The issues at Red Bull have also been at the front end of the car, but in a different way. In some aspects the recent iterations of Red Bulls have been suited to Verstappen, in others they haven’t.

What’s generally accepted is that until this year, when the team has tried to take the edge of the RB21, the cars have been extremely ‘pointy’ i.e. very sensitive to steering inputs: easy to oversteer, easy to spin.

Though this matched Verstappen’s rapid, aggressive style up to a point, even he said the cars were unbalanced, and that he was making up for a number of its deficiencies with his driving – papering over inherent flaws.

When Stoner was questioned in 2012 over why he could ride the Ducati but others couldn’t, his answer was somehow vague yet unequivocal. Yet the Australian admitted he too had to adapt.

“You’ve got to forget everything you think you know,” he said. “You can’t be proud in the slightest about what you think you can do and you have to ride the bike how it needs to be ridden. You’ve got to succumb to the bike.”

However, in later years Stoner did give some more detail on the Ducati Diaries podcast.

“It wasn’t, except for fourth, fifth gear, really good at anything,” he said.

“It didn’t go round the corners. It was pretty good under brakes, it was pretty stable under brakes.

“There’s a lesson to be learned for Red Bull and a warning to be heeded from Ducati’s wilderness years”

“But the first three gears, we’d just get absolutely eaten alive. So, any tracks that you come to where you really have to accelerate and pump out of the corners, we were gone, we really, really struggled.

“But we just tried to minimise the weaknesses and maximise its strengths. And everybody saw what it’s strengths were: its top speed, and with its stop speed we had some stable braking.

“So, we basically just tried to sit at the front of races as much as we could and make everybody else work for it, because if we didn’t qualify well or we weren’t at the front of the race early, it was very hard to chase people down because if they could get a few clean laps going it was very hard to make the most of that bike.”

After his championship year in 2007, Stoner wrestled on with the Ducati before moving to Honda in 2011, claiming one more title and then retiring the following year.

After 2007, Ducati didn’t manage another championship triumph until 13 years later.

It was only when tech genius Luigi Dall’Igna came on board in 2013 and began ringing the Ducati changes that the Desmosedici – quite literally – began to turn around. It was still a long road to follow though: it took years of catching up with innovative solutions and sheer hard work to chip away at all the negatives, finally turning the Ducati into a race winner again.

“Step by step in recent years Ducati engineers have chipped away at the Desmosedici’s negatives – front-end feel and turning – without losing its positives – enormous straight-line performance and great braking stability,” wrote Oxley in 2021.

“There is little doubt that after almost two decades of trying, the Desmosedici is finally the best bike on the MotoGP grid.”

There’s a lesson to be learned for Red Bull and a warning to be heeded from Ducati’s wilderness years.

If Verstappen decides to move elsewhere, will Red Bull suffer the same fate as the Italian bike manufacturer did?