Why Rossi can defy time in the 2017 title race

Given the way the first 10 races of the MotoGP season have played out, it almost seems odd to think back to the start of the year and to how much of a nailed-on championship favourite Yamaha new boy Maverick Vinales was.

Such was the 22-year old's dominance during pre-season testing that the idea of him being outshone by a team-mate 16 years his senior seemed fanciful, especially given how Valentino Rossi was struggling so badly for pace in those Sepang, Phillip Island and Losail tests.

It was against this backdrop that 500cc legend Kevin Schwantz mooted the scenario of Rossi potentially hanging up his leathers a year before his current contract is due to expire at the end of 2018, should Vinales "hand him his ass" this season.

Fast-forward five months, though, and the prospect of the nine-time world champion not retiring but actually inking a fresh deal with Yamaha - one that would keep him racing until the age of 40 - seems more likely. At the same time Vinales has gone from clear title favourite to a mere contender, his last win coming back in May at Le Mans.

Probably the most significant factor in this has been the introduction of a new Yamaha chassis after Barcelona that gave Rossi a boost and at the same time threw Vinales somewhat off his stride.

The frame used at the beginning of the campaign, which Vinales gelled so well with, was a hybrid of the 2016 chassis - widely acknowledged at the time as the best in the field, even if Marc Marquez managed to snatch the title for Honda - and the full '17 design.

It was only when Vinales began to falter, first crashing at Austin (an incident he blamed on an irregularity with his tyre) and then struggling to sixth at Jerez, 24 seconds behind race winner Dani Pedrosa, that Rossi is understood to have begun pushing Yamaha to think about changing its chassis concept.

The performance at certain tracks of Tech3 rookies Johann Zarco and Jonas Folger - riding year-old Yamahas - had not gone unnoticed. Rossi joked that this had been a "nightmare" for him and Vinales.

In the slippery, low-grip conditions of Jerez, Zarco finished fourth, ahead of both factory Yamahas (sixth for Vinales and a lowly 10th for Rossi), while at Barcelona, both Zarco and Folger finished ahead of their works counterparts, who limped home to eighth (Rossi) and 10th (Vinales).

It was that Barcelona race that prompted Rossi to declare that the Yamaha had "lost its essence" - an ability to carry greater corner speed than its rivals - a statement that was backed up by Yamaha project leader Kouji Tsuya during a press conference during last weekend's Brno race.

"As everybody knows, in low grip conditions in Jerez and Catalunya, our new bike for this year couldn't perform with the tyre wear," said Tsuya. "As a result we lost cornering speed, our positive point, so we couldn't make good lap times."

If this year's MotoGP title battle was a question of pure speed, there would be little doubt that Vinales would be the runaway favourite

After Barcelona, both Rossi and Vinales stayed at the track for two more days of testing - one official group test day and one private day to give the pair extra time to try out a whole range of frames, including the ones handed off to Tech3 at the end of last year.

But neither rider appeared willing to go down that route.

"In Barcelona, we compared with both riders this year's chassis and last year's chassis that Tech3 are using, and we also produced two versions of the new chassis," Tsuya explained. "Finally, both riders chose the same chassis, which was one of the new ones."

The reality is, however, that the supposedly 'new' frame they chose was in fact based on a shift in philosophy back towards the one that Zarco and Folger had been putting to such good use, something Folger acknowledged at the Sachsenring after beating both works Yamahas to second in his home race.

Asked if he felt the factory squad should be asking for its old bike back, Folger responded: "I knew they were testing different chassis, I don't know exactly what they were trying, but it looks like they are going in a backwards direction, like 2016."

Of course, Yamaha would never publicly admit to be heading "backwards", but any embarrassment over the matter would have been quickly erased at Assen, as Rossi narrowly overcame Pramac Ducati's Danilo Petrucci to score his first MotoGP win in more than a year, relaunching his title bid in the process.

Rossi said immediately after testing the new frame on the Barcelona Monday that he felt it was an improvement for his style, enabling him to regain the stability he was missing on corner entry. The fact he chose to race it in the Netherlands after further checks in practice was little surprise.

Vinales, on the other hand, admitted at the Sachsenring that the new frame was in fact worse for his style than the previous one - having raced it at Assen, where he crashed out after qualifying a dismal 11th (his worst grid slot of the year so far) in mixed conditions.

If this year's MotoGP title battle was a question of pure speed, there would be little doubt that Vinales would be the runaway favourite. But in the Michelin era, with three (or occasionally four) tyre compounds to try in a relatively short space, and the field so tightly compressed, it's not as simple as that.

For Vinales, having to test different chassis back-to-back in practice, while working out which is the best tyre to use in the race and also perfecting his bike's set-up, has thrown him off balance. It was only on Saturday at Brno that he finally committed to using the latest frame on both his bikes.

This has been a much simpler process for Rossi, who is very much used to the rigours of combining bike development with pushing for the championship. He quickly worked out the new frame was the one that worked for him, and didn't lose track time performing comparisons.

You could argue that Vinales could have done with being born a couple of years earlier, to have raced in the first three years of the 1000cc/Bridgestone era, with a relatively strung-out field dominated by Honda and Yamaha that rewarded sheer pace over all else.

Back then, an off-weekend might have resulted in a solid fourth place. But now, with the field so close together, you could well struggle to be in the top 10. Only Dani Pedrosa at Jerez so far this year has enjoyed a winning margin greater than five seconds, disregarding Marquez's mixed-conditions masterclass at Brno last weekend.

This places a much larger premium on consistency, as well as experience, in the 2017 title fight than in previous years - helping explain how Ducati's Andrea Dovizioso has become a factor. Starting from pole and romping to a straightforward lights-to-flag win is becoming an increasingly rare feat.

Now Vinales appears to have reached some sort of closure with chassis selection, the big question is this: has he learnt the lesson that Marquez did in his gruelling 2015 campaign, when he didn't have the machinery to win underneath him and simply began trying too hard?

"It's the first year I've been in the front fighting for the championship," Vinales said just before the summer break. "I try to give my best but sometimes you give your best and you have to get fourth, fifth, sixth.

"In Assen, I wanted to win, I didn't want fifth. So maybe if it was the second year [fighting for the title] I wouldn't have risked and I would have stayed fifth and I'd be leading the championship."

Rossi has just about everything in his armoury he needs. Lacking that final tenth of ultimate pace doesn't matter so much

For Rossi, such a mindset is already second nature; he rarely talks about trying to win, instead repeating that his goal for each race is to finish on the podium and avoid "zeroes". Do that, so the logic goes, and in a season like this one, the championship ought to take care of itself.

With eight rounds of the season left to run, Marquez leads Vinales by 14 points after winning at Brno, slashing the odds of him taking a fourth premier-class crown further with a flag-to-flag pit strategy that left his rivals looking like chumps.

Pitting too late cost Rossi, but he limited the damage inflicted with a strong recovery ride to fourth place, leaving him another eight points down - still less than a race win behind Marquez and still very much in with a shout, especially with some of his historically stronger venues (Misano, Motegi, Phillip Island) still to come.

Beating an on-form Marquez will be no easy task, and the Honda man has certainly been 2017's most consistent all-round performer so far, as Rossi acknowledged just before the summer break. Keeping a lid on Vinales, now the young gun appears to have got the worst of his chassis troubles out of the way, is also sure to be a major challenge.

But in this strangest and most unpredictable of seasons, Rossi has just about everything in his armoury he needs. Lacking that final tenth of ultimate pace doesn't matter so much, when he has his level of technical understanding, feel for the Michelin tyres, canny racecraft and silky throttle control.

Should he manage to win the 2017 championship, it would represent one of the great all-time triumphs of experience over youth, not only in MotoGP, but in all of motorsport.

And it would surely make Rossi's status as the greatest of all time more or less unimpeachable.