How a Crutchlow helped Miller to Jerez MotoGP redemption

“We’re in the shit right now”. This is how Jack Miller summed up the start to his 2021 MotoGP season and life as a factory Ducati rider on the Thursday of the Spanish Grand Prix. Over the first three rounds of the campaign, Miller has courted a lot of outside criticism for displaying form not befitting of someone pegged as a pre-season title favourite.

Although there were mitigating circumstances for his runs to ninth place in both races of the Qatar double-header – Miller hindered by a rear tyre issue in the first race and late arm-pump in the Doha round – the criticism he earned wasn’t without justification.

In the first two rounds, Ducati team-mate Francesco Bagnaia made it to the podium, while Pramac’s Johann Zarco tallied up two second-place finishes. Even Pramac rookie Jorge Martin delivered some silverware to the Italian manufacturer with his third in the Doha GP. Bagnaia added a second podium to his tally in Portugal, while Miller found dug his trench deeper with a crash – a mistake he held his hands up to.

Then in the Doha GP there was his collision with Joan Mir following an earlier tough move from the Suzuki rider – something the Ducati rider escaped punishment for, though many believe he was lucky to do so having clearly seen where Mir was before they touched at close to 200km/h on Losail’s main straight.

PLUS: Why MotoGP's stewards must revisit Miller and Mir's Losail clash

But still, the past month has been unquestionably hard for Miller, the Australian sensibly turning away from social media for his own mental wellbeing.

“I mean, we put ourselves up on this pedestal, we’re there to be critiqued and what not,” Miller admitted last Sunday. “As soon as things aren’t going good it turns like that. But it is what it is, it’s part of the territory and you’ve got to take it in your stride. I felt like what I wanted to do was just try to focus on what I could control, and that was me and my training and how I approached the races.”

Race winner Jack Miller, Ducati Team

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

With that in mind, Miller entered the Jerez weekend with a different mindset. There’s no denying the Australian has the speed to be a top MotoGP rider, as he’s continually demonstrated over the past few years with Ducati. But consistency has always been an issue.

PLUS: How Ducati can channel Stoner with its latest MotoGP Aussie

Jerez isn’t considered a Ducati venue – though Miller felt what the marque showed this year and last year disproves this – and its last win at the track was with Loris Capirossi back in 2006. At the very least, one-lap speed definitely wasn’t an issue. Miller managed to get himself onto the front row in third in qualifying, using his team-mate Bagnaia – who ended up fourth – as a reference on his flying lap.

Poleman Fabio Quartararo had little doubt Miller would lead into the first corner, the Ducati’s speed coupled with its holeshot devices sure enough sending him into Turn 1 like a firework at the start of Sunday’s 25-lap race. But Miller had put in the legwork in practice to at least try and make sure his speed lasted more than a few hundred metres.

“It’s just been a phenomenal weekend, I’ve been able to get stronger and stronger each session and I credit that to just putting my head down in FP1, FP4, just doing laps on my own,” Miller explained after claiming his first MotoGP victory in five years.

"I now have a new life coach, let’s say. Normally it’s my mum, but she’s not very good. Lucy Crutchlow called me up just out of the blue during the weekend, telling me ‘you are fucking good, you can do it’" Jack Miller

“As soon as I got going - I haven’t been 100% comfortable with that medium front all weekend - I got going and it felt pretty mega straight up. The ground temperature was higher than it has been all weekend and I felt great straight up, I was hitting my marks and thought it felt alright.”

Miller admitted after his tough start to the season that he was “not trusting myself”. Although Ducati management had his back, he credits an “aggressive” phone call from Lucy Crutchlow (pictured below) – wife of triple MotoGP race winner and Miller’s best mate Cal – as helping him to ditch some of the doubt that had been hanging over him.

Cal Crutchlow, Team LCR Honda

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

“For sure these last weeks haven’t been easy,” he said. “I’ve been angry, frustrated, not trusting in myself. I will have to say one massive thing. I now have a new life coach, let’s say. Normally it’s my mum, but she’s not very good. Lucy Crutchlow called me up just out of the blue during the weekend, telling me ‘you are fucking good, you can do it’. She’s quite aggressive like this, and even this morning she sent me a text. So, I have to say a massive thanks to Lucy. It feels good to hear stuff like this because sometimes you need it. At the end of the day, we’re all human, we all have doubts.”

It took just four laps for Quartararo to find his way through on Miller, having dropped to fourth off the line. But confident in his Ducati and the medium front tyre underneath him - and with Mrs Crutchlow’s morale-boosting comments in the back of his mind - Miller didn’t simply accept his fate.

Quartararo quickly opened up a gap of 1.5s to Miller, but the Ducati rider’s pace remained high. From laps 2 to 13, Quartararo’s average pace stood at 1m38.025s. In the same period, Miller’s average pace was 1m38.1s. Had Quartararo not been struck by the arm-pump issue from lap 14 which eventually dropped him to 13th, it’s unlikely the Yamaha rider would have been toppled for the win.

But Miller’s pace was good enough that it may just have pressured Quartararo into a mistake had that gap moved closer to the one-second mark at any point in the second half of the race. Even though Quartararo’s demise gave Miller a comfortable lead of over a second, he still had to wrestle his own concentration as a long-awaited victory of great significance drew closer for him.

“When I saw Fabio starting to drop off I thought ‘I have to go for it’,” Miller noted. “I looked and I saw how many laps were left and I thought ‘that’s a long time out front by yourself, you sure you got this?’. I was having this conversation in me helmet.”

Though Bagnaia made an attempt at closing down Miller in the final laps, the Australian resisted the pressure – though admits he felt “like a bit of a twat” defending thin air at the final corner – to claim his first dry-weather MotoGP win and first since his shock maiden victory in a wet Dutch TT back in 2016.

Jack Miller, Ducati Team chequered flag

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

At Assen that day, an emotional Miller said the win had proved he wasn’t “an idiot” - having built up a negative reputation across his first season in 2015, when he was plucked straight from Moto3 by Honda and placed at LCR. Although the rest of 2016 proved to be tricky, that Assen win transformed Miller into the mature rider Ducati would ultimately snap up for 2018 at Pramac and mould him into factory-worthy shape for 2021.

Miller’s Jerez success, in some ways then, mirrors his Assen win and could well unlock his potential going forward in 2021.

It’s timely too. Miller only has a one-year deal with the factory Ducati squad currently. Though his place was under no immediate threat at this stage of the season, any continuation of his slump from the first three rounds would surely have piled on the pressure. Having a victory in his back pocket will certainly strengthen his claim to keeping his factory team spot for 2022 – even if he suggests his achievements will be quickly overlooked through anymore rough patches.

MotoGP now enters a phase of the championship which has typically been kind to Ducati, with the upcoming Le Mans, Mugello and Catalunya events set to offer those on Desmosedicis big opportunities

“I sent my resume out to a few construction companies in Australia, I thought it was done, I was going home to work construction,” he joked when asked if any doubts about his future had crept into his mind. “This deal’s a bit better now, but… It’s as easy as that in this game.

“People forget very quickly. You all forget very quickly about what happens and where you are and how people are. It’s the wrong mentality, a lot of people get a lot more respect around here and that’s just the way it is. I just try and do my own work and do my own job and be the best person I can be. And at the end of the day I will be happy with who I am.”

MotoGP now enters a phase of the championship which has typically been kind to Ducati, with the upcoming Le Mans, Mugello and Catalunya events set to offer those on Desmosedicis big opportunities.

Miller will need to get in on that to really kick his championship challenge into gear. But with his first victory for Ducati at Jerez lifting a weight off his shoulders, the Australian is now free to be the rider the Italian marque expected in 2021…

Jack Miller, Ducati Team

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images