As Jack Miller ponders his next move to extend his MotoGP tenure into an 11th season, the available gaps in the 2025 rider market matrix are disappearing – and it looks very much like a case of Honda or nothing for the 29-year-old.
It’s a possibility, though, that comes with a word of warning from one of Japanese factory’s current riders, one whose career trajectory has hit rock-bottom ever since he threw his leg over a Honda.
These days, Joan Mir is barely recognisable from the rider who won the 2020 world championship for Suzuki, the Spaniard a shell of his title-taking self just four years later.
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Just 26, Mir’s first season for Honda last year was so psychologically bruising and physically damaging that he admitted to contemplating retirement; while he’s out of contract at the end of 2024 and has shelved ideas of hanging up his helmet for now, he admits he has few options.
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“When I came to Honda, I had many offers, I could go wherever I want,” Mir said after the one-day test at Mugello following the Italian Grand Prix in early June.
“Now, it’s not like this. Doesn’t matter what you did in the past. Now the others that are doing the results, at the moment, four to five riders have the priority.
“People consider the bike that you use, of course. But one thing I said before is that nobody comes out of Honda in a better way than they came in …”.
Mir’s stance was eyebrow-raising in its savage delivery and uncomfortable for his team’s management to hear, but as honest as it gets. Should the Spaniard find a home elsewhere – most likely at Trackhouse Aprilia, where team principal Davide Brivio was in an equivalent role at Suzuki the year Mir won the title – the Honda seat he seemingly can’t wait to vacate is Miller’s most likely landing spot.
The Australian may have few – or no – better options than a return to a manufacturer he rode for in his earliest MotoGP days (2015-17), but is a full-circle reunion a potential career-killer?
Put simply, that may not matter given Miller’s world championship career is already on thin ice after being replaced at KTM’s senior team by Pedro Acosta for 2025 and then overlooked for its Tech3 team for Enea Bastianini (Ducati) and Maverick Vinales (Aprilia). But it does appear to be a move akin to a poisoned chalice, as Mir would attest.
So is Mir’s brutal assessment of Honda – and the riders that come and go, or are already in place for 2024 – accurate?
Mir’s misery of the past two years – relative to what preceded them – paint a familiar picture when compared to a quartet of others who followed his path, and offer some statistical consideration for Miller and his management to contemplate.
JOAN MIR
Pre-Honda (2019-22, Suzuki): 65 races, 1 win, 13 podiums, 558 total points/8.6 points per race, 2020 world champion, third in 2021 championship.
At Honda (2023-24): 22 rounds (five missed with injury), best result 5th, 39 total points/1.7 points per round, 22nd in 2023 championship.
Mir’s 2020 world championship – in a strange, covid-curtailed season of just 14 rounds, all in Europe – is unfairly undervalued. Yes, it was a campaign defined by Marc Marquez’s season-ending accident in the first race that brought an abrupt end to his run of four straight titles, but Mir and Suzuki were metronomically rapid, taking six podiums in a seven-race late-season span to secure the championship with a round to spare.
The following season (third) was an acceptable title defence, but things went awry when injuries saw him miss four rounds in 2022, right as Suzuki announced it was withdrawing from the sport.
Needing a new home for 2023, Mir parlayed his past into a ride at Repsol Honda alongside Marquez, but soon discovered what Marquez’s teammates over the years found out the hard way – the mercurial six-time MotoGP champion, when fully fit, was the only rider who could wrestle the recalcitrant RC213V into contention.
Marquez still wasn’t right after repeated operations on his shoulder damaged in 2020 and looking for a way out, but Mir was mentally broken after a season where he crashed – no misprint – 24 times, missing five of the 20 rounds altogether with fractures and frayed confidence. For context, Mir fell 11 times total in his final season with Suzuki.
Mir is the leading Honda rider in this year’s championship, but 18th place overall is an accurate representation of Honda’s deficit to the rest, no reflection on Mir’s ability, and certainly no reward for the limits he stubbornly continues to push and the crashes he’s piling up as a consequence.
In that same, often harrowing, Mugello debrief, Mir admitted he’s discussed life on the outside with Marquez, who walked away from a lucrative final season with Honda in 2024 to ride a 2023-spec Ducati for Gresini Racing, and done so well on it that he’s signed a contract with the factory Ducati team to partner reigning world champion Francesco Bagnaia in 2025.
“I spoke many times with Marc about it, how he felt last year and how he feels now,” Mir said.
“This is a bit … I [have] an example, a line I can follow.”
ALEX RINS
Pre-Honda (2017-22, Suzuki): 89 races (8 races missed with injury), 5 wins, 17 podiums, 844 total points/9.5 points per race, 3rd in 2020 championship.
At Honda (2023): 7 rounds (13 missed with injury), 1 win, 1 podium, 54 total points/7.7 points per race, 19th in world championship (previous worst: 13th in 2021).
Now: Yamaha (8 points, 20th in world championship).
Rins, Mir former teammate at Suzuki, had a short and – for one weekend – sweet dalliance with Honda in 2023. Longer-lasting are the ramifications of injury, but the Spaniard was at least able to escape Honda to something better for this season, if only marginally.
The 28-year-old gave Suzuki a fairytale departure from the sport in 2022, winning two of the final three races of the brand’s final season to wrap up his six-year tenure with the team with a bang.
A spot with Honda’s second-tier satellite LCR team looked to be a berth beneath his abilities, but it paid off almost immediately when Rins won the third race of 2023 in Texas – snapping a run of 24 straight Marquez victories for the marque. After that? Rins finished once more race.
Following Austin, Rins crashed out at Jerez and Le Mans before badly breaking his right leg in the sprint race at Mugello; today, 12 months on, the Spaniard still walks with a considerable limp. He signed a one-season deal with Yamaha to partner 2022 world champion Fabio Quartararo two months before he finally came back last year, but rode just two more races in Honda’s colours before cutting his losses.
Yamaha has its own problems – Quartararo sits 13th in this year’s standings, and Rins just 20th. But Rins isn’t at Honda, and while there remains doubt that the injury he sustained while riding one won’t see him walk away from the sport sooner rather than later, he’s at least on a machine that isn’t mired in MotoGP’s basement.
POL ESPARGARO
Pre-Honda (2014-16 Yamaha, 2017-20 KTM): 118 races, 6 podiums, best result 3rd (six times), 725 total points/6.1 points per race, best result 5th in world championship (2020).
At Honda (2021-22): 36 races, 1 podium, best result 2nd, 156 total points/4.3 points per race, best result 12th in world championship (2021).
Now: Test rider for KTM.
Espargaro’s acquisition by Honda was bizarre; the Spaniard inked a deal to become Marc Marquez’s teammate for 2021 before the covid-postponed 2020 season had even started, Honda deciding not to renew Marc’s brother Alex Marquez before he’d even raced with the team.
It says much for Espargaro’s time with Honda that his results over two years didn’t make anywhere near the headlines his initial signature did, save for a career-best second-place finish behind Marquez at Misano in 2021 that was overshadowed by Bagnaia crashing out of the lead and handing Quartararo the title with two rounds left.
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Espargaro’s two years at Honda – 12th in his first season, 16th in his last – were a long way off his past at Yamaha and KTM, where he had four top-10 championship finishes over a seven-year period of being a solid, if unspectacular, midfielder.
When Suzuki pulled the plug on its MotoGP experiment, Honda swooped for Mir and Espargaro was deemed surplus to needs; he had one more injury-cruelled season with KTM’s second team in 2023 before Acosta took his place.
LUCA MARINI
Pre-Honda (2021-23, Ducati): 56 races, 2 podiums, best result 2nd, 2 pole positions, 362 total points/6.5 points per race, 8th in 2023 championship.
At Honda (2024): 7 races, 0 points (best result: 16th), 23rd in world championship.
Maybe Marini has the right idea of how to ride a Honda; not particularly quickly, certainly not fast enough to fall off, and with a contract to the end of 2025 already in his pocket. It’s just as well he has job security, because after seven rounds this season, the Italian is the only full-time rider yet to score a single point.
Valentino Rossi’s half-brother knew what he was signing up for when he left a top-10 championship finish for his step-sibling’s VR46 Ducati outfit to effectively take the place of Marquez – a factory ride with a big name, heavy history, and a project with nothing but upside.
The scale of the task would be bigger than even he realised, but one Marini – long regarded as one of the most astute technical brains in the pit lane and a rider who gets results from methodically chipping away and diving deep into data – might be the man for with Honda at its nadir.
The results, for now, paint a stark contrast to Mir, who is still raging against the machine he’s on and coming off-second best. Marini has been out-qualified by Mir in all seven Grands Prix this season and finished either last or second-last six times, but has seen the chequered flag in one piece and in 13 of 14 starts, his one slip-up coming when he slipped off in the sprint race in Spain on a sketchy damp track.
Slow and steady won’t win the race, but the Italian is at least gathering information for Honda to learn more about its machinery to get it to a competitive level.
JOHANN ZARCO
Pre-Honda (2017-18 Yamaha, 2019* KTM, 2020-23 Ducati): 121 races, 1 win, 21 podiums, 8 pole positions, 973 total points/8 points per race, 5th in 2021 and 2023 world championships.
At Honda (3 races in 2019*, 2024): 10 races, 12 points (best result: 12th), 19th in 2024 world championship.
Rins’ departure from Honda – announced before the 2023 British Grand Prix in August – gave Zarco the opening he wanted as a 33-year-old journeyman without a race win and on a series of rolling one-year contracts with Ducati.
The Frenchman swiftly inked a two-year deal with LCR Honda two weeks later to bring down the curtain on a four-year stint riding satellite Ducati machinery, signing off in style when he took a maiden win in the Australian Grand Prix at Phillip Island on his 120th start in the category.
It was the longest-ever wait for a rider to see the view from the top step of the MotoGP podium for the first time, a stat very on-brand for a mercurial talent who led his first race for Yamaha in 2017 before crashing, got sacked by KTM half a season into a two-year deal in 2019 before returning as an injury replacement for current teammate Takaaki Nakagami for three races at what’s now his new employer at LCR, and recorded 19 podiums before a first premier-class win.
Given the historically long wait for that breakthrough, perhaps Zarco is content to be patient with Honda as he morphs from genuine podium threat to also-ran; Zarco is yet to qualify or finish inside the top 12 in seven weekends on a Honda this season, a stat that looks unlikely to change any time soon.
It’s a statistical swoon that offers Mir’s theory that riders reach their highest points before they come to Honda even more fuel, while simultaneously (and surely) making Miller be careful what he wishes for.