The 2022 MotoGP season hasn’t even started yet and Jack Miller and Aleix Espargaro have already kicked off a war of words, after the Australian hit out at Espargaro following the opening day of pre-season testing at the brand new Mandalika Bay circuit in Indonesia.
Miller encountered Espargaro in the tight final corner of the track late in the day, with tensions already running high following a disagreement earlier in the afternoon in an impromptu safety commission meeting to discuss whether to continue to ride on a dirty track or whether proceedings should be called to a halt in order to properly clean it.
Once again on opposing sides of that argument, as they often are, the two then had their on-track incident, with Miller left fuming at the factory Aprilia racer when they almost collided.
“He decided that he wanted to follow [Enea] Bastianini, up the road from me,” the factory Ducati rider explained of what he had seen.
“Then, I dunno, I was on a good lap, 0.8 seconds under and right before I went to the top the following lap – and he decided he was too close to Bastianini so he just got on the f**king brakes in the middle of the second last corner.
“Right in the middle of the racing line, I nearly crashed right up his arse. So then I revved it at him.
“Of course he didn’t look around or anything, ‘oh, I didn’t see you.’ Yeah, sure.
“But it’s typical, Aleix being arrogant and thinking he owns the track.”
Espargaro jumped to his own defence when asked about the incident afterwards by The Race, instead insisting that instead of trying to get a tow off Miller’s fellow Ducati rider Bastianini, he was trying to do the exact opposite – to get out of the way of both of them on a track that very quickly became a single-line venue thanks to the issues with how dirty it was.
“He said that he thought that I was waiting to follow him,” Espargaro explained, “but I was just waiting to get out of the line. I was waiting to go into the pits, actually, and I think he didn’t understand. He said he blamed me because I was waiting, but actually I was going to the pits.
“There is one line, and I was trying to be kind and not go in the middle. I wasn’t outside waiting for him, not at all. Actually, he did the laptime behind me, so I wasn’t waiting for him!”
The issues with the new Indonesian circuit and its single line plagued every rider during the opening day of action, with what seemed to be loose gravel coming off the top layer of the surface. Leaving the whole circuit slippery and treacherous, it meant that riders couldn’t deviate off the racing line at all.
“I went a little bit off line,” explained late faller Marco Bezzecchi of his second crash when asked by The Race, “and really, if you go 20 centimetres off-line, the dust is incredible, so as soon as I went wide I lost the front.”
Bezzecchi’s first crash had been a “reflex” fall in the wheeltracks of fellow rookie Fabio Di Giannantonio, who had tumbled at the very same sharp Turn 10 right-hander moments prior in what was a fairly crash-filled day of testing.
