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One week ago, 2017 Moto3 world champion Joan Mir gave us the first real demonstration of his MotoGP potential at the Red Bull Ring by not only setting himself up for his first podium position but by launching a last lap attack on Jack Miller that secured him second place.
The 22-year-old has been widely acknowledged as having top level talent for quite some time, immediately impressing upon his MotoGP debut last year and just starting to come to grips with the GSX-RR and the premier class when a technical problem at Brno caused a crash that left him with injuries that essentially wrote off the second half of the season.
And he backed up his first performance at the Austrian Grand Prix with an even more impressive second outing in yesterday’s race – or at least, it was impressive until fates conspired against him to deny the sophomore his first MotoGP victory.
Going into the race the hot favourite after showing rapid race pace in practice and finally coming to grips with qualifying to end up fourth (then promoted to the front row by Johann Zarco’s pitlane start penalty), he got down to business when the lights went out.
Shouldering Miller’s Pramac Ducati out of the way on lap four, Mir was checking out at the front of the race, extending his lead to almost two and a half seconds when Maverick Vinales had brake failure going into Turn 1 and was forced to jump from his Yamaha before it burst into flames and popped the air fencing.
“I just couldn’t hang with Mir. He was just like a robot, just ticking them away” :: Jack Miller
That brought out the red flags. Mir was left distraught at watching his fantastic lead evaporate – and things took an even worse turn when he returned to the Suzuki garage to await the restart.
Falling victim to the same curse as runaway Austrian GP race leader Pol Espargaro only seven days earlier, Mir’s team hadn’t retained a fresh set of tyres for the possibility of a red flag, forcing him to restart the race on the same 18-lap old front medium Michelin that he’d been using during the first part of the race.
It’s the first time that the premier class has seen red flags deployed in consecutive races since the Dutch TT and German Grand Prix in 1996 (a year before Mir was even born), so it’s an easy mistake to make – but it eventually cost him his chance to win.
“We considered it throughout the weekend,” he admitted afterwards, “but the problem is that the only tyre that was working well for our bike was the medium and we only had five of them.
“We need one for Q1, one for Q2, and I need to practice on them too – I can’t stay in the box.
“We just had bad luck. It wasn’t the day. We had the speed, we had the pace, we had everything, but in the end it wasn’t to be.”
And it wasn’t just Mir saying that. Even in the immediate wake of his agonising defeat by Miguel Oliveira and Miller at the final corner, Espargaro took a moment to say Mir would’ve been a deserving winner. Miller emphatically agreed.
“I really feel sorry for him, he had a great pace in that first race, honestly, I just couldn’t hang with him,” said Miller.
“He was just like a robot, just ticking them away. 1m24.3s, 1m24.3s, 1m24.3s, he was just going away from me.
“For him not to be on the podium, I feel sorry for him.”
Mir admitted that the combination of the Suzuki’s strength being at the start of normal races and the lack of a fresh tyre meant that anything better than his eventual fourth was out of the question.
“The difference between race one and race two was starting not like a normal race with a full tank of fuel,” he said.
“It’s something you have to work on because you can’t do 28 laps on a MotoGP bike at 100% – it’s something you’ve got to manage.
“If you penalise me, please penalise the others too because if not it doesn’t make sense” :: Joan Mir
“It penalised us a lot, and the Ducatis were unbelievable on the straights.
“To have to use a front tyre with 20 laps on it too – I wasn’t able to stop the bike, wasn’t able to fight as before and I was really on the limit.
“I was a bit angry, because it was like a Moto3 race with everyone touching at 300km/h – it was crazy.
“I was angry because I wasn’t able to retain myself at the front.”
He was left with plenty more to be angry about after the race, too, believing that Espargaro should have been demoted from the final podium spot after running onto the green-painted run-off in the final corner.
That’s something that Mir was similarly punished for on the opening lap of the first race. He had to hand a place back to Miller then recover.
And he went on the attack against the FIM Stewards’ Panel after the race calling for greater consistency in sanctions.
“It’s unbelievable. Look at what happened in the warm-up with Zarco – I was coming on a good lap, and he was stopped in the middle of the track – but nobody saw it,” said Mir.
“In qualifying with [Andrea] Dovizioso, I was on my hot lap and he was in the middle of the track – but nobody penalised him.
“Myself too – I started the first race, I went wide onto the green, and they penalised me. I agreed with it, I gave one position back – but if you penalise me, please penalise the others too because if not it doesn’t make sense.”
There’s still plenty to be pleased about from Mir’s Austrian week, as he showed that both he and Suzuki now have the capability to fight for the win every single weekend.
The Red Bull Ring is a horsepower-dominated track where Suzuki was never expected to make an impression, just like its fellow inline-four engined runner Yamaha – which had a disastrous time in Austria.
With that in mind, Mir will go into the second half of the abridged season after a two-week break brimming with confidence.
Eighth in the championship standings but only 26 points off the lead thanks to the topsy-turvy 2020 season’s ups and downs, he’s confident that with nine races left it’s not too late to launch a title challenge of his own.
“We have a great bike, if we were fighting for the victory here in Austria,” he said.
“We have a lot less horsepower than the other people, and this means we have a well balanced bike.
“I’m proud of my team, proud of Suzuki, and for sure the bike is a contender for the title now.”
