There’s only one race left before MotoGP’s summer break, as the championship heads back to one of its most iconic venues at the historic TT Circuit Assen – and it couldn’t come at a better time for reigning world champion Joan Mir, as he finally tries to get his 2021 season off to a proper start.
It’s been a rocky campaign so far for Mir, who has taken only two podiums from the opening races of the year and who now sits a whopping 46 points off championship leader Fabio Quartararo – and if he has any hope of retaining his crown, then he needs to quickly start making an impression on the remaining races.
There have been multiple factors for that lack of performance, and some of the disappointments have been good old fashioned bad luck, like when he narrowly missed out on a podium at the opening race of the year by a few hundredths of a second.
But the bigger picture comes down to two factors. Firstly among them has been Michelin’s tyre allocation, with the rubber supplied to teams marked out even before the season started as unfavourable to Suzuki. With the allocation announced in advance of the opening race for all rounds, the team knew that it was going to struggle at certain tracks.
That meant that certain races, like last weekend’s German Grand Prix at the Sachsenring where Mir finished ninth, were always going to be battles to survive rather than thrive as the French firm brought harder tyres all round than it did in 2020.
However, according to The Race’s sources in the team, the German race also marked the final round where Suzuki was significantly concerned about the allocation – and the hope internally is that from now on it should be easier to manage.
The second cause of Suzuki’s woes was something that’s in the marque’s hands rather than those of an external partner – something of a lack of development on its bike that’s not been a significant factor but has nonetheless handed some of the advantage Suzuki had last year back to its opponents.
It’s not been aided by Suzuki’s somewhat conservative reputation when it comes to development work, with the Hamamatsu factory oftentimes too keen to ensure things are just right before delivering them to its race team.
But, according to Mir, that’s something that should be addressed after the summer break, assuming Suzuki can get this weekend’s Dutch TT out of the way with a strong result.
“Suzuki are working really hard to bring new stuff,” he explained last weekend, “and I expect an improvement on the bike. I don’t expect a new bike, because we don’t need a new bike. I don’t know what we will get, but what I do know is that they are working like animals there.
“This is important, that they want the same as me. We share a goal, and maybe for some reason we couldn’t get improvements before now but I see that [project leader] Sahara and all the Japanese staff are really conscious about the fact that we need to improve.
“This is something that makes me happy, because I want the same. I’ll go home now, try to be better, try to improve my skills, try to be a better rider, and they’re trying to make a better bike for me. It’s important that both work in the same direction, and I think that we are.”
He’s fortunate that Assen comes next, though, with the Dutch circuit being one of the key targets of Suzuki in 2020 until the COVD pandemic saw it struck from the calendar for the first time in the sport’s 71-year history, and somewhere where the GSX-RR’s disadvantages will have a much lesser effect.
With the race back again and with the fast and flowing corners of the iconic venue made for the nimble Suzuki chassis, it’s finally time now for Mir to get his season underway ahead of the five-week break he’s hoping his engineers can exploit.
“It was a shame what happened in the last two races,” he said after Sunday’s race at the Sachsenring. “We were not in the position that we wanted to be in, but I expect that this is only these two races. It’s true that it’ll be really important to be competitive in Assen again, to try and be where we are used to being.
“Ninth position here is not a good result, but it is a realistic result after starting from 16th. It wasn’t easy, here in MotoGP. There is a lot of equality between bikes and this track is so difficult to overtake at. For sure we could have done much better, but we just have to be realistic and take good information from this weekend.
“But yes, we have to start the season in a better way in Assen, and then in the second half of the season I’m sure that it’ll be better in all aspects.”
