A reasonably entertaining Malaysian Grand Prix weekend was wholly overshadowed by the terrible crash involving Moto3 riders Noah Dettwiler and Jose Antonio Rueda, and their well-being and full recovery is obviously infinitely more important than whose performance caught the eye at Sepang.
But while MotoGP hopes and waits for good news, here's how the premier-class field compared through the weekend.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 3rd Grand Prix: 2nd
Let's first go over the reasons why Acosta shouldn't be number one here. Reason one: he made a mess of Q2 with the crash and the illegal remount (under the new rule forbidding it in the final three minutes), and should probably have been on front row.
Reason two: in both races he was flattered in finishing position by circumstance, given Fermin Aldeguer's tyre pressure penalty and Pecco Bagnaia's puncture.
But those things pale in comparison to the fact he beat down his fellow KTM riders yet again, really, really badly this time, and that he delivered an exceptional Sunday ride that ran so counter to conventional wisdom, finishing within three seconds of the winner.
Acosta says this was aided by a nothing-to-lose set-up gamble he had pushed for. Whether that made the podium possible or just aided it, it was a fantastic performance.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 5th Grand Prix: 5th
After a couple of weekends of just looking like 'one of the guys' at Yamaha - Phillip Island pole notwithstanding - Quartararo really turned it up here.
Worried on Friday about "zero performance" on race pace, Quartararo needed to maximise the sprint and did - but then held up better than expected over the full Sunday distance, which he attributed to a lack of Pirelli Moto2 rubber build-up on the track due to the schedule change.
The M1 wasn't anything special, and he was on the receiving end of an aggressive move from Franco Morbidelli - which he described as a "typical Franky move" but also as fair game (though it's believed he felt differently behind the scenes).
But the end result at the chequered flag was much better than feared, and much better than any of his Yamaha peers could even dream of this weekend.
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 2nd Grand Prix: 1st
A known Sepang master, Marquez took a slightly roundabout route to the expected outcome.
A messy Friday, featuring a couple of crashes, risked forcing an unwanted Q1 appearance - but he managed to avoid it despite the resulting neck pain, then qualified very well on Saturday morning.
By his own admission he rode a suboptimal race in the sprint, too rigid on the bike and seemingly preoccupied with the idea of clinching second place in the championship - but that was wrapped up on Sunday and he was unleashed, working his way past Bagnaia and then controlling the race, though it remains a question mark whether the works Ducati rider would've posed a threat if not for the puncture.
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 1st Grand Prix: DNF
Off the back of embarrassing outings at Mandalika and Phillip Island, Bagnaia clearly had the performance all through the weekend here.
He didn't cope the best with the uncertain track conditions in the final moments of Friday practice, but ran a masterful qualifying - particularly in Q2, with just a single fresh rear tyre at his disposal.
The sprint was fantastic, especially given he managed without a functioning rear ride height device, and though the medium front choice for the Sunday probably backfired (as it did for several others), it would've been interesting to see what kind of late-race pace he could've showed without the puncture.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 4th Grand Prix: 4th
Morbidelli's performance pattern has largely mirrored that of Bagnaia as of late - just with the highs not as high and the lows not as low.
He did well to put the Phillip Island horrorshow aside a weekend later, qualifying on front row, and bagging good results in both races - despite being dreadfully slow off the line both times, which potentially cost him a podium on Sunday.
But he said he wasn't frustrated to miss out, for "nothing really matters" compared to how Dettwiler and Rueda were doing after their horror crash earlier in the day - with Morbidelli admitting he was unable to put that worry to the side in the race.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 3rd
Mir's sprint crash while chasing after the top three was tear-your-hair-out frustrating, that frustration compounded by his seeming insistence to attribute it to the shortcomings of the Honda forcing him to overcompensate with the front - an argument that would've held a lot more water if he didn't have 20 crashes all season to team-mate Luca Marini's one.
But also at the moment Marini probably can't do what Mir could on Sunday.
He would've been a borderline win contender (for at least a small handful of laps) through a higher grid position, though admitted afterwards both Marquez and Acosta ultimately had too much pace
"Now I feel like, either we finish on the podium or we finish on the ground, and this is not possible," he said afterwards. But it's absolutely not just up to Honda to fix this.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 9th Grand Prix: 7th
Bastianini made up a ridiculous 22 places across the two races relative to grid position, and attrition - depending on how you count - only accounts for five or six of those.
He is despondent every Friday, feeling like he's learning the bike from scratch. In addition to that, I suspect that - like Brad Binder - he just cannot tame the RC16 over one lap right now.
Both of them are MotoGP's pre-eminent racers - and most dubious qualifiers. For Bastianini, the contrast is perhaps the sharpest, but at least it means he keeps ending weekends on a high, even if longer-term this kind of thing isn't really sustainable or fruitful.
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: 7th Grand Prix: DNF
If you told me ahead of Sunday's action that a Gresini rider ends up the grand prix winner and asked me to guess which, I would've guessed wrong.
Aldeguer wasn't the quickest rider at Sepang over one lap - though his top-10 absence on Friday was apparently connected to a technical issue - but he looked to have field-beating race pace, and produced a confirmation of this on Saturday by working his way from seventh to third (before a tyre pressure penalty sent him back to seventh).
But that pace was nowhere to be seen on Sunday, and his race was already a certified disappointment when he compounded it by crashing out of seventh.
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 12th Grand Prix: 10th
This was maybe the most alarmed Ogura has sounded about performance - which is to say, his words on paper read as "alarmed" even as his tone betrays nothing of the sort.
He said he was "a little bit disappointed about myself" in-weekend, hinting that he had expected more of a step forward in performance given the prior experience of pre-season testing here.
He also felt on Saturday that he wasn't aggressive enough in the early laps of the sprint; said of beating his team-mate in said sprint that "we're both in the back so it doesn't really matter"; largely refused to take credit for finishing as top Aprilia on Sunday by pointing out that Bezzecchi erred with the front tyre choice so it wasn't representative.
All of that is true to varying degrees, but the fact remains: Ogura may need to work over a single lap and be quicker at the start of the weekend, but he's a very reliable operator in race trim.
Qualifying: 14th Sprint: 6th Grand Prix: 11th
The very strong sprint was what we've come to expect from second-half-of-2025 Bezzecchi, and though he ranks below Ogura here I have little doubt he was the fastest among the Aprilia riders.
But a so-so Friday hamstrung his weekend - he never stood a real chance against the Ducatis in Q1 - and the wrong front tyre choice on Sunday ensured it finished in disappointment, as he struggled in battle.
It wasn't anything too dramatic - just an off weekend relative to his usually high 2025 standards that also coincided/correlated with a major off weekend for Aprilia.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 10th Grand Prix: 6th
Di Giannantonio's big frustration right now - apart from the general trend of qualifying underperformance, which in any case seems connected - is that he's not starting weekends with the set-up that he needs and they're taking too long to figure it out.
He just wasn't very noticeable here, and couldn't make the front work at all in the sprint, but a Hail Mary set-up change before the grand prix - the kind you normally do not do before a race, he said - at least turned Sunday respectable.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 8th Grand Prix: 12th
It's very clear that things just aren't clicking yet for Zarco on the upgraded Honda package - and with that context in mind, it was a pretty reasonable weekend of swimming against the tide, at least until it engulfed him in the final few laps on Sunday.
He was at a comparable level to Mir and Marini over a single-lap, as proven by his no-tow Q2 effort, but was largely resigned to a rearguard action in both races - while the factory Hondas could reasonably aspire to move forwards.
A two-bike clash up ahead spotted him a couple of points from the sprint, but he ran out of performance late on on Sunday while trying to keep a gaggle of bikes behind - ultimately going wide and settling for a quiet 12th.
He believes his confidence with the package has improved a notch, but - relative to his stablemates - it's still a far cry from what he was managing at the start of the year.
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 8th
On a weekend on which the Honda was at worst the third-best bike on the grid and really probably the second-best, Marini got showed up by Mir - though really not by as much as it looked.
His weekend was compromised irreparably by just ending up on the wrong side of the Q2 cut-off on Friday - as a consequence of rain, final-sector traffic and yellow flags - and, what was even more of a hindrance, ending up in Q1 with a pair of Ducatis that both clearly had front-or-second row speed.
The sprint marked his first crash of the MotoGP season, though while he took the responsibility for clashing with Pol Espargaro - saying he came into Turn 14 too gingerly and not giving Espargaro enough of a chance to see him - it looked more like misfortune than a glaring error.
The choice of the medium front - which stopped well but would not turn - for Sunday was perhaps a bigger faux pas, and meant he struggled to get through on the slower Zarco, but eighth was an acceptable return in the end.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 11th Grand Prix: DNF
This will probably be the weekend that keeps me from putting Espargaro into my season top 10 - and yet he was still much faster than a test rider really has any right to be in 2025.
After getting the job done on Friday he "f***ed up in Q2" - trying to follow Acosta and then getting all discombobulated when his reference point crashed immediately at Turn 1.
But the sprint should've been fruitful without the Marini incident - which he is at least partly culpable for, but which was ultimately just 'one of those things'. And the "painful" Sunday crash was probably just a mistake brought on by rustiness, with Espargaro admitting he relaxed too much while trying to bide his time and save the tyre behind Binder.
Qualifying: 11th Sprint: 14th Grand Prix: 14th
It was no surprise that Miller thrived as he did when the rain came down during Friday's 'Q0' shootout, but he was slower in Q2 - and the Yamaha couldn't afford that this weekend, the bike rendered unruly by front tyre temperature spikes in the pack.
He got boxed in at Turn 1 on the sprint, then tried to play it conservative in the main race in the early laps to preserve some tyre life - but to no avail.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: 15th Grand Prix: 13th
Rins vs Miller is probably the hardest (and also probably the least meaningful possible) call in these rankings, and in the end despite getting more out of the most important session Rins ranks slightly behind.
He appeared slightly fortunate to make Q2 on Friday (also in that he crashed late on and brought out some helpful yellow flags, though there's no clear evidence they were decisive), then - like everyone else on an M1 who wasn't Quartararo - just didn't have much of anything in the races.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 16th Grand Prix: 9th
Another total write-off weekend in a season replete with them.
It was unpromising from Friday already, though he got unlucky with the timing of the late-day rain, but he then got nowhere near salvaging things in a "not very good at all " Q1.
Binder's sprint was "literally the worst [race] I've ever had in my life", with no drive out of the corner and no reason revealed publicly by the end of the weekend. Sunday was a relative improvement but still unspectacular.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 13th Grand Prix: DNF
It's narratively tempting to paint this weekend as a victory hangover, but the more accurate assessment appears to be that Aprilia simply struggled and Fernandez couldn't elevate himself above that.
There was a bit of improvement from Friday to Saturday, and his sprint was compromised slightly by having to roll off at the start due to Miguel Oliveira coming across, but ultimately there just wasn't all that much on offer here.
He was admittedly ahead of Ogura, who would end up the top Aprilia, when he lost the front at Turn 1 (feeling the soft rear pushing the medium front, which Fernandez said was a bad choice that he took responsibility for). This came a lap after a major moment at Turn 5 that had already convinced him to "relax".
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: 17th Grand Prix: 15th
There were some clear commonalities between this weekend and Motegi, and Chantra's performance was one of them - if Motegi was his best weekend as a MotoGP rider by far, this was the second-best, even if neither is the highest-scoring.
He was struggling with lean angle through the weekend and reported a bit of chatter, and the second half of his Sunday race was all about hanging on rather than pushing. But for a good chunk of the weekend he was at least competitive rather than firmly relegated into test rider land or behind them.
Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 18th Grand Prix: 16th
Savadori was much slower than one of the four test riders here and much quicker than the other two, so his only real competition instead was Chantra - who he seemed to be duelling all weekend.
He came off second-best but obviously Aprilia and Savadori himself won't lose any sleep over that. He's continuing to focus on the electronics package, and the evidence of 2025 so far suggests it'll be beneficial for Aprilia in the long run given how ably the manufacturer has so far used the race-testing opportunities set up by Jorge Martin's absences.
Qualifying: 23rd Sprint: 19th Grand Prix: 18th
The optimism of the V4's first couple of sessions in a MotoGP weekend back at Misano has all but leaked out by now, the rupture widening as if session by session.
The prototype is largely unchanged since Misano, and while there was hope from test rider Fernandez - whose own performance level is all but impossible to parse - that they were zeroing in on "the start of a base" on Saturday, by the end of the weekend he was clear that they'd run out of parameters to "play" with in the chassis.
The engine is running detuned, too, so that never helps, but there's also a concern that the bike isn't responding well on used rubber - and there's not all that much time to get it in good shape before it has to start delivering in early 2026.
Qualifying: 22nd Sprint: 20th Grand Prix: 17th
Pirro's ranking should really be determined by the quality of the package Ducati will wheel out in 2026 - but that would require a time machine.
On the merits of his performance specifically in terms of laptime, it seems clear that the days of Pirro fighting for significant results on his occasional Ducati appearances are long gone, and it's not what he's paid for anyway.
It remains to be confirmed whether the 39-year-old will continue in the final two rounds or hand over the bike(s) to Ducati World Superbike ace Nicolo Bulega, but the fact Bulega is testing the MotoGP bike before Portimao suggests another handover is the plan.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 19th
This was a pretty hopeless weekend for Oliveira - with Q1 a (very relative) high point given he'd set a laptime better than what two of his Yamaha peers would manage in Q2.
Apart from a chop across former team-mate Raul Fernandez off the line in the sprint, he made little impression on either race - tucking the soft front on Saturday and then doing the same with the medium front on Sunday.
Crashing out from back-to-back races is a particularly rough outing, but even had he stayed on it's hard to see a yield of anything more than one, maybe two points.
