In a universe of professional sportsmen and women happy to proclaim the incredible rigour of their winter training regimes, it was refreshing to hear Cal Crutchlow summarising his very different preparation for the MotoGP season a few minutes after climbing off his Honda in Argentina two weekends ago, having won the second race of the new campaign and shot to the top of the world championship standings.

He spoke of spending the off-season on holiday in California with his wife and their one-year-old daughter. “It shows you don’t have to ride motorcycles all winter and do press‑ups and pull-ups,” he said, “because I haven’t done one.”

This is Crutchlow’s eighth season in MotoGP and perhaps it has taken him all that time to learn how to relax and make the most of his talent. His performance on the Rio Hondo circuit, in tricky conditions requiring the highest level of feel and intelligence, was that of a rider who has grown out of the years when he always seemed to be having something to prove.

On a chaotic day, when a drying track provoked a pre‑start episode of chaos throughout the field over the choice of tyres, and featured a performance of startling immaturity from the reigning world champion, Crutchlow was the one who kept his head. It was he who best assessed the changing nature of the asphalt/rubber interface throughout the 24 laps and who took his victory, after a fierce four-way fight, with cool panache.

He is 32 and did not achieve promotion to the top tier until he was 25. Contrast that with the most famous rider on the current grid, the seven-times champion Valentino Rossi, who was 21 when he graduated, or Marc Márquez, the champion, who was 20 when he won the first of his four titles and is 25 (and rode on Sunday like a hot‑headed teenager).

Cal Crutchlow rides his LCR Honda to first place at the Argentina GP. Photograph: Mirco Lazzari gp/Getty Images

Crutchlow also came into MotoGP from Superbikes rather than rising through the Moto3 and Moto2 categories, which offer a smoother ramp of preparation, and arrived at the top at a time when no British rider had won a grand prix for 30 years. There had been several decent prospects since Barry Sheene took his last victory in 1981 but none managed to make a significant impact. And he found himself on a grid packed with talent, from Rossi through Casey Stoner, Jorge Lorenzo, Dani Pedrosa and Andrea Dovizioso, all of whom won races during his first season.

It was a little bit like Andy Murray trying to break into a top echelon occupied by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, and it took him a while to do it. Whereas the race winners were riding works machines, Crutchlow spent his first three seasons on a privately entered Yamaha run by one of the satellite teams. Gradually, he worked his way up to become a challenger for podium places, despite some mishaps, and in the 2013 Dutch Grand Prix at Assen he landed his first pole position, going on to finish third, a few seconds behind Rossi and Márquez.

For 2014 he announced a big move to Ducati, believing only a hook-up with a factory team would give him the chance of victories. After a year of mechanical unreliability and crashes on the Italian machines, however, he and the team parted company. Having gone from 12th to seventh to fifth in the championship standings in his three years, now he slumped to 13th, behind two younger Brits, Bradley Smith and Scott Redding.

MotoGP will again pack out Silverstone in August without managing to attract a wider British audience. This is a mystery since it offers the most spectacular racing in motor sport

Needing to rebuild his career, he moved to another satellite outfit, the Monaco-based Team LCR. There he was given a factory-specification Honda RC213V, as used by Stoner and Márquez to win the world titles in 2012 and 2013. The rehabilitation took time and a third place in Argentina was the only top-three finish in a season when he hauled himself back up to eighth in the standings.

After a bad start to 2016, his fortunes were transformed not just by a win in wet conditions in the Czech Republic GP at Brno, ahead of Rossi and Márquez, but by a follow‑up victory at Phillip Island in Australia after Márquez, the pole man, crashed on the first lap. This was the first time a British rider had won two grands prix in a season since Sheene in 1979.

If 2017 was a year of marking time, with a single third place and six other top-five finishes, this season has started on a very different note. And now, after adding the points for fourth place in Qatar to his win in Argentina, he is the first British rider since Sheene 39 years ago to sit on top of the world standings.

A huge draw in many countries, MotoGP will once again pack out Silverstone in August without managing to attract a wider British audience. This is a particular mystery since, season after season, it offers the most spectacular racing to be seen in any form of modern motor sport, with a compelling range of personalities and nationalities among the riders, who retain a sense of human agency long lost to Formula One.

On Sunday, for instance, Crutchlow and his Honda were fighting for the podium places with an Australian on a Ducati, a Frenchman on a Yamaha and a Spaniard on a Suzuki.

As long as he is on a non-works machine, the odds are still heavily against the Coventry-born rider mounting a season-long challenge for the title. But when he and his rivals meet again this weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, the Englishman will have a new status to defend.