Joan Mir: “Now I’m back to my natural style” - Exclusive

Former MotoGP champion Joan Mir returned to the premier-class podium with Honda this season, almost four years after his final Suzuki rostrum.

There must have been moments when Mir wondered if it would ever arrive, having achieved just two top ten finishes during two years with Honda prior to 2025.

This season then began with Mir finishing just one of the opening six grands prix, as a mixture of bad luck, incidents and over-riding continued to take their toll.

“In the first part of the year, the best thing you could do with this bike was a top seven,” Mir told Crash.net.

“If someone did something more, it was due to the conditions or strange situations. But if not, the real potential was to put everything together and make a top seven.

“At Aragon, we scored a seventh. But unless somebody was missing, it was difficult to do more.”

Mir later managed a sixth place in Austria, in between further DNFs, but the turning point came after the latest RCV aerodynamic and engine upgrades were introduced at Barcelona.

“After Barcelona, we improved a little bit the aero and the engine connection. That was something that was disturbing me a lot. And then personally I could make a click,” Mir explained.

Everything came together two rounds later in Japan.

Mir claimed the HRC team’s first MotoGP podium since Marc Marquez at the same Motegi circuit in 2023, adding to a victory and podium earlier in the season for LCR Honda rider Johann Zarco.

The Spaniard then repeated the podium feat at Sepang, a race he rates as his best of the year. Why?

“For the potential itself of the bike,” Mir said. “Sepang normally is not a track that is very good for this bike historically. And I think what we did there was something very important.

“Because normally, we struggle with grip. And Sepang is a very low grip track.

“[To compensate] we just had to brake a lot, risking more than the others. I crashed in the sprint, so I didn't want to make that mistake again!

“I handled the situation very well. So I’ll say Sepang [was my best race].”

Mir thrilled fans with his late braking exploits in the Malaysian Grand Prix, a natural attribute he had been forced to restrain during his Suzuki years.

“With the Suzuki, this was not the style,” he said. “I had to adapt to the bike to flow a lot more, brake a little bit earlier and release the brakes earlier. Because that bike required that type of style.

“And now with the Honda I'm back to my natural style. Like I had in Moto3 and Moto2. It's something that I enjoy a lot, braking really hard and really putting the bike into the ground.

“But it’s very difficult to do, because I risk more than the others, and you need to find the limit and the confidence. 

"It can cause some crashes, but if I'm able to ride with a little bit more margin, we can control that.”

Despite the podiums, Mir’s high number of non-scores, 21 out of 44 races, left him just 15th in the world championship, behind Zarco and factory team-mate Luca Marini.

But the ‘turnaround’ in performance, also illustrated by Honda climbing from rank D to C in the concessions system, has left him confident for 2026.

“It was a key year,” he said. “A year where we could turn things around, from less to more.

“Probably I waited a bit longer than I had hoped. We had a lot of bad luck and zero consistency. But in terms of performance, the potential of the rider, the potential of Honda to reverse the situation, it was a very positive season.

“Now we need one more click, to try to find more consistency, with a little more potential. Because if I have to go always [on the limit] like this, it will be hard.

“But hopefully next year we start from here and go up.”