Racing should encourage technical diversity and experiment but it rarely does, at least not since the so-called golden age of the 1960s, when in-line six-cylinder Honda four-strokes battled for victory with V4 Yamaha two-strokes.

That fun ended at the end of the 1960s – that wildest of decades in all areas of endeavour – when people realised this simply could not go on. Honda, Yamaha and all the others couldn’t keep spending money like NASA forever.

The technical regulations were therefore rewritten to ban the wildest engineering fantasies and replace them with more sensible, more restricted tech rules.

Of course some factories still wanted to do things differently – coming up with crazy blue-sky thinking for the racetrack that might somehow create something of delight for the road rider.

In the late 1970s Honda had its 22,000rpm eight-valves-per-cylinder oval-piston NR500 four-stroke, the factory’s quixotic attempt to beat the two-strokes. It was an astonishing motorcycle, but it didn’t score a single grand prix point.

A few years later, after going with the two-stroke flow, Honda built its first NSR500 with the fuel tank under the engine and the expansion chambers over the top, looking a bit like a church organ. The idea was to increase cornering performance by lowering centre of gravity. The bike proved that this wasn’t a good idea. More had been learned.

A decade later Italian factory Aprilia entered the premier class for the first time. The rest of the grid was all 500cc V4 two-strokes, but the little Italian factory entered the game with a bored-and-stroked version of its successful v-twin 250 GP bike. Aprilia raced and developed the bike over six seasons, but never quite overcame the most powerful V4s.

The closest Aprilia got to victory was Jeremy McWilliams’ hard-fought podium at the damp 2000 British GP, less than a second behind Valentino Rossi and the latest iteration of Honda’s NSR.

In 2002, the inaugural season of 990cc MotoGP four-strokes, Aprilia once again did things differently. While Honda created its wondrous five-cylinder RC211V and Suzuki and Yamaha built their less-than-wondrous four-cylinder GSV-R and YZR-M1, Aprilia built its RS3 triple.

The RS3 was the best-sounding MotoGP bike of them all and was the first to crack the 200mph barrier, during practice for the 2002 Italian GP at Mugello, but that was about as good as it got.

Its engine was engineered by Formula 1 concern Cosworth, and like most F1-created bike kit, didn’t work very well in a motorcycle. RS3 rider Colin Edwards famously said this about riding the bike, “You take a bull, you cut off its balls, dangle them in front of its face, then climb on its back.”.

The RS3 lasted three seasons without once troubling the top five. After that debacle Aprilia stayed out of MotoGP for almost a decade, returning in 2012 with its ART CRT bike, then upping its game in 2015 with a motorcycle powered by an engine from its RSV4 superbike.

This first RS-GP was a laboratory bike, created by Romano Albesiano, who had been moved from Piaggio’s road-bike department (where he worked on Aprilias and Moto Guzzis!) to the race department, taking over from Gigi Dall’Igna, who had defected to Ducati.

In 2016 the RS-GP was powered by a full prototype engine with pneumatic valves and seamless gearbox, but once again Aprilia decided to go its own way. While Ducati and Honda were racing and winning with 90-degree V4s Aprilia opted for a 75-degree V4.

A narrow-angle vee offers several advantages, mainly better packaging of the motorcycle. But like everything in racing it’s a mix of positives and negatives. For example, a narrow-angle vee requires a balance shaft, which means more weight and space and less horsepower.

Finally last year Aprilia did what it had never done before in the premier class: it went with the flow, building a 90-degree V4, using an overall motorcycle configuration not dissimilar to Ducati’s Desmosedici.

All of a sudden the bike was competitive, because in racing it’s best to forget about technical diversity and experimentation, and instead copy whoever’s winning and try to better what they’re doing.

Aleix Espargaró qualified fourth for the bike’s third race and often showed great speed in races, only to be let down by the kind of niggling problems from which an all-new bike inevitably suffers. Not only that, but emergency cost-saving technical regulations written in the wake of Covid-19 prevented Aprilia from doing what it needed to do: introduce engine and aerodynamic upgrades during the season.

The RS-GP’s 2020 aero was a particular problem – it was designed for higher-gearing tracks that require less downforce – so the bike wheelied far too much all year, robbing it of acceleration.

Last winter Aprilia fixed all those issues and from the first race of 2021 Espargaró was right in the mix. At Losail and Jerez he finished five seconds behind the winner, just two tenths of a lap too slow off the victory pace

At the Austrian GP, two weeks before Silverstone, he was five seconds down and closing before the rain arrived.

“When Aleix was catching the first group at Spielberg, which isn’t a great track for us, I said, we are ready,” commented Albesiano after celebrating his first MotoGP podium on Sunday.

Espargaró, who had previously scored one MotoGP top-three, aboard an open-spec Yamaha YZR-M1 at the rain-soaked 2014 Aragon GP, was as relieved as anything after chasing winner Fabio Quartararo and runner-up Álex Rins over the line.

“We’ve been very, very close in the previous races,” said the 32-year-old Spaniard who is contesting his 12th season in MotoGP and his fifth with Aprilia. “Finally, to finish on the podium is something that gives me more motivation to keep working and improving the bike.