In May, a Honda rider snapped Ducati's MotoGP grand prix-winning streak at Le Mans, then followed it up in a dry-weather Silverstone podium - a podium on which he really should've been joined by a Yamaha rider as the race winner.
But since Johann Zarco's French Grand Prix triumph and Fabio Quartararo's British GP near-triumph, the form of MotoGP's two Japanese manufacturers has totally collapsed through the June run of Aragon - Mugello - Assen.
Both Honda and Yamaha scored single-digit manufacturers' points at each of those rounds. Honda had entered June second in the contructors' standings, but is now down to fifth. Yamaha was already fifth but a close fifth rather than the cut-adrift fifth it is now.
This has been exactly the kind of slump that you would ideally hope to avoid when you're 'Rank D' concession manufacturers - allowed in-season testing with race riders, engine upgrades and more aero homologation freedom.
So it's really not that surprising that their respective riders are starting to sound cranky again.
What happened?
There are some commonalities between the three tracks.
On paper it's at least logical that Honda didn't have a great time - it doesn't enjoy long high-speed corners, present in all three; it relies on hard braking, which Mugello and Assen don't really prioritise; it is very slow on the straight, with Aragon and Mugello having huge ones.
You would probably point to Aragon as the best of the three for the RC213V, and indeed that's where the RC213V looked the best, at least vaguely competitive.
At Assen, not so much.
"If you saw the lap of Johann behind Pecco [Bagnaia] in qualifying - Turns 1-2-3-4, all the tight sections, he lost nothing against Pecco," test rider Aleix Espargaro explained. "But once you arrive in the fast corner and you throw the bike in, it's difficult, the rider can't do anything. If the bike isn't turning, it isn't turning.
"When you're able to make the bike transfer [weight] with the brakes, the bike is very-very good. But if you're not able to load the front, the bike doesn't turn. In [Turns] 6-7-13-15, the delta against the others is crazy. Really nothing we can do."
"It's true these [recent] tracks aren't the best for us, we have to accept," said Joan Mir. "These tracks show really well our weak points - long corners, turning with throttle, that is the area where we struggle so much."
Yamaha's situation is a bit more complicated. "Straights, [high] temperature, [low] grip and degradation of the tyres - those are the four things that make our bike really bad or not," said Quartararo ahead of Assen. "And at Mugello the four of them were there. Here normally the four of them aren't there."
Yet despite Quartararo's pole the Yamaha didn't make a great impression at Assen. It didn't help that he'd crashed out of the sprint and was caught up in another rider's incident on Sunday, but his bike was being absolutely gobbled up at the start of both races - in parts of the track that were supposed to be where the Yamaha excels - and the rest of the M1 riders were anonymous.
Both Quartararo's team-mate Alex Rins and Pramac rider Jack Miller pointed to a specific sequence of how the Yamaha was falling apart at Assen. They would wheelspin through Haarbocht and Madijk at the start of the lap, which then blew the rear tyre temperature out of the range - creating non-stop sliding that the electronics settings weren't able to overcome.
"The bike becomes a trailer," was Rins's assessment.
How big is the concern?
Zarco wondered several times during the Dutch TT weekend whether Honda has reached the limit of its current package, and Mir felt it has been outdeveloped - and hoped for upgrades "soon".
"Because if not, I feel that the other manufacturers have made an improvement in that [post-Aragon] test, and we didn't. That is the difference, no?
"I don't feel with the tools that I had in the first part of the season, the first races, when I think I could do something more."
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But Mir also suggested Honda is "not very-very far" off despite the slump - whereas Yamaha, perhaps unsurprisingly given the respective market value of the riders involved, is certainly coming under more public pressure from Quartararo.
The 2021 champion is no stranger to airing his misgivings about Yamaha's performance in the public - it often feels almost mischievously blunt. And this latest run has brought it out again.
Even before the Dutch TT disappointment, when asked by MotoGP how confident he felt on a scale of 1-10 of winning another MotoGP title with Yamaha, Quartararo couldn't help himself.
"Do you really want to know the number right now?" he joked through laughter. "I think for Yamaha and me I prefer not to say any number. For this year, the confidence is zero, of course.
It will depend a lot on the bike of next year. Max [Bartolini, Yamaha technical director] has a big-big-big pressure on him.
"That I remained at Yamaha for this year and next year, I think Yamaha can say thank you to him, he's the one that really changed my mind, and the one that made me really believe in the project.
"But he knows that he needs to make it work before next year. This is something super important for me, for my mental health. It's important for me that we have to fight for victories from next year.
"I have no more time. What I want to see is facts. And at the moment I don't see anything. To be honest, we are still very far."
Quartararo expects to be racing the V4 Yamaha next year. He feels he too "needed a change" in that regard - with the inline-four-engined M1 "pretty much at its limit".
The V4 project is still very raw, though, so is it really realistic for it to be a winner straight out of the blocks?
Regardless, Quartararo insists: "I need a winning project now."
For all the gains made from last year, Yamaha still isn't that. And the same can be said for Honda.
