Honda rider Mir “thought seriously” about quitting MotoGP in 2023

The 2020 world champion signed a two-year deal with Honda to join its factory squad from this season after Suzuki elected to quit the championship at the end of 2022.

Mir’s season so far has been miserable, with the Spaniard scoring just five points in total and hasn’t seen a chequered flag on a Sunday since the opening round of the campaign in Portugal – when he finished 11th.

Since then, Mir’s season has been characterised by crashes and injury, the Honda rider missing the Argentina GP, Italian GP and the full Germany and Dutch rounds.

Asked about comments he made in an interview with DAZN, in which he spoke about thoughts of retirement, Mir said on Thursday at the Austrian GP: “I’m crossing a tough time.

“I’m in a moment that I accept the situation that I am. Before I didn’t want to accept it, and mentally this is more difficult because you want one thing; you cannot get it and it’s difficult to accept it.

“Now I accept it, I know the situation that I am in and I want to turn things around.

“It’s true that in one moment I thought seriously to stop, but not because I wanted to go to another bike.

“I wanted to stop because mentally I was collapsed. Now I’m not in that situation. Now I’m in a different situation.

“I know that if I stop that in the future I would regret this a lot. So, this is the main thing.

“You say ‘I want to stop’, because I think it happens sometimes that you are not having a good time with your job, you have some discussions with people, you have a bad month and you just want to stop.

“But you say ‘if I leave from here, I will regret it in the future’. I was in that situation, but then I thought I wanted to keep trying.”

Joan Mir, Repsol Honda Team

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Mir noted that he had a similar thought in 2019 when he crashed heavily during a post-race test at Brno, but this quickly disappeared.

“Yes, when I had the big injury in Brno, my first year,” he added when asked if he’d considered retiring before.

“When you have a bad time and after such a bad crash, you ask yourself a lot of things – if it’s worth it. So, that happened also that time. But in one day, I was perfect, I was back.”