A year after one of the best MotoGP debuts in history, Ai Ogura matched that points yield for the first time – with the exact same sequence of finishes at the exact same track: a fifth place in the sprint and a fourth place in the Thai Grand Prix.
Ogura is not a figure of big emotional swings. But if last year he was happy-but-reserved, this year he was as disappointed as he gets.
Ogura placed 12th in our post-weekend rider rankings this time (compared to first in the same weekend last year). I found his weekend a massive disappointment. It is clear I was less disappointed than Ogura himself was.
“The position is the same but the feeling is completely different,” he said, sighing. “Zero happiness.”
Last year, his Buriram form came out of nowhere. This year, the pace in testing and through practice suggested this was a weekend to be on the podium at least once, but the podium eluded a “completely” disappointed Ogura.
He didn’t qualify high enough (his best lap in Q2 contained none of his best sectors in Q2, which is how you know it was not good enough), then had to salvage what he himself described as a pair of “s**t starts”.
On Sunday the launch itself was no drama, but dropping out of the top 10 after getting boxed in behind Joan Mir on Turn 1 entry was. He crossed the line in 11th place on each of the first 13 laps of the 26-lap grand prix – then started to move up quickly.
Fastest riders in Thai GP, laps 14-26
1 Marco Bezzecchi
2 Pedro Acosta, +0.477s
3 Ai Ogura, +1.905s
4 Franco Morbidelli, +3.556s
5 Enea Bastianini, +5.078s
“There is some issue that stopped me in the first part of the race,” Ogura lamented in the end. “But it’s nothing from the bike, it’s just the problem was how I approach the corners especially when all the bikes were in front of me.
“I was surprised by how s**t I was in the first part of the race.
“I knew that I was going to be fast at the end but I couldn’t use that. That was my strong point for the race, but I couldn’t use that thing.
“I just force the bike with the wrong timing. Maybe when the bike is ready to – how should I say it…when the bike is OK to push, maybe I didn’t. And when the bike says it’s quite limited, that’s where I push. I should understand more!”
He is right to feel this way, but the honestly of admitting it – when you could instead hide between a pair of top-five finishes – is very disarming. But then again, ‘disarming honesty’ is Ogura’s MotoGP modus operandi.
His season won’t hinge on Buriram. If anything, this might have been the least important weekend of his season, because it’s the other tracks where he still needs to prove himself.