The second season Honda Fireblade project, a full HRC effort, is still lagging behind where most people expected it to be by now - including Alvaro Bautista, one of the two factory Honda riders, according to his comments on relative performance.

The previous round at Estoril was torrid to begin with, as he fell three times on day one, hardly confidence building, although tyre choice may have been one element at play.
Bautista and Honda’s current problem is not in one or two areas, it is a general not-quite-there performance of the machine as a whole.

“I expect more improvement,” said Bautista of his 2021 bike so far. “In the winter test I didn’t make a lot of tests, but the feeling with the bike was not too bad. I expect better feeling and better performance. We are struggling a lot with the electronics. We are struggling a lot with the traction with the bike.

"To make a bike with more stability during all the race in all the conditions. It changes a lot if you ride in a way or another, so you have to be very precise because in other ways you are losing. So the bike starts to work in a different way. So, it’s very complicated.”

Improvements still have to be made to get into real contention, it appears. “We need to keep improving all areas,” said Bautista. “We do see on track we don’t miss big in some areas. We just lose small things in everywhere. So there is not an area that this is very bad and we have to improve. No, it’s general. All the bike has to improve.

"It’s difficult because if you say braking is terrible but the rest is okay. Then you can concentrate on braking. But sometimes you concentrate on braking, but you miss the traction.

"Then you concentrate on traction but you miss engine brake. So it’s a package. It’s not easy to find something that really can help us to make one step forward.”

At Misano on day one things were possibly looking up - even though he had another fall in FP2 - as he managed seventh overall, just behind Scott Redding.