Joan Mir is in his second season with Repsol Honda in MotoGP. Although the results have been far from encouraging, Mir remains the top performer for the Japanese manufacturer so far this season.
Currently, the 2020 champion is the most experienced rider in the official team, after partnering with Marc Márquez in 2023. He also inherited Marc Márquez’s crew chief, Santi Hernández.
The engineer was asked by the website Relevo if Mir has changed somehow his mentality or his attitude. In his reply, he stated:
– I don’t know if he feels different now compared to last year. It’s true that when you have a rider like Marc in the garage, doing what he did, he imposes himself, and Marc was the project leader. And now Joan has become the veteran, and that gives you some freedom to do what you think or follow the path you think is best. But I can’t make comparisons because we do the same things we did with Marc. […]. It could also be that he has found himself in a more Spanish-speaking environment, and for someone more introverted, it can be harder to express themselves in another language, and doing it in their own language might have helped him.
Hernández emphasized the importance of evaluating their collaboration at the end of the season: ‘The important thing is that at the end of the year, Joan says that working with us was a success and that we did well. Because at the beginning, it’s like when you meet a girlfriend: at the beginning, everything is beautiful, but you really see if you like each other and if it works when you’ve been together for a year’.