Joan Mir quizzed about Romano Albesiano impact at Honda

After experiencing two of their worst seasons in MotoGP in 2023 and 2024, Joan Mir believes Honda has made progress with its RC213V in 2025.

The Spaniard, who this year enters his third season with HRC, thinks that the RC213V is closer to the front now than it was last year after he finished the penultimate day of MotoGP preseason testing at Buriram in 11th place, and his Honda HRC Castrol teammate Luca Marini was sixth.

“Better than expected? No,” the Honda HRC Castrol rider said. “But it’s better. I feel that we have a better performance than last year.

“We are closer to the good pace and we are closer to the good lap times.

“So, I will say ‘yes’, we are more prepared this year than last year – probably not enough, but we made some improvements: the bike is more rideable, today we improved the braking area, and also it was a little bit of a difficult day because we had some technical problems in the morning, then due to this we had to change the plan and that probably means that tomorrow we will try more things than what we had in the plan.

“But, anyway, it’s okay, these things can happen, and I think that tomorrow we will do another step forward, I think we have margin.”

Joan Mir explains Romano Albesiano impact

Expanding on the problems he had in the morning, Mir said that it was to do with the ride height device.

“We had some technical problems on the rear [ride height] device that it was not working perfectly, but then we solved it,” he said.

“It was a technical issue that delayed our programme, but at the end I think it was okay.”

One of the key changes at Honda for 2025 is the arrival of Romano Albesiano from Aprilia to take up the role of technical director at HRC.

Mir said was asked if there had been a change in the working method that he had noticed since Albesiano’s arrival at the end of last year.

He said: “I think that the environment inside the garage is similar – I work with my team. But it’s true that we see some improvement on the bike that is the proof that you can do it.

“If you are making the things correctly, then we will improve our performance on the bike and the reality is that in a short time we improved the performance.

“Now I’m riding a bike that more or less you can ride it, you can ride comfortably. It’s true that we are still losing in acceleration and top speed a lot, we have vibration a lot, but we improve today the braking. We are making some steps forward.