Marc Marquez has a hand on the 2019 MotoGP championship title

The huge margin (he won the next day’s race by 2.5 seconds in spite of sauntering over the last lap) throws the next two rounds into sharper focus. At these, in Austria and at a sublimely reconstituted Silverstone, Marquez was twice beaten, on each occasion in the last corner, and by the smallest of margins.

At Austria’s fast and deceptively simple Red Bull Ring, the assault came from a Ducati (for a second successive year). The pair touched and the protective brake-lever guard on Marquez’s right handlebar actually snagged on rival bike and/or rider – but fortunately snapped off before one or both had been precipitated into the grandstands. Dovizioso won by 0.213 seconds, a tenth more than Lorenzo had done 12 months before.

This was a yawning gulf compared to Silverstone a fortnight later: the fourth-closest finish in 71 years of motorcycle grand prix history. Just 0.013 seconds, side by side over the line. And the man who mugged Marquez was a surprise: relative class rookie Alex Rins on the hitherto somewhat erratic Suzuki.

(The three even closer finishes are spread out over four decades: in 1975, long before electronic timing, the Dutch TT was recorded as a dead heat on time, but with Barry Sheene adjudged ahead of Giacomo Agostini by a tyre’s width. Then Alex Criville drafting alongside Mick Doohan over the line at Brno in 1996; and Spaniard Toni Elias pipping Rossi at Estoril ten years later, both of these by two thousandths.)

Given that Rins is no title threat and that Marquez had once again extended his big points lead over Dovi at Silverstone, this lent plausibility to his assertion that “to win the war you must lose some battles.”

More to the point was how these narrow margins have increasingly become a feature of MotoGP, as Dorna’s equalising technical initiative bears fruit.

Unlike other forms of motorsport, where arcane complexities include technical success penalties such as rev controls or ballast, MotoGP has achieved this parity by simplification. Control tyres and limitations on aerodynamics, engine development and dimensions, and compulsory longevity play a part. More crucial are standard (“unified”) electronics, both soft- and hardware, including this year a unified inertial measurement unit (IMU), to prevent the richer factory teams regaining advantage by development in this crucial niche of ECU information.

In turn, this throws a different focus on Marquez’s ability to keep stretching his points advantage. It’s not because he has the best motorcycle. The results of others riding the latest 1,000cc Honda RC213V argue the point.

New factory team-mate Jorge Lorenzo’s efforts to tame the unruly V4 have seen the multi-champion struggling at the far end of the points, and frequently injured by the bike’s savagery. Unlike the rider-friendly Yamaha on which the smooth stylist won three titles, the Honda needs to be wrestled into submission.

Independent-teamster Cal Crutchlow has made the podium twice this year, but his results are unpredictable at best, and he too finds the Honda easy to crash. After a major ankle injury last year, at Silverstone the Briton was talking about possible retirement, saying evocatively “I’d like to be able to walk in a straight line again.”

In this contest of small margins, it is Marquez who makes the difference. And he has had to change his approach and tactics to do so.

“In the past, I preferred to wait until the end of the race to push.” He could afford to save his tyres, knowing that he could be relatively relaxed in the early laps without losing too much ground.

“This year,” he says, “everyone can be fast on new tyres. I need to push from the start to try to make an advantage, and then control the race from there.”

It doesn’t always work for the win. In Austria the more powerful Ducati was able to follow, and use its advantage at race-end; at Silverstone the sweeter-handling Suzuki had saved more tyre for that crucial last-corner pounce.

But Austria and Great Britain showed how the tactics contribute to a steadily growing tally of points, because in each case it was just the two of them left in it. The worst that could happen to Marquez was second place.