The events of the wet-dry-wet French Grand Prix felt like they had precious little to do with all the other premier-class sessions that had made up the rest of the MotoGP weekend.
And yet, for all that luck inevitably plays a part in deciding who is the bigger winner in conditions like these, the three podium finishers did genuinely seem a cut above in terms of the impression they'd made through the whole of the weekend.
But which one of them was most impressive?
The idea behind the rider rankings is to grade riders' performances all through the MotoGP weekend - though primarily the sessions that actually count towards something - in how impressive they really were.
I base it on what I think I know about those riders' machinery, performance level and outside circumstances - but it's not an exact science, and your own ranking may of course differ hugely. It's often more fun if it does.
After each race I answer your questions and comments on my rankings in a debrief video for The Race Members’ Club on Patreon - if you want to take part, head to Patreon and leave your comment on this post.
Qualifying: 11th Sprint: 6th GP: 1st
When a rider wins the main race of the weekend by 20 seconds, you'd have to have a pretty good reason to deny them first place in the rankings - and the rest of Johann Zarco's weekend gives me no such reason.
He still feels a little off with the Honda in the dry, like had been the case at Jerez, which was reflected in a so-so Friday and a Q2 crash - but the sprint was salvaged impressively.
And while there's almost always a dash of luck when you win a rain chaos race like this one, Zarco's pace all through the 26-lap race - on rain tyres that had to suffer on an almost bone-dry track in the early laps - was remarkable and held up amazingly.
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 1st GP: 2nd
There were hints of Sachsenring-and-COTA Marc at some points this weekend, with Marquez's race pace for any conventional contest looking completely out of reach for his rivals from the very first session.
But you could see that he's now riding with a keen awareness of the championship - and that he's not totally attuned to the bike on fresh tyres with a full fuel load - in the early laps of both the sprint and the grand prix.
The thing is, that's totally fine when the margin over rivals on used tyres is massive (as it again looked in the sprint) and rain is no big worry.
Even with the crashes at COTA and Jerez, he's more than good value for this suddenly-balooning championship lead.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 3rd GP: 3rd
A borderline win contender on Sunday who could've easily been top of these rankings, after a weekend at a track that didn't really work for him in Moto2 (though perhaps that was a Boscoscuro chassis particularity).
Aldeguer crashed in qualifying - at the part of the track Marquez later told him he expected him to crash, looking at the data - but his one-lap pace is coming along well, and the rest of the arsenal is already in place.
The sketchier conditions got on Sunday, the faster Aldeguer seemed to get, to the point where his suboptimal pit timing was probably caused by the fact he was coping with the slicks-on-wet challenge much better than even the Marquez brothers.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 5th GP: 5th
There was nothing truly spectacular about Maverick Vinales' weekend - as fellow KTMs seemed to run him a little closer than in previous weekends, as he laboured to overtake Pedro Acosta in the sprint and spun up the medium wet rear tyre on the straights in the grand prix.
Yet fifth-fifth-fifth across qualifying, the sprint and the main race feels about right, and he would've taken that place in the rankings, too, if the rider behind him had been just a bit nicer to the volunteers working at Le Mans.
Vinales was also right to accentuate that he looked considerably better than expected in those initial laps on slicks on a sketchy, grip-less track on Sunday. The KTM hasn't fixed all of his weaknesses, but it's clear as day it's negating at least some.
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 4th GP: DNF
Fabio Quartararo was right to throw all caution to the wind (leading to a crash) in those opening Sunday laps, because otherwise there is precious little evidence the Quartararo-and-Yamaha combination can count on a good result from a conventional wet-weather ride.
I'm less convinced of that same strategy in the sprint (even though he did stay on), because he seemed to have nothing left in the tank for the final laps.
But the overriding impression of the weekend is still that pole position, and it cannot and should not be taken for granted just how much better Quartararo is when it comes to extracting that peak pace than any of his Yamaha peers.
However, he also gets a bit of a ranking 'sanction' for his conduct towards the Le Mans marshals after his crash, as he threw a tantrum and got very aggressive when they refused to help him get his bike refired. Not relevant to his performance, although it will rightly cost him practice time at Silverstone - but also, like, he should knock it off regardless.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 2nd GP: DNF
"The crashes make our weekend look like a disaster, but it's not like this."
This is true. Alex was stellar in the dry part of the weekend, at a track he expected to struggle more on, and probably doesn't deserve to leave the weekend losing 23 points to his brother.
But two crashes on Sunday - the first dropping him out of the top five, the second ending his race - were obviously two too many, the second leaving Marquez particularly angry as he felt he pushed too much given the bike's handlebar and winglet damage.
"Those mistakes we have to control. Those 5-10 points would be really helpful for the championship."
Ain't that the truth.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 19th GP: 4th
Finally at least on the level again with Vinales, though beaten badly in qualifying - a consequence of yellow flags, but also part of a trend Pedro Acosta pointed out in Vinales making the difference over one lap (though Vinales himself feels it's the weakest part of his game right now).
Especially accounting for his recent arm pump surgery, he raced as well as could be reasonably expected both on Saturday and on Sunday - save for falling on the final lap of the sprint.
That torpedoed somewhat an otherwise strong impression from a ride in which he masterfully soaked up the pressure from Vinales.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 9th GP: DNF
Joan Mir compromised the weekend a bit by crashing his preferred Honda on Friday (it got shredded after bouncing over the kerb) and hurting his Q1 challenge - but took the right lesson from that by keeping a bit of laptime in reserve in the sprint to ensure he finished and scored.
That makes it particularly cruel that Enea Bastianini's Dunlop chicane lunge forcing Mir's evasive action not only led to a fifth Mir DNF in six grands prix, but also fractured Mir's right hand as he hit Zarco's Honda and then Bastianini's by-then rider-less KTM.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 10th GP: 7th
This wasn't a game-changing weekend for Raul Fernandez's current status in MotoGP, but at least there's finally something to grab on to.
It sure didn't look like it when he crashed on the outlap to start the weekend, but that was an oil-on-the-rear-tyre situation, and in that context Fernandez did very well to rebuild and finally make Q2.
The sprint got away from him - he spent a couple of laps "cleaning" the front tyre - but overall there were at least peaks of pace that felt totally absent earlier this season.
In the wet, he wasn't alone in feeling the medium rear wasn't up to snuff, but at least salvaged a result.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: 12th GP: 11th
Luca Marini knows as well as anyone that he should not have bailed out on his initial wet tyre strategy, but I accept that's easy to say when you're not the one having to ride in the pack while on the wrong tyre.
In the dry, he looked reasonably competitive with the other Hondas - something he attributes to a step from the post-Jerez test, with Honda having apparently managed to open up the bike weight distribution options a bit to help him load the rear more.
Qualifying: 22nd Sprint: 16th GP: 6th
Wildcarding test rider and racing returnee Taka Nakagami spent day one testing Honda's new carbon swingarm, which got parked after Friday.
His pace out of the blocks was actually very impressive for a test rider, but a step in qualifying trim just did not come - and he toiled particularly badly in Q1 after the Ai Ogura red flag, struggling to get himself back into rhythm.
But, obviously, he deserves a lot of credit for his execution on Sunday, using Zarco's strategy for a slow-but-steady sixth on an unrefined bike that hamstrung him with too much traction control.
Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 18th GP: 9th
Lorenzo Savadori's 'lab bike' Aprilia was giving him some trouble this weekend - the implication was that something majorly new on the bike (the in-development new swingarm?) was misbehaving - but rain on Sunday allowed Savadori to run a more conventional spec.
He did reasonably well with it. The call to go to the grid on slicks for the restart (which nobody else did) was a brave one, and in some alternate universe (where the rain doesn't come and the rules are the pre-COTA rules) it pays off with a podium. But even once the strategy was proven to be suboptimal Savadori did well to hang in there.
Qualifying: 14th Sprint: 8th GP: 12th
Alex Rins was denied a good shot at Q2 on Friday by an alternator issue, then missed out by a narrow margin on Saturday.
A two-point sprint performance negated that disappointment, but he missed the opportunity to completely turn his weekend around by forfeiting the 'golden ticket' strategy of starting on wets on Sunday - pitting because the Yamaha felt too much of a handful in those conditions.
But it is more relevant that, while he's the second-highest Yamaha in these rankings, the true performance ranking among the M1 quartet in representative conditions has Rins in an increasingly clear third place.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 11th GP: DNF
Another weekend of Jack Miller very obviously being quicker than the final results suggest - the final results being a third consecutive non-score, so it's fair to say it's getting old.
Miller did a reasonable job in the single-lap portions of the weekend, not on Quartararo's otherworldly level but good enough as back-up, and it's difficult to fault him too much for the sprint unravelling - as he got boxed in behind a wall of KTMs in a bad place at the Dunlop chicane, then got punted to the run-off by another KTM (troublemaker Bastianini).
Equally, there's only so critical you can be of a "strange" Sunday crash in the Raccordement corner where everyone was falling off - but while Miller won't much care about what that crash did to his position in the rankings, he was clearly devastated post-race in knowing that it cost him a very probable win (or second place, given he had the lesser-fancied medium wet rear on).
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: DNF GP: 16th
Pecco Bagnaia certainly didn't deserve the rotten Dunlop chicane luck of being rammed into by Bastianini and suffering bike damage that forced a race-ruining pitstop he would've otherwise forgone.
Without all that, he very well may have won - but that his weekend also didn't deserve.
That Bagnaia has accepted he just has to ride around the particular demands of this Desmosedici is important, and his feeling he's getting somewhere in that process is important, too. But they're less important than the cold hard truths of the stopwatch.
He cannot dream of winning this championship right now not because he crashed in the sprint and got crashed into in the main race, but because there has hardly been a weekend where he's looked anywhere near the fastest (we can debate Qatar), and even second- and third-fastest has looked a tall order.
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 7th GP: 8th
The Le Mans weekend marked a deeply unwelcome appearance by early-2023-spec Fabio Di Giannantonio, a frustrating figure who everyone thought had been banished for good.
Jerez was shaky already but here Di Giannantonio's single-lap pace was so rough that he was barely top-15 material - though he was better over longer distances.
In the dry he initially felt bereft of front confidence, but he at least left Le Mans believing he had zeroed in on a base set-up - which he'd lacked after his injury-ruined pre-season.
The points haul in the wet in the wet was worse than it could've been (he pitted late like Aldeguer) but better than the rest of the weekend had suggested.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 14th GP: 10th
The first truly rough weekend of Ogura's MotoGP career, which he foreshadowed a little by admitting on Thursday he "doesn't really like" riding here.
Ogura said he's more sensitive to Le Mans' temperature particularities than other riders, and crashed twice on the usually-cooler left side of the front tyre - on Friday and in Q1.
That turned the sprint into a mission to recover confidence, but Sunday was another reset because of the conditions - with Ogura's only other experience of MotoGP coming in Friday practice at COTA, where he was shockingly off the pace.
"For me it was not even a race. It was like practice in wet conditions," he said of Sunday's ride, which did yield a top-10.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 17th GP: 14th
Bike stability remains the end-all and be-all question of Marco Bezzecchi's Aprilia tenure so far - he finally did a great job in one-lap trim, both on Friday and in Q2, but it was undone when he went exploring the desert oasis of the Garage Vert gravel trap, caught out by a bike shake in Aldeguer's slipstream.
Sunday could've been so much better had he stuck to his self-admitted plan of just copying Miller's strategy. But he backed out, before crashing on slicks as rain picked up.
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 20th GP: DNF
No longer hurt, but just not race fit - and he felt it all weekend.
Miguel Oliveira said watching Jorge Martin's Qatar Grand Prix weekend conditioned how he himself approached this one, which is to say he wanted at all costs to avoid a crash that would return him 'to the couch'.
His sprint fell apart as he went off at Garage Vert, but Sunday should've been very fruitful - but for a loss of rear grip with more rain later on in the race (seemingly tied to choosing, yes, the wet medium rear).
Oliveira was already firmly in 'trundling around' mode when the Yamaha spat him off at Raccordement. At least he got away unhurt.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 15th GP: 15th
Franco Morbidelli gets a bit of a pass for an obviously turgid outing because he cannot be fully right after that Jerez crash - even if he insisted it wasn't a limitation on the bike.
He had crashed three times already before the sprint - and had some technical problems, too. His Saturday hope of scoring some points then collapsed immediately when he failed to engage his start device.
Sunday fell apart with a slicks-on-wet crash, after which he did at least manage to get in for a bike swap, to salvage some feeling in the wet and a point - a slightly better note to end an admitted "awful weekend".
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: DNF GP: DNF
Brad Binder looked to have a reasonable turn of pace about him at Le Mans, but tripped over himself at almost every crucial step.
He crashed on Friday (which then consigned him to Q1 and led to a 0.010s Q1 exit), crashed in the sprint, crashed twice in the main grand prix - first at the final corner, then at Turn 1.
The Sunday crashes with rain intensifying you can understand, but Binder's biggest asset in MotoGP (apart from his uncanny first-lap smarts) is his ability to squeeze out the results, and he just didn't really do that over the dry portion of the weekend either.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 13th GP: 13th
Showing some signs of progress over one lap, but not enough progress not to spend both of the weekend's races feeling he has to play whack-a-mole with his fellow riders to recover from the back of the grid.
Not all of Bastianini’s exploits were caught by the TV cameras, but the overarching impression is that he was a bit of a menace, and the one faux-pas that was front-and-centre - barging into Bagnaia and causing a multi-bike crash - certainly was avoidable.
He then crashed again, but still took away a 13th-place finish - along with a long-lap penalty to be served in the British Grand Prix.
