After safely negotiating some bumpy public roads from the town centre to reach the circuit, the four-time premier-cl🐭ass race winner, who d🐓ominated the inaugural Portimao MotoGP in 2020, led fans on a lap of the track.

“This has been amazing, a great pleasure,” Oliveira said. “We always wanted to do something s🦹pecial here for the fans and this was very cool. If I would put myself in their pos✅ition and had the chance to ride along with a MotoGP bike – which is quite a unique machine - and then onto the track then there is no way I would have missed it.

“I couldn’t believ🎶e the amount of bikes I saw. It’s a shame we couldౠn’t ride for longer.

• Dovizios🐓o dissects the Yamaha: Grip, power and Quartararo
• Marc Marquez doubts 'levelཧ' to fight f💎or victory in every race
• Bradlꦰey Smith after EWC cr﷽ash: ‘I’m lucky to be in one piece’

“Having the RC16 on the road was super-strange. You can defi༺nitely see that these bikes were not made to go slow! I was only just keeping the engine on. When we got to the track then this was more our environment.

“I hope we can so something like this again be♍cause every time you take one of these bikes out of context then it is beautiful. It’s ๊been a great day and now my expectation is to have a good weekend and make a strong result.

“Being in Portugal gives me this strong boost and motivation in a way that everything 𝓡that happened before doesn’t matter.”

What’s behind the ‘spiky’ results?

Oliveira starts round five of the season having taken victory in the w🐼et Mandalika round, but managing just three out of a possible 75 points from the other race☂s.

That includes crossing the line 18th at the recent COTA event, when he was one of only two riders to fit the medium rear tyre (the other was Tech𓄧3 KTM’s Raul Fernandez, in 19th).

“This season is like that, one weekend is maybe good, the other weekend you struggle,” Oliveira said in Texas. “I think it's going to be more normal in this era of bikes in MotoGP. I think just the window of work and perfor𓃲ming well is so short and narrow.”

Smoothing out such ‘spiky’ performances had been one of Oliveira and KTM’s main goals for this season. But with ten different podium finishers al𒉰ready this season, they certainly aren’t the only ones struggling for consistency, so why are the results so topsy-turvy from one track to the 💙next?

“I could not tell you accurate♍ly, but from my perspective, I think the aerodynamics have s𝄹omething to do with it,” Oliveira said. “Because we accelerate a lot faster, we brake much more and so somehow the stress you have on the tyres makes them much more sensitive in terms of working temperatures and pressures, and this is important to be competitive and to be fast.”

Olღiveir💧a believes ride-height devices might also play a part.

“In 2020 we started to see some guys at Ducati startꦍing to use the [rear] ride-height devices, and I think somehow this affects a lot the dynamics of the bike during accelerating and braking," he said."

“I think tඣhat what we are doing now is going [low at the rear] and coming back. Of course that also affects the aerodynamics, because the wings have different degrees of angle when we are down and when we are braking. But it's complex. I know nothing about it!”

Oliveira’s team-mate Brad Binde🍷r is currently the top KTM rider in the world championship, in sixth, ꦜwith a (dry) podium in Qatar.