- Joan Mir’s manager says the 2020 world champion seriously thought about retiring from MotoGP before a factory Ducati deal for 2027 talked him out of it.
- A mystery illness has sidelined Mir from September onward, forcing Honda to use four different substitute riders across four grands prix while he recovers.
- Mir is set to return at this weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang, a track where he stood on the podium just one year ago.
A Champion Who Nearly Walked Away
Before Joan Mir ever got sick, he was already close to quitting. That is the version of events his own manager, Paco Sanchez, gave in a recent interview, and it reframes everything that has happened to Mir over the past two months. A rider who won a MotoGP world championship in 2020 and then spent four grinding seasons at Honda HRC had reached the point where walking away looked like the better option than continuing to crash a motorcycle that would not reward him for trying. “Joan thought about retiring,” Sanchez said, describing the moment after Honda’s factory-team plans for Mir fell through. It was not a throwaway line. It was the closest thing to a confirmed near-exit that MotoGP has seen from a former champion in years.
What makes that admission land harder is what followed it. Mir has not raced after the San Marino Grand Prix in September, when he told reporters he was operating at roughly 50 percent of his normal energy. Honda has not named his illness publicly. What it has done is burn through a rotating cast of stand-ins trying to cover for him: Takaaki Nakagami at the Austrian Grand Prix, Somkiat Chantra in Japan, and Aleix Espargaro in Indonesia, who withdrew before the Sprint after flying in on short notice. By the Australian Grand Prix, Honda had no replacement left to call, and raced the weekend without him at all. His own teammate, Luca Marini, was also declared unfit at Phillip Island with what MotoGP’s chief medical officer, Angel Charte, described as muscle weakness from a viral infection. For one of the sport’s most storied manufacturers, it was as close to a full-team emergency as MotoGP produces outside of a crash.
Four Years of Speed Without Reward
To understand why Mir got to the edge of retirement, you have to go back further than this season. Sanchez describes a rider who stayed loyal to Honda out of belief in the brand and the project, a decision Sanchez now calls a mistake. The Honda RC213V never improved fast enough to match that loyalty. The bike was difficult to ride through Mir’s first two seasons on it, and the crashes piled up. A technical breakthrough in 2025 finally produced two podium finishes, proof that the speed had never left him. Then 2026 brought the crashes back, on top of the illness that would eventually sideline him completely.
Mir himself has described the same stretch in plainer terms. “In the first part of the year, the best thing you could do with this bike was a top seven,” he said of the Honda’s limitations. He has also been candid about how much of his own crashing comes from a riding style he refuses to soften. “It’s something that I enjoy a lot, braking really hard and really putting the bike into the ground,” he said, the same late-braking approach that won him a championship on a Suzuki and that he says finally feels natural again on the Honda, after a spell early in his career when a different bike forced him away from it. “It’s very difficult to do, I risk more than the others, and you need to find the limit and the confidence,” he said. “It can cause some crashes, but if I’m able to ride with a little bit more margin, we can control that.”
Sanchez puts it more bluntly than Mir does about himself. He contrasted Mir with teammate Marini, a rider he called reliable and careful about avoiding risk, someone who scores points by staying within himself. Mir, he said, is the rider with the speed, and that speed comes at the cost of putting his own safety on the line almost every race weekend. Mir “crashes a lot,” Sanchez said in his defense of the rider he manages, pointing to what he called “incredible ambition” as the real driver of it, a line that doubles as an explanation for why Mir kept getting back on the bike when the results argued he should stop.
The Call That Changed His Mind
The retirement talk stopped the moment Gresini came calling. Michele Masini reached out to Sanchez on behalf of the Ducati satellite squad, and Sanchez admits he was not sure Mir would even accept a seat on a satellite team after four years inside a factory Honda garage. A meeting followed between Mir, Gresini, and Ducati’s technical director, Gigi Dall’Igna, who made the kind of promise that changes a rider’s entire outlook: a fully factory-spec bike with official factory support, built to match what Marc Marquez and Pedro Acosta currently ride, though some of the updates would arrive a little later than the works team gets them.
Sanchez said Mir put the financial terms aside and prioritized one thing: a motorcycle that could compete at the front again. For 2027, Mir will ride a Ducati Desmosedici for the BK8 Gresini team, alongside rookie teammate Dani Holgado. Sanchez, unsurprisingly, expects him to prove the doubters wrong. The “incredible ambition” line bears repeating here. It is the closest thing to a thesis statement for what Gresini is betting on: not a safer, more conservative version of Mir, but the same rider who has been too fast for his own bike for the better part of two years, placed on a machine that might finally let that speed translate into results instead of gravel traps.
A Return Built Around One Good Memory
Mir appears set to end his layoff at Sepang this weekend, and he chose to announce it himself rather than let Honda do it for him. He posted a photo with a flat-track training bike and a two-word caption: “See you in Malaysia.” It is a fitting place to come back. Mir stood on the Sepang podium a year ago, one of the clearest proof points that the Honda, on the right weekend, could still deliver a result worthy of a world champion. Sepang will be his fourth-from-last appearance on the Honda before the switch to Gresini, with Qatar, Portimao and Valencia still left on the 2026 calendar in November.
Mir has already described this season in terms that sound like a man closing one chapter while bracing for another. “It was a key year,” he said, “a year where we could turn things around, from less to more.” He has also admitted the timing frustrated him. “Probably I waited a bit longer than I had hoped,” he said of his own patience with Honda’s progress. What comes next, in his words, is simple math dressed up as motorcycle racing. “Now we need one more click, to try to find more consistency, with a little more potential.” He will get that click on a different bike, in a different color scheme, racing for a team that convinced him the sport still had a place for him when he was ready to believe otherwise.
For a rider who once said he just hoped he had the strength to keep pushing, Sepang is more than a comeback from illness. It is a preview of the version of Joan Mir that Gresini is paying to find out still exists.
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