Honda-bound Suzuki MotoGP rider Joan Mir admits he feels his 2020 MotoGP title has been widely undervalued.
The 25-year-old won the MotoGP crown in only his second season in the premier class, having had a fast-tracked graduation with Suzuki after just one year in Moto2.
That year’s defending champion Marc Marquez was effectively absent for the season after his injury and aggravation of said injury across the season-opening Jerez double-header, creating a power vacuum that Mir ultimately was the one to fill.
Despite scoring just 11 points across the first three races, Mir found form as a consistent podium finisher to seal the title with one grand prix to spare – despite it having been a COVID-19 pandemic-condensed 14-race schedule.
Ahead of his final race with Suzuki, which is departing MotoGP at the conclusion of this season, Mir acknowledged a frustration at the perception of his 2020 crown in an interview with Spanish broadcaster DAZN.
“I’ve had the feeling that it’s not valued. That annoys me, I’m not going to claim otherwise when it’s the reality,” he said.
“When people try to belittle that performance they always talk about the same things – that Marc wasn’t there, that it was the COVID year.
“They don’t talk about the fact that it was Suzuki’s first title in 20 years, that it was my second year in MotoGP, working with a wonderful crew, not making any mistakes. This isn’t being talked about, that the work the team did that year was spectacular.”
Mir remained a frontrunner the year after his title, but has had a particularly miserable 2022 season trying to get a handle on the updated GSX-RR and work through the shock of the news of Suzuki’s departure.
Game over before it's even started! 💥@JoanMirOfficial is OUT on lap 1! 😢#AustrianGP 🇦🇹 pic.twitter.com/1FQNFj4px6
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) August 21, 2022
The campaign was particularly soured by his injury in a Red Bull Ring crash, but that crash by itself already marked a sixth non-finish in nine races.
Since his return, he has had errant tyre pressures wreck a potential victory bid at Phillip Island before a case of arm pump – which may lead him to seek off-season surgery – destroyed his Malaysian Grand Prix.
Mir acknowledged 2022 has been “the worst year of my sporting career, by far”, and said the change of scenery in moving to Honda can serve him well and is something “I need after this year”.
“I’ve just turned 25 [in September], I’ve won two titles [Moto3 and MotoGP] – in a way now I’m starting like a second stage in my sporting career,” he said.
“Let’s see if I can really achieve something more.
“It’s a very good situation for me to have been able to achieve what I have with Suzuki. Unfortunately, it’s ending the way it is, and now we are heading to another amazing factory.”
How should Mir’s title really be valued?
Joan Mir was excellent amid the chaos of the compact 2020 calendar, but just because it understandably annoys him to hear about outside factors at play doesn’t mean there weren’t any.
Now, there is an increasingly proud tradition in the US sports scene to discuss titles won in the particular atmosphere/set-up of the COVID lockdowns as somehow invalid or worth less – you’ll hear the term ‘Mickey Mouse championship’ relating to the 2020 NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers and 2020 MLB World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers – and that tradition is basically more fan-driven trolling than any serious point.
So, when it comes to MotoGP’s Europe-only, empty-grandstand, 14-race calendar in 2020? It was certainly a change of pace, but the difference was easy to overstate.
If the flyaways did occur, Mir ultimately did already have prior experience of those tracks, and among those races left off was Phillip Island, which the 2020 Suzuki would likely have won at. And 14 races is certainly below modern standards, but it’s still more than every calendar before 1987, and nobody is rushing to take those 38 titles away.
Now, the circumstances to do with Mir’s rivals are more salient to mention. And it’s not just Marquez – although it is primarily Marquez, who before his Jerez crash humiliated the field by going 16th to third and would’ve surely won that year’s title had he stayed healthy.
In Marquez’s absence, three-time runner-up Andrea Dovizioso couldn’t properly step up to the plate because his form completely unravelled with the introduction of the new, grippier Michelin rear tyre. Yamaha’s title challenge was hamstrung by a 2020 bike that hindsight has been particularly unfavourable towards. And Mir’s team-mate Alex Rins wasn’t able to climb out of a hole dug by an early-season injury and two crashes when in contention for victory.
But in the end all those were varying degrees of self-inflicted, while Mir avoided any sort of injury-causing crash (of his three retirements, the Jerez opener was a small self-inflicted crash, Brno was being wiped out by Iker Lecuona, and Portimao was already post-coronation) and the Suzuki team had produced a truly great bike. He thus kept the points tally ticking up, and had his own slice of misfortune in a red flag that likely denied him a win at the Red Bull Ring.
It was a very assured campaign for a second-year rider, also one with minimal Moto2 experience and whose debut MotoGP season was not a straightforward one, with a brutal Brno test crash conditioning a significant chunk of his 2019.
And it was also a title run the credentials of which he effectively backed up in 2021, holding his own on a GSX-RR that remained relatively static while rival bikes improved massively and scoring more than twice the points of a struggling Rins.
Let’s be honest here – if you’re ranking all the MotoGP-era titles, Mir’s wouldn’t be very high. Just one victory (which he still hasn’t added to), a relatively small winning margin, and the defending champion absent are all things you have to account for.
But it was still very legitimate in terms of who made the fewest mistakes and was the most reliably fast rider. And as much as you can call his and Suzuki’s 2020 crown fortunate, there’s still an equally strong argument to be made that, given the inexperience of the rider (who really had no business being as dependable as he was in just year two) and the moderate budget of the team, it remains a giant-killing for the ages.
