It’s very rare that the reigning MotoGP world champion finds himself lining up for a race weekend as a rookie rider – but that’s exactly the situation that Suzuki’s Joan Mir finds himself in this weekend as he makes his MotoGP debut at Silverstone.
And despite a difficult start to proceedings, he says that it’s not unfamiliarity with the circuit that caused him to finish the opening day in a distant P13. In contrast to the majority of weekends over the past year, Mir finds himself in the unfamiliar slot as Suzuki’s second best rider, behind his team-mate Alex Rins.
Mir hasn’t ridden at the Northamptonshire track since his Moto3 days after the race was cancelled due to track conditions in 2018 during his only season in Moto2. While serious chest injuries in a post-race test at Brno in 2019 meant he wasn’t fit in time for the British race two weeks later during his rookie top-flight campaign.
With the track subsequently failing to feature on 2020’s COVID-impacted calendar, it means that this weekend marks his debut there on a MotoGP machine.
But despite that unfamiliarity with the longest circuit of the MotoGP season, he insisted that his Friday struggles why he ended up struggling so much on the opening day of action in cool conditions.
“It’s a mix,” he told The Race, “it’s not only because it’s my first day, because in FP1 I was already OK with the track and I didn’t have any corner. I just had trouble with the feeling with the bike, and we have to understand what I need to be strong with the bike here. It’s a track where normally our style works well, because we flow well and this is a track where you need to do that, so there is a margin.
“I’m not having problems in one sector – I’m just having problems in all the track. We have to adjust the electronics of the bike – this is the main thing that we have to do. Then we have to work a little more on the settings, and the data we gained today will be really important for that. But we saw that with all the problems that we had we were only three tenths from Alex [Rins], who won the last race here.
“I think that there is much more room for improvement. I don’t like to be in this position on a Friday and P13 is not the best result to end the first day, but we will try to make an improvement not only on the lap time – because I’m more worried about the race pace. But we were faster on every exit today and with used tyres.”
However, he didn’t just have problems with getting up to speed, admitting that most of this morning’s session was wasted by what he says was a bad front tyre – an increasingly frequent complaint these days, especially after Michelin recycle tyres that have been previously through a heat cycle.
“Honestly I had some troubles today,” he explained. “Something wasn’t right with the front tyre we used in FP1, and that cost me a lot of confidence. In FP2 things were better, but I needed more laps. We have to adjust everything because FP1 was a lost practice, and we had to use FP2 to build some speed and learn from it, because I wasn’t competitive at all.
“Not all the preheated tyres work in the same way, and in my case the problem in FP1 was with a preheated tyre. I gave the wrong information to the technicians because the tyre wasn’t working well, and then we went in the opposite direction because of it. It was better in FP2, but I was not comfortable – I did not have a good feeling.
“I’m a bit angry today, because I lost FP1, at a track where it is always important to make laps, at a track that is so long and so wide, and where the correct line is so important.”
