Michael Scott | September 14, 2022
Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
Mir to Honda … Dream Team or Nightmare?
What is one of the worst fates to befall a MotoGP rider? Funnily enough, it’s the same as one of the best. It’s joining the factory Honda team.
Will the move to Repsol Honda hurt or hinder Joan Mir’s career? History points to hinder, but we will see.
This was often true in the past. For instance, having to try to match up to Mick Doohan was no easy task. But it has become all the more so recently.
For the past decade or so, riding a Repsol Honda has offered one of two outcomes. You have all the potential to win the championship. Or your career hits the buffers.
The last factory Honda rider other than Marc Marquez to win a GP was Dani Pedrosa in 2017. Nobody since. And by 2022, the usually dominant manufacturer appears to have switched off the light at the end of the tunnel. Winners of nine constructor titles between 2011 and 2019, Honda currently languishes in last place.
Take Jorge Lorenzo—a triple-champion and a sublime rider, with 47 race wins, all but three on a Yamaha, where his super-precise style meant he ousted Rossi from the top spot. He moved to Ducati, and after a trying apprenticeship he started winning on that as well.
Then in 2019 he joined Repsol Honda, for a nightmare of many crashes and a string of injuries. And zero top-10s. At the end of the year, he announced a premature retirement.
The next sacrificial lamb was Pol Espargaro, who—eyes gleaming—confirmed the achievement of a lifetime’s ambition when he signed for Repsol Honda for 2021.
Less than two years later, similarly battered and bruised after yet another double-crash weekend at Misano, he is only too pleased to escape back to KTM. Pol, a former Moto2 World Champion, took a single top-three at the end of his first year, and one more at the start of 2022, before a frightful season of pain, disappointment, and a battle to get into the points at all.
They shared Marc Marquez as a teammate, and even now after three years of injury the contrast could not be greater. Marc has missed eight out of 14 2022 races but is still the top-scoring Honda rider.
Joan Mir is that latest to venture onto the razor’s edge, signing up as Marc’s teammate for next year. Is he rescuing his career after being dumped by the departing Suzuki, or will he, too, fall victim to the curse of the poisoned chalice?
The 25-year-old Spaniard was an immaculate Moto3 Champion in 2017, a Moto2 podium regular in 2018, then straight into MotoGP, where he won the title in his second year.
His reputation is equally immaculate, if slightly tarnished by crashes this season. Mir is known for a calm and intelligent approach, and a tire-saving technique that sees him stronger in the later stages of a race.
Improvements to the Honda are increasingly urgent, and there were some surprises at the two days of tests after the Misano GP.
One was that Marc Marquez was present, after an operation and 100 days away, and going pretty well. Placed 13th overall and top Honda rider.
The other was not that a 2023 bike turned up, as had been rumored (Repsol’s Espargaro ran basically the bike on which he started the year with a solitary strong third at Qatar), but that two obvious changes were very much out of character.
Not only had the determinedly independent-minded HRC produced some aerodynamics that closely echoed Aprilia. More surprising still was an aluminum swingarm replacing the usual carbon-fiber unit—and reportedly (according to German-language website Speedweek) made for Honda by Kalex, the German chassis outfit that supplies almost the entire Moto2 grid.
For HRC to be seeking new solutions is not surprising, after their dire 2022 season. But for them to be buying technology from outside is almost unprecedented.
In any case, the troublesome RC213V should be at least on the way back to full strength. Marquez will be in the same condition even sooner. His on-track return might even happen at next weekend’s Aragon GP.
But whatever Honda manages, Mir is joining a team still digging itself out of a hole.
Will the progress and Marc’s return help turn things around for the new boy?
Mir’s strength has been smooth riding on the inline-four Suzuki. The Honda, like the other fast-but-clumsy V4s, means he will have to revise his style completely, and ride to the bike’s strengths rather than his own, something even Rossi found difficult when he made the same move to Ducati.
Furthermore, during Marc’s triumphant tenure, the Honda has become increasingly a one-rider bike.
The chance didn’t come about, but Mir might spend the next two years regretting that he didn’t get to move to Yamaha. He might have proved the only rider other than Quartararo able to win races on the Suzuki-like M1. CN
Click here for all the latest MotoGP news.
