I made no straw man. You misunderstood. I was not making the sort of comparison you thought. I simply opined that Dovi’s good weekends are on a background of too many average ones. Vinales similarly has great weekends on a backdrop of too many average ones. That’s where any comparison I made ends. Why they each have this issue, what their strengths are as racers, is something else to look at. On this latter question, I do feel Maverick depends on raw pace to get results since he can be extremely quick on a good day leading to typically dominant victories, but this is on a backdrop of too many weekends when his pace is strangely average, leading to average results. He is not known to fight his way through the field and showing the sort of race craft and cunning that are in contrast, Dovi’s strong points.
This latter analysis doesn’t take away from the simple similarity in that we have two riders who are, I think, above average riders on the MotoGP grid, but who each exhibit an inconsistency with outstanding performances which do not go well with a championship winning campaign. They will be championship contenders and almost rans. We will have stories to tell of how close they came to winning a championship but never quite did.
