Joan Mir is in his second season with Repsol Honda in MotoGP. The results are far from encouraging, but the rider is still the best of the Japanese manufacturer in the championship so far.
At this moment, the 2020 champion is the oldest in the official team, after partnering with Marc Márquez in 2023. He also inherited the chief mechanic Santi Hernández from him.
The engineer was asked by the Relevo website if Mir has changed in any way mentally and in attitude. In response, he stated: ‘I don’t know if he feels different now compared to last year. It is true that when you have a rider like Marc in the garage, doing what he did, he imposes himself, and Marc was the leader of the project. And now he has become a veteran, which gives you some freedom to do what you think or follow the path you think. But I can’t make comparisons, because we do the same things we did with Marc. […] It may also be that he has found himself in a more Spanish environment, and when someone more introverted has more difficulties expressing themselves in another language, and doing it in their own language may have helped him‘.
Having said that, Hernández only wants to assess things at the end: ‘What’s important is that at the end of the year, Joan says that working with us was a success and that we did well. Because in the beginning it’s like when you meet a girlfriend: at first everything is beautiful, but you really see if you like each other or not, and if it works, when you’ve been with her for a year‘.
