Joan Mir “worried” about Jack Miller condition after “I ran over his legs”

Joan Mir has admitted he was “worried” about Jack Miller’s physical condition after running over his legs in the lap one crash at the Malaysian Grand Prix which brought out the red flag.

Miller was caught up in first corner contact with Brad Binder and Fabio Quartararo, and ultimately went down and hit his head on the Yamaha rider’s rear wheel as he fell.

As the Australian then slid across the track in the middle of turn two, Mir was unable to avoid him.

“Honestly I was very worried,” Mir said. “In the first start I made a super-good start, I recovered a lot of [positions] in the first corner.

“I was around the top-10, so if I could make the [second] corner I could be in a very good position, but then I find the crash with Fabio and Miller, and I ran over Miller.”

Mir said that he became concerned for Miller’s condition when he saw that he was taken to the medical centre by ambulance.

“Then when I saw the ambulance and all the stuff, I was very worried because I don’t know how he was, because I ran over his legs. I was worried for him.

“But then I went to his box and he said ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I have a bruise here [on my leg]’, so I said ‘Oh, perfect’. But I was worried.”

Stewards investigated but deemed nobody to be at fault.

Rear brake issue leads to restart crash

Mir’s race was over after five laps on the restart, the Repsol Honda rider having encountered a rear brake issue early on.

“I had problems with the rear brake, [...] and I couldn’t ride in a good way because of it,” Mir said.

“Then I crashed probably for this reason. I don’t normally use so much the rear brake, so probably it’s not that I overheat it, maybe it’s some problem. But, it’s never happened to us [before], so let’s try to understand.”

Although it was over quickly, Mir felt in those early laps he was able to demonstrate a decent pace.

“Again with everything together in the race I was able to go a bit, overtaking the riders in front, the riders that in qualifying are able to be in a better position than me.

“Then in the race I have better pace, and it arrives, but starting in that position it’s not easy to overtake.”

Mir said that the hot ambient temperatures — as high as 35C before the start of the Grand Prix — contributed to the difficulty in overtaking.

“It’s super-hot on the bike because the temperature is huge, you cannot breathe,” he said.

“I went behind Aleix [Espargaro] for 10 laps and I was boiling because behind somebody you get a lot of temperature so you have to manage quite well.”

In general, Mir was unenthused by his weekend as a whole, feeling he’d not made any progress from Friday to Sunday.

“But it is not a positive weekend, we did not improve anything because we didn’t get anything to try,” he said.

“We still have the same problems. I know that Honda is making a big effort to bring everything in the test, in this case in the Barcelona test, then we will make another test in Jerez, and there we will see if we are able to make a good step to prepare well next year.”

The Barcelona test, moved from Valencia as a result of the recent flooding in the region, will offer good testing conditions, Mir expects, because the track surface offers such little grip.

“Barcelona is the worst scenario for our bike, so in terms of result it’s not fantastic,” Mir said.

“But in terms of testing there and trying the new bike, the new idea of the bike that they [Japanese engineers] have, it’s very interesting.”