What has gone wrong for Lorenzo?

March 20, 2016. Jorge Lorenzo starts his MotoGP title defence as though nothing has changed since he won his third championship at Valencia four months earlier. Flying in the face of new tyres and electronics, the Yamaha rider controls the race from pole position to grab an early, five-point lead.

July 17, 2016. Lorenzo finishes a nearly-lapped 15th at the Sachsenring and heads into the summer break trailing Marc Marquez by almost the equivalent of two race wins in the championship, talking about needing to regain his confidence.

What's gone wrong? That, and the 'when', are tough to pinpoint, such are the unique array of circumstances that have added up to Lorenzo's nightmare during the last month or so.

He has scored seven points since winning the Italian Grand Prix at Mugello. That is Lorenzo's worst return from a run of three grands prix since his all-action rookie season in 2008. And in that case he was eliminated early at the Sachsenring and Laguna Seca, and finished 10th from the rear of the grid at Brno, for a total of six points.

In the last three races, Marquez has scored 65 points. That is how you win a title. Marquez was defeated at Mugello after that last lap and was 10 points adrift, but following second-place finishes at Barcelona and Assen, and last Sunday's victory at the Sachsenring, he starts the summer break 48 points clear and talking about holidays and parties.

Lorenzo has looked decidedly normal. Not normal as in he looks like Lorenzo, that's normal as in he does not look like a supremely-talented and committed racer.

He was not a factor after the track configuration changed at Barcelona following the death of Moto2 rider Luis Salom, he seemed frustrated and perceived the new layout suited Honda. When he took the lead early, there was a sense that it was business as usual.

But he fell behind the lead pack and struggled with front-tyre graining. While you could chalk up being punted off by Andrea Iannone as 10 points lost, Lorenzo was only going to keep falling down the order over the remaining nine laps.

Lorenzo is one of only four riders in the field to have raced on Michelin tyres in MotoGP before the start of this season. Along with Andrea Dovizioso, he is the one with the most recent experience from 2008, as Dani Pedrosa switched to Bridgestones late in the season and Valentino Rossi the year before.

MotoGP bikes and the style required to make them go quickly have changed a lot since then, but Lorenzo still felt that experience might help.

"I don't remember so much how the feeling was, but I understand that the way of riding this type of tyre is quite a big difference from the Bridgestone," he said at Yamaha's season launch in January.

"You have to anticipate the braking a little bit, to release the brake a little bit sooner, and this kind of riding style can be, theoretically, a little bit better for me."

After some problems during 2015 testing, Michelin got its front tyre sorted by Qatar and Lorenzo was a happy man. But somewhere along the line since then, concerns have crept back in. Argentina was, in hindsight, a sign of what was to come. Lorenzo crashed in qualifying and again in the race, in low-grip conditions on a rarely-used circuit.

So much of Lorenzo's style is about front-end grip, finding its exact limit and then hitting that limit. When the grip is questionable, or he cannot trust the tyre, life is not good.

"He is a really precise rider that when something is not perfect he doesn't feel confident to ride the bike," another Yamaha man, Tech3's Pol Espargaro, surmised at the Sachsenring.

"His riding style is based on the front tyre. when he doesn't have feeling in the front tyre he is not fast."

Talk about Lorenzo dominated the Sachsenring weekend. Between the Catalunya and German GPs, he crashed in cooler conditions on the Saturday at Assen and was then miles off the pace in the race in Sunday's wet race.

By the time the red flag was shown for what was effectively the first half of the race, Lorenzo was 53 seconds off the lead. That's an average loss of 3.8s per lap, hardly fathomable, especially as one of those leaders was team-mate Rossi on the same bike. That Lorenzo finished 10th in the second half was all down to other riders, including Rossi, crashing.

What Lorenzo needed to do in Germany last weekend was reassert himself. But he only found more trouble. It was cold on Friday morning and the Spaniard was one of three riders to come unstuck at Turn 11, where there are no small crashes.

His left wrist and right heel took knocks but he was otherwise uninjured. He was slow in the afternoon, then slightly less slow on Saturday morning in warmer conditions but still off the pace enough that he had to contest the first phase of qualifying for the first time since the format was introduced in 2013.

He made it through, despite crashing at Turn 8. In the main session he crashed again, this time at Turn 1. Lorenzo has had calendar years where he's barely crashed three times, let alone falling thrice in two days.

Bullish best describes his demeanour on Saturday evening, and he declined the opportunity to say he was "unlucky".

"I had the same tyres as everyone and I was the one who lost more, so that means something wrong," he said.

"Three mistakes are not normal for my part. So I'm disappointed about the crashes, I'm disappointed about the position, but I could see some big improvement from the bike."

That all three crashes were different was important and he spoke about needing to be more "conscious" on the Michelin tyres. In Lorenzo's defence, he is not the only rider who discusses the difficulties in detecting the limit. You had some chance of saving it if you lost the front end on the Bridgestone. On a Michelin, forget about it.

When Lorenzo opened the curtains on Sunday morning, he would not have liked what he saw. Rain. Lots of it. By his own admission, he was "terrible" in the morning warm-up, effectively last and four seconds off the pace.

In the race, he looked at least a little bit better than at Assen in the rain. But his pace fell away as the track dried, bringing that unknown grip element back into play. He stayed out on wets too long and then rejoined on intermediates, both mistakes the Yamaha pitwall also had a big hand in. Lorenzo finished 15th, a whopping 77 seconds behind Marquez.

On Saturday, Lorenzo did not use the 'c' word. Confidence. It emerged post-race, when he greeted the press looking calm and composed and committed to turning things around.

"We have to recover the confidence," he said. "We have to recover the good results that we don't have now, the last three races were very bad for us. For different circumstances, but we just had little problems in these races."

Following this week's Red Bull Ring test, he heads off into the summer break as a man for whom time out of the paddock cannot come quickly enough.

There is no sugar coating Lorenzo's last two weekends. But beyond the weather and his lack of comfort in cool conditions - even Rossi admits getting heat into the front Michelins on the Yamaha is tough - perhaps the venues just make this a perfect storm.

Lorenzo crashed heavily in practice at Assen in 2013 and smashed up his left collarbone. He flew back to Barcelona on Thursday night, then returned to the track and did the bare minimum to qualify before finishing a super-human fifth in what was then a Saturday race. But a fortnight later he went to the Sachsenring and had another big fall, at Turn 11, undoing the surgeon's good work in a vicious highside.

In these circumstances, mental scars are understandable. Confidence is shaped by a litany of factors, and serious injury is the not the sort of thing you forget.

At Assen, Lorenzo denied his history with the circuit was on his mind, instead talking about the conditions that were proving troublesome and of his need to come to grips with the Michelins and "understand the best lines and the best way to be a little bit faster".

But Dani Pedrosa is another rider with unhappy Sachsenring memories. He was ruled out of the 2013 race while leading the championship after a massive Turn 1 accident.

"In the past I've had not good memories when the track was like this," he admitted three years on. "Today I took more care than normal."

When all was said and done at the Sachsenring on Sunday night, Lorenzo was asked whether these two bogey tracks had played a role in his slump. He largely discussed improving his confidence and the conditions but did concede the venues had "a little bit" of impact.

If Lorenzo has any demons to bury at Assen and the Sachsenring, they will loom even larger when he returns next year, on a Ducati.

Espargaro's Tech3 Yamaha team-mate Bradley Smith is one of the riders to have lost out with the move from Bridgestone to Michelin. After finishing sixth in the standings last year, he's currently 16th and knows what Lorenzo is going through.

"If you can't find the setting and you can't find the feeling it doesn't matter who you are and what you've done in the past, you can't make this bike go fast," Smith said. "A world champion is going through that same problem and those same issues and, regardless of who he's got inside his garage, they still can't find the solution."

Smith also knows what it's like to have a weekend like Lorenzo's at the Sachsenring. His was even worse, in 2014 when he had what he now calls a "meltdown" and crashed five times amid contract speculation.

"The problem is there's no magic cure to find the solution," he said. "Rather than hitting your head against a brick wall you just have to try and work on all the small details to try and get there.

"We saw the emotion come out in Q2 where he didn't even look at the bike, just walked off. That's what you feel as a rider because it's like 'I don't even know what to do now'."

Lorenzo now has three-and-a-half weeks to work out what to do before the second half of the season starts in Austria. The final nine races take place over 14 weekends, so there's not time to reinvent the wheel.

The gulf between Lorenzo at his best and his worst this year has been massive, having barely existed for the bulk of his career. The peerless Lorenzo from Qatar would be leading this championship by a country mile. The Sachsenring Lorenzo would be battling to make it into the top 10.

Yes, the last few grands prix have produced a unique set of circumstances. But it might be cold and/or wet again somewhere between now and November. Similarly, Michelin's tyre development will continue, but there is no major overhaul coming that would play into Lorenzo's hands.

Does he have too many chinks in armour right now to win a fourth MotoGP title this year? It's never wise to write off a competitor of Lorenzo's calibre, but he has nine races to dismiss that notion.