Enea Bastianini's KTM MotoGP resurgence faces a major test in this final stretch of the season, following a sudden split with his crew chief, Alberto Giribuola.
A crew chief change when a rider hasn't changed teams often points to something dramatic having happened behind the scenes - for example, you need only to go as far as Bastianini's current Tech3 KTM team-mate Maverick Vinales, who made headlines cycling through crew chiefs during his Yamaha stint.
Giribuola was the crew chief behind Bastianini's best run of form in MotoGP yet - his breakthrough as a frontrunner at Gresini Ducati - but he didn't follow the rider into the Ducati factory team for 2023, instead committing to a wider role at KTM.
But that role narrowed to being Bastianini's crew chief again when he came into the Tech3 fold this year, and Bastianini and Giribuola looked to have completely righted the ship after a very shaky start to the year - only for it to emerge that the partnership has ceased.
Xavi Palacin replaced Giribuola - who Bastianini and many others call 'Pigiamino', his nickname, the Italian word for pyjamas - at some point during the Barcelona weekend.
That culminated in Bastianini's first grand prix podium, though he'd already looked much stronger than before at Brno, Red Bull Ring and Balaton. At Misano, where news of the crew chief change finally became a matter of public record, he struggled - but so did most KTM riders, the RC16 not really agreeing with the wind, the high-speed third sector and the vibration from the asphalt's high grip level.
Bastianini said at Misano that the crew chief change hadn't been made public earlier "for many reasons".
With a smile, he said: "At the end, he [Giribuola, below] has done it two times that, uhh, he's left two times from my team - now I have a new crew chief, it's Xavi, the work will be the same, I think he knows my style very well."
Though he described the decision as being taken between Giribuola and KTM, he added to Italian media that it was better for Giribuola to go as his heart had been set on leaving.
Bastianini has an extremely laid-back demeanour in front of the media, but it is known he can be a very fiery character behind the scenes - and, as the "two times" comment perhaps hints at, this is rumoured to have been a very, very difficult split.
It will have been made doubly so if what is virtually taken as fact in MotoGP circles is indeed true - that Giribuola is leaving to be crew chief for someone else, namely World Superbike champion newcomer Toprak Razgatlioglu at the Pramac Yamaha team.
Bastianini knows new crew chief Palacin from Moto3, when Bastianini raced at and Palacin worked for the Estrella Galicia-badged Monlau Honda team.
"I didn't work with him during that period, I was with another crew chief," Bastianini recalled. "But I started to work with Xavi starting from the first race [this year], to have a relationship with him, and with KTM we took the decision to put Xavi by my side."
The question now is how important Giribuola really was to Bastianini's success - having clearly played a big part in his recent turnaround at KTM - and whether the "very ambitious and very schematic" Palacin can recreate that impact.
"It's not easy to change like this, also from my side," Bastianini admitted. "I think we lost that 0.1s at the moment. But we can bring it for the future soon."
