Jack Miller's 10th season as a full-time MotoGP rider is in the running for his worst - and it may well be his last.
Pedro Acosta's accelerated rise made him expendable in the works KTM team, the availability of shiny options with more recent MotoGP wins meant no room at the in at Tech3, and now both Pramac Yamaha and Trackhouse Aprilia - two teams who could in theory have a lot of use for Miller's experience - look to be moving in a different direction.
Pramac, a team Miller enjoyed probably his most convincing stretch as a MotoGP rider with, is said by Sky Italy to have chosen Miguel Oliveira as its experienced option to spearhead its Yamaha switch, and is known to be looking at Moto2 options for its second ride. Trackhouse, which now has an Oliveira-shaped vacancy to fill, is apparently splashing for Ai Ogura, according to Motorsport.com Spain.
Miller could yet find refuge - there have been far too many twists and turns in this MotoGP silly season to rule that out - but he might not. There'll be a natural interest in having an Australian representative on the premier-class grid, but ask Joe Roberts and Somkiat Chantra how much being a sole representative of a major market is actually worth when bumping up against MotoGP teams' clear existing preferences.
There is still absolutely a case for Miller staying on the grid somewhere. If his time in active MotoGP ranks is up at the end of the season, he will have entered the top 15 in all-time premier-class starts by then, and he should not feel hard done by. MotoGP would not be what it is, and staying in it for this long would not have the value that it has, if it wasn't easy to drop off the grid. We are, after all, talking about the absolute best of the best, a 22-rider roster who all should belong in the top 30 of circuit racers worldwide at worst.
He's having a bad season, and this is the inherent risk in having a bad season in a contract year.
If this is the end of it, what it should not take away from is that Jack Miller has had a very good MotoGP career.
Good arrogance and bad arrogance
There will be approval in some circles if Miller does lose out here in this game of musical chairs, and that approval will go hand in hand for many with a perception that Miller has an inflated sense of his MotoGP achievements and standing relative to other riders.
Certainly, this comment to Spanish broadcaster DAZN on Assen media day a month ago will come up: "People forget very quickly. We still have speed, we still have consistency, we are nearly every weekend inside Q2, on a bike that we are not gelling with correctly at the moment.
"There are a lot of slower people on the grid than I am and they still have a job. One guy finished behind me last week that just signed for €12million. So I'm sure that I can manage to find a job."
That "one guy" is, of course, Fabio Quartararo, and that's what makes it a deeply clumsy point: the Yamaha appears for all intents and purposes much worse than the KTM, and Quartararo has almost single-handedly kept its season respectable relative to the doldrums of fellow Japanese manufacturer Honda.
Miller also wasn't helped by the fact that comment was presented on social media in an abridged version that made it seem he was specifically saying he was better than world champion Quartararo, rather than simply pointing to an individual race outcome.
As a result, what should've just come off as a 2025 sales pitch badly missing the mark instead became a further example of outrageous arrogance.
Every rider on the MotoGP grid is arrogant to some extent - it comes with the job. Miller, certainly, is no stranger to talking himself up, but there's a better explanation for why than an excess of ego. That explanation, and it's one that there's a lot of evidence for in his various media sessions, is that Miller has come to see himself as both a MotoGP outsider and, because of that, a MotoGP "survivor", a rider doing anything and everything to stick around and prove his worth to a paddock he clearly sees as having always doubted him.
That perception will not be helped by having your quote taken out of context and translated into a different language for people to then clown on you, but it's also reflective of the career he's actually had. Ever since it did not come off for him at Honda, it is clear he never felt true job security in the premier class.
Even once he'd found his feet at Pramac, there was that mid-season bombshell in 2019 - a bombshell he himself partially corroborated - that there was genuine interest in sidelining him to make room for a Jorge Lorenzo return to Ducati. That same season, he was fighting his corner in trying to hang on to a works-spec Desmosedici, which his performances warranted but which a contractual promise to the then-struggling Pecco Bagnaia made difficult.
When he did leave Ducati a couple of years later, he repeatedly positioned himself as the master of his own destiny, which by most other accounts wasn't strictly true. He had Bagnaia's backing to continue in works Ducati red, yes, but the Ducati higher-ups were pretty clearly intent on choosing between Jorge Martin and Enea Bastianini instead. But in KTM, Miller, who did also admit to having felt an outsider culturally at Ducati, felt he had finally found his long-term home where he could just get down to business instead of worrying whether his ride would be taken out from under him at the first dip.
It didn't work. Even at the end of last year, with KTM committing to five riders for four bikes, he had to face questions about being the odd one out. And as for 2024, the only silver lining has been that he hasn't really spent any races under pressure of having his seat stolen by Acosta - but only because Acosta's performances made it clear immediately that seat was his, regardless of what Miller did or what Miller said.
But remember, if we come back to 'arrogance', that what Miller said was that Acosta deserves it, and that he'd just like to stay at Tech3 - emphasising his development contribution (which maybe proved not the right time to do it as the RC16 has declined in recent months).
Remember also the situation in the works Ducati team, where he was coming in as the prospective team leader but got overshadowed suddenly and ruthlessly by Bagnaia, improving at lighting pace. Miller accepted that quickly: he fell in line and had no qualms at all serving as Bagnaia's rear gunner and proving a harmonious team presence, as evidenced by not just their public interactions but Bagnaia's desire to see him retained.
Much less talented riders would've handled that situation much less gracefully than Jack Miller, but I think that was less realism and magnanimity - though of course probably some of that - than pragmatism. As always, it was about getting this team and other teams to see why he should still be here on the grid.
If this is the end
That case has weakened the further we've got into 2024. Acosta has done serious, likely irreparable damage, to both Miller's and Brad Binder's reputation, but Binder steadied the ship while Miller's results went into freefall.
Miller is one of MotoGP's finest riders, probably ever, in mixed conditions, but this season's weather patterns haven't given him a chance to display that - and, truthfully, it doesn't actually look like he's been finding that part of his game as easy to extract on the KTM RC16 as on the Ducati or on the Honda.
And outside of that, he's still too similar to the rider he has been all along, which is the problem. He's a good qualifier but in conventional races he is always likely to move down the order - or at least act as a roadblock while maximising KTM's braking strength as a defensive weapon, but with no possibility to move forward.
This has been his reputation for years now, and it's still pretty accurate. Any prospective MotoGP employer will know that this part of Miller's game it probably cannot fix and - as brutally harsh as that assessment is on a rider who was just nine laps off winning on the KTM last season at Valencia - if it cannot fix that, it cannot win with him.
If you're not partisan, it is also just a little difficult to be truly excited about the prospect of an 11th season in MotoGP for Miller - and I'm sure MotoGP team principals are affected by that in a way, because so much of the market is driven by hype. Narratively, the exciting riders in MotoGP belong to one of three groups - champions, race winners who could be champions, and up-and-comers who could be race winners (and then maybe could be champions).
Miller doesn't fall into any of the three. You feel his MotoGP story has been, by and large, written, although there can be some debate on whether his peak was the works Ducati years, the final Pramac season of 2020 when it very briefly looked like a title challenge was on the cards, or that marvellous Dutch TT Sunday in 2016 - when Miller ended a 10-year wait for a non-factory race win.
When The Race asked Miller about his future at the Sachsenring earlier this month, the answer made it clear the sands had shifted. "Worst comes to worst, we go home," was his summary, and that outcome seems as realistic as ever.
But if this is it - four wins, 23 podiums, and one of the most iconic images of this MotoGP era from Termas 2018, when (as polesitter) only he correctly opted for slicks and lined up totally alone on the grid as everyone else scrambled back to the pits. That should've been a fifth win if sporting fairness had been the overriding principle in that moment.
All those career achievements from a jump straight from Moto3 to MotoGP, by a rider who broke out through Australia and then Germany rather than the Spain or Italy-centric path 75% of his peers have followed.
He's also, remarkably, only 29, so there could be a way back if he drops off this year. It is, though, increasingly hard to make a seat-worthy impression in a wildcard outing or test rider role, and in terms of World Superbikes or something (where Ducati's powerhouse works team is known to be interested in Miller) you'd probably have to actively defeat the absurdly on-form Toprak Razgatlioglu to convince MotoGP teams you're a must-hire.
So, this could be it. But, after 10 years, maybe that's fine. Whatever happens from here, Jack Miller got further than most and did more than most, and history will look kindly upon his MotoGP career.
