Lead riders for Aprilia and Ducati dominated the various stages of a really eventful MotoGP return for the Brazilian Grand Prix.
Those same riders head up these rankings - but what about the other manufacturers' standouts?
Qualifying: 2nd Sprint: 4th Grand Prix: 1st
It's way, way, way too early to write things like this...but these are the kind of weekends that win championships.
He would've been right to fear catastrophe on Friday, struggling for tyre temperature as at least two other Aprilia riders thrived. Perhaps this will rear its head again as a concern later in the year, but in the dry Bezzecchi sorted himself out with aplomb.
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His sprint wasn't anything special but good enough - and the medium rear seemingly proved a panacea on Sunday. We're at 101 consecutive grand prix laps led and counting.
Qualifying: 5th Sprint: 3rd Grand Prix: 2nd
Has an argument for being first this weekend. If any Martin fans are annoyed I didn't quite convince myself to do it, let me offer an olive branch by saying I think Jorge Martin can be 2026 world champion.
He was very good in both races - and probably could've got something more out of them with a better qualifying - but the ultimately inconsequential Friday was what stuck with me the most in terms of Martin's weekend.
In shaky conditions on a new track, with the existing reserves of bike knowledge and experience neutered for his rivals, Martin looked like he was running laps around the other Aprilias.
...Be afraid, yeah.
Qualifying: 3rd Sprint: 1st Grand Prix: 4th
Marquez is "still far from the feeling I had last year", and you could kind of tell this weekend - though the track layout also isn't very Marquez-y anyway.
Like the Thai GP, this was perhaps an unremarkable weekend. Like the Thai GP, that was still enough for a veritable boatload of points - with no tyre failure to rob him this time.
The late-race defeat to Fabio Di Giannantonio on Sunday was uncharacteristic (the fact that it happened because Marquez had a massive moment a lot more characteristic), but by all rights he should be second in the standings now on a bike that currently looks MotoGP's second-best.
Qualifying: 1st Sprint: 2nd Grand Prix: 3rd
Di Giannantonio's Goiania weekend has continued - and accentuated - an untidy-yet-shockingly-fast start to the season.
He had "completely f***ed [up]" getting into rhythm on the wet patches on Friday, so could've easily ended up with a spoiled weekend - but instead should've had a win after a stellar Q1-to-pole recovery.
The sprint was his, handed over to Marquez with two errors in the same spot (one unseen early on to erode his lead, one late on to let Marquez through). The grand prix looked maximised.
Qualifying: 4th Sprint: 6th Grand Prix: 16th
Went AWOL in the most important session of the weekend, with a hopeless slump to 16th in the grand prix blamed on "something clearly wrong" with the rear tyre.
I'm inclined to half-believe there wasn't much he could've done about that - or at least show some grace given the new M1 has been so inconsistent on the rubber. But it also kind of doesn't matter.
Quartararo was due a day off after what can only be described as a 'magic trick' of a Saturday, in which the M1 in his hands came much closer to pole than I had expected to see at any point before autumn. The sprint was awesome, too.
Qualifying: 7th Sprint: 14th Grand Prix: 8th
My head cannot go fifth or higher. My heart cannot go seventh or lower. There was probably a less weird way to phrase that, but I refuse to use the backspace button.
This will be an unremarkable weekend on the results sheet, especially as Aldeguer destroyed his sprint by going perpendicular off the line. But the guy can barely walk, has done all of zero laps in the pre-season, and had to wait until Saturday for his first serving of true dry running in MotoGP this year.
If you're coming in blind and looking at the Ducati results this weekend, you'd never ever know he's the injured second-year rider.
Qualifying: 9th Sprint: 9th Grand Prix: 7th
Probably should be higher. Can't be any lower.
This is a 10-point weekend that can be scoffed at if you so desire - and certainly Acosta wasn't perfect, with a Q2 crash and a mildly costly bad start in the sprint.
But all evidence points to the KTM RC16 having been flat-out bad at Goiania by the manufacturer's recent standards. It might have been closer in competitiveness to Yamaha than Ducati/Aprilia, and it looked quite dreadful on the straights, confirming the Buriram impression that a long-time strength of the RC16 is now a major weakness.
Acosta kept KTM's weekend respectable.
Qualifying: 6th Sprint: 5th Grand Prix: 5th
"Top five in a new circuit for all the riders sounds not too bad. But if you see factory Aprilias finishing 1-2, I feel like my result is like nothing."
Wonderfully put - though it certainly isn't "nothing".
Ogura deserves credit for banishing some past wet-weather demons with a solid Friday, and he rode a very professional couple of races (especially the recovery from a really poor launch on Sunday that culminated in a last-lap Alex Marquez pass).
Trackhouse and Aprilia should be happy, but with the level of the RS-GP right now he can do more.
Qualifying: 14th Sprint: 10th Grand Prix: 13th
Moreira has a real case right now for telling Honda: "Hey, I know you've filled one 2027 factory seat with Fabio Quartararo; maybe hold fire on the other one, and watch this."
As far as what I've watched is concerned, I'm genuinely over the moon. I can nitpick this weekend a little, across the Friday crash over a wet patch, a very poor start on Sunday, and a general reliance on tows, but none of that matters at all.
The rookie is competitive with all the other Honda riders. It's round two.
Qualifying: 10th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 9th
A fantastic Friday in the damp laid the foundations of Zarco's weekend but it had promised a lot more had the weather complied.
The Honda wasn't amazing in the dry and Zarco didn't stand out against his fellow Honda riders, but he performed admirably on Sunday, riding a sensible race to a sensible position for the bike.
The sprint had been less sensible - he crashed at Turn 1 after being sucked in by Raul Fernandez's slipstream. But that anyway came after he was already badly compromised by Aldeguer's wild sideways rodeo off the line.
Qualifying: 8th Sprint: 7th Grand Prix: 6th
A pattern has emerged across these two weekends of Marquez ceding the 'second-best Ducati rider' position to Di Giannantonio, but at least unlike in Thailand he delivered up to his pace here.
The points return was a solid one, but the optimism of the pre-season feels forgotten.
Qualifying: 17th Sprint: 13th Grand Prix: 14th
Rins's position as the top Yamaha on Sunday reflects the feeling that he was probably vaguely the fastest - or at least the most-at-ease - Yamaha rider here, but with Quartararo's single-lap magic unavailable to him yet again.
He caught some badly timed traffic on Friday during his Q2 push, then had no real hope getting out of Q1. That basically wrote off his sprint, but his Sunday ride was, in his own words, "great for what we can do" - an accurate assessment.
Qualifying: 12th Sprint: 18th Grand Prix: 17th
A 'monster' Friday that was never really realistic to build upon - though he and Pramac will have hoped for at least a point.
The performance clearly just wasn't quite there in the dry. In the sprint he felt like he was on "five-year-old tyres" and "scared to use the front brake" due to excessive movement, and the grand prix was better but still complicated.
Still, this is good for early days.
Qualifying: 19th Sprint: 11th Grand Prix: 11th
His weekend featured what I increasingly feel like calling 'the Luca Marini special': just missing out on Q2 on Friday (by 0.021s in this case), then getting badly outmatched in Q1.
That's partly luck, of course. But some uncharacteristic crashing on Saturday left Marini with more work to do than ideal.
The recovery in both races was very reasonable, though ideally he should have beaten rookie Moreira in the sprint. His theory was that he was limited by a front tyre that stayed in the warm too long amid all the track repair delays.
Qualifying: 16th Sprint: 12th Grand Prix: 10th
Fernandez admitted after the weekend that he "was not on the level of the bike" and his Trackhouse team.
He couldn't figure out a way to exploit the tyres either on the rainy Friday or in the dry portions of the weekend, and took responsibility for not getting the RS-GP he wanted under him.
Qualifying: 13th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: DNF
Another Mir weekend that yields a big-bowl-of-nothing, but a lot of sympathy is warranted.
It was clear already when he rocked up on media day with no voice that this could be a physically unpleasant weekend, and so it proved, Mir battered by illness and clearly overtaxed by the demands of Goiania running.
He appeared largely blameless for his sprint exit, pushed out wide by Fernandez and crashing on the dirt. He shrugged it off by saying "nobody will remember" the sprint if Sunday goes well, then got caught out in a strange on-throttle crash quite far into the Turn 4 trouble spot in the grand prix.
It had been a good race for him up until that, but he had also chewed through the right side of his front tyre - something he attributed to a lack of information as a consequence of the early sprint exit.
Qualifying: 15th Sprint: 16th Grand Prix: 12th
A weekend of general bewilderment, summed up best by two stats.
In the sprint, Morbidelli set his fastest lap on lap 15 of 15. Nobody else set theirs later than lap 10.
In the race, Morbidelli set his best lap on lap 19 of 23; only Marc Marquez and Morbidelli's VR46 team-mate Di Giannantonio set theirs later.
It's a trend for him in 2025 so far, one that he hinted could be connected to the harder-casing rear tyres. He "cannot lean, cannot turn" on new rubber, then "everything becomes more normal and natural" when the grid drops.
It's an exact inverse of what Morbidelli's performance pattern looked like at the start of his Ducati tenure.
Qualifying: 22nd Sprint: 17th Grand Prix: 15th
Bastianini struggled awfully to put load into the front on Friday, and had the weekend continued in the same conditions it might have got really ugly.
He was much more competitive in the proper dry, but still off, making several major mistakes in the sprint.
The grand prix was better, as is usually the case.
Qualifying: 11th Sprint: 8th Grand Prix: DNF
Yeesh.
The problem for Bagnaia is that this is starting to look a whole lot like the bad patch of 2025 - in the sense that he is genuinely quite fast on occasion, but the level of competitiveness seems to have an inverse correlation to the importance of the session.
He looked decently competitive here in 'clean' running but bulldozed his chances by falling off in Q2 - "my mistake" to not have warmed the front tyre well.
It meant he got bottled up in the sprint, and he then - by his own admission - couldn't get his head around the grip conditions of Sunday's race, trying to hang on but falling off all the same.
Qualifying: 20th Sprint: DNF Grand Prix: 18th
The fact he's been trying to forge his own way in terms of bike spec relative to his fellow KTM riders buys a little bit of leeway, as does the fact that there were some genuine glimpses of good performance on Friday.
But it's pretty bleak, and a finish 26s back from Acosta on Sunday is difficult to stomach given both were on the soft rear, which Vinales cannot exploit at all right now (it pushes the front) but Acosta clearly can.
Another worry is that a 20th-place qualifying (not great - but second of the KTMs) turned into 22nd and last in the order after lap one in both races.
Qualifying: 18th Sprint: 19th Grand Prix: DNF
A low-key contender - which thankfully for Miller will probably be forgotten immediately - for one of the worst weekends of his MotoGP career.
Friday was potentially make-or-break in the Miller-friendly conditions, but one good lap was ruined by an ill-judged bid to overtake Martin in the final corner, and the resulting crash ensured there would be no Q2.
He then kept crashing through the weekend, all the while being hindered by "massive understeer" and graining on the front tyre.
Tough all around.
Qualifying: 21st Sprint: 15th Grand Prix: DNF
A really strong start in the sprint was the highlight of Binder's otherwise rotten weekend, which was over on lap four of the grand prix when he locked the front into Turn 1.
The KTM was poor here, and his only chance to really get in the mix was on Friday in the strange conditions - and unfortunately he crashed on his first flying lap, consigning himself to backmarker scraps and general anonymity.
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