There are three rookies on this year's MotoGP grid, and it would've been a problem for any of their respective team-mates if the rookies in question were running them close.
It's not a problem Gresini Ducati rider Alex Marquez has had to worry about - Fermin Aldeguer has been improving at an impressive rate, but as evidenced by Marquez's actual championship lead he's had Aldeguer more than covered.
It's not a problem LCR Honda rider Johann Zarco has had to worry about - Somkiat Chantra has not laid a glove on him, as has been expected, and that was before Chantra's form tailed off badly in recent weeks, at least in part due to arm pump that he has now undergone surgery on.
It's not a problem Trackhouse Aprilia rider Raul Fernandez has had to worry about… because he isn't being run close by Ai Ogura. He is being blown out. By every metric.
Fernandez's start to 2025 has been a well-documented, widely-noticed catastrophe. Looking at the numbers feels like rubber-necking, and reciting them feels like piling on.
Trackhouse Aprilia riders in relevant MotoGP sessions
Friday practice (Q0)
Fernandez 2-3 Ogura
Ogura 0.218s faster on average
Saturday qualifying
Fernandez 0-5 Ogura
Ogura 0.294s faster on average (taking fastest lap across Q1/Q2)
Saturday sprint
Fernandez 0-5 Ogura
Ogura 7.130s ahead on average
Sunday grand prix*
Fernandez 0-5 Ogura
Ogura 11.758s ahead on average
Points
Fernandez 6
Ogura 37
Championship position
Fernandez 19th
Ogura 8th
*ignoring Ogura's Argentina DSQ as it was not a performance differentiator
Fernandez was always going to be under threat from Ogura, reputationally, but it wasn't supposed to be like this. The 24-year-old Spaniard hasn't lived up to his phenomenal Moto2 form in MotoGP, but last year he at least gave the more experienced Miguel Oliveira a good fight.
Something seems fundamentally broken, and Fernandez's outlook on what it is has changed during the season. In the early going he was talking about psychological struggles, mistakes at the worst moments in weekends, cracking under pressure. He at least sounded happy with the bike.
But after the Spanish Grand Prix he described himself as "super angry" and "understanding nothing on the bike".
Fernandez feels the 2025 Aprilia as currently assembled has sapped him of his ability to maximise high-speed corners, struggling on the front and overheating it into an unusable state.
"I cannot be fast. I feel that I cannot turn the bike," he lamented.
"I feel that overall the bike is very different to last year, we don't have a base set-up for me, one that I start the weekend with and I can be fast."
Of the brutal comparison to Ogura, Fernandez said: "He is making a super good job. But if I see my race and his race, it was the same - but I'm super slow compared to him.
"It's easy to see what he's doing. He's going six tenths per lap more or less faster than me. It's easy to see. The difficult thing is how he can ride the bike how he wants, and I cannot. And it's very frustrating."
Fernandez was an Aprilia-contracted rider at Trackhouse last year, but is now a Trackhouse-contracted rider, though one Aprilia continues to keep an eye on.
He has a lofty role this year in being the only Aprilia regular with extensive knowledge of last year's bike relative to this year's, but that sure doesn't look to be paying off - and the security blanket of his two-year deal is clearly providing no relief.
While there has been no public indication from Trackhouse that Fernandez's contract for 2026 is anything but iron-tight, it axiomatically cannot be iron-tight when the pace is like this.
And the fact he's being destroyed in races, arguably to a bigger extent than in qualifying, is maybe the biggest indictment. Fernandez's biggest issue as a MotoGP rider used to be that he struggled to be on the pace on Friday and would run out of time to turn his weekend around, but currently the gap between him and Ogura only grows the further they go into a weekend.
But that's only further evidence of the fact that something is fundamentally off, maybe fundamentally broken.
The Race understands there's a belief within the Aprilia camp that the psychological side is a big problem on Fernandez's side, and that it has observed him in a vicious circle - spiralling when a weekend isn't going right.
There's also a feeling that Fernandez has picked up some riding style changes relative to last year that are proving less effective - and that he just needs a reset.
In the Monday test after the Spanish GP, Fernandez felt he'd finally found a base set-up solution and also said that Aprilia "gave me something" that improved his feeling on the bike.
He said he'd run a 1m36.9s on used tyres (his best lap from the weekend was a 1m36.7s in qualifying) but acknowledged the post-race test presented optimum grip conditions as it always does - describing himself as deliberately "optimistic but realistic" and waiting for the French Grand Prix at Le Mans to draw some real conclusions.
To say those conclusions must be positive at Le Mans is to almost waste kilobytes of text. Fernandez is in such a hole that going anywhere but up is unthinkable.
