of the 10-lap race.
The only hitch was it took him slightly longer than he would have preferred to find a way past the excellent defensive riding of Yamaha'sFabio Quartararo. Another lap on the end of the race would most likely have meant that Bezzecchi would have been able to steal third away from Fabio Di Giannantonio to record his first podium since Jerez last April and his first so far for Aprilia.
And while that is in itself an excellent result for Bezzecchi and a sign that Aprilia is at last moving in the right direction after a tough start to the season, it might serve a double purpose for Aprilia - boosting the confidence of not just one but two of its riders.
Thanks to extensive media leaks since the last race at Le Mans, it's no longer a secret that Aprilia's reigning world champion star rider Martin is looking elsewhere for 2026 following his own disastrous start to the season.
So far able to finish only a single sprint race in Qatar after injury on top of injury and, as a result, wholly unable to really assess the level of the Aprilia RS-GP he's contracted to ride for another year and a half, he's been looking for a way out of his contract, much to the distaste of his Aprilia bosses.
However, with Aprilia believed by The Race's sources to still be keen to keep Martin rather than lose him despite this move, much of the team's focus behind the scenes right now is likely to be on convincing him that there's untapped potential in the bike even if he's not yet been able to fully explore it himself.
And while the lacklustre performances of Aprilia in general and Bezzecchi in particular up until this point might not have managed to do that, it's hard to imagine that team principal Massimo Rivola won't be in touch with Martin on Saturday evening to help reassure him that the Silverstone race was a better representation of what's possible than what we've seen so far this year from the team.
It's unlikely that Bezzecchi is going to be too focused on that, though - given that he's both recorded his own best result to date and managed to stay out of the drama engulfing the rest of his team.
"I don't focus on any bullshit that is not regarding me," he said when asked about it earlier in the weekend.
