Mir haunted by bad luck
Adapting a famous saying, one could write that in a person’s life, the only certainties are taxes, death, and…Joan Mir’s retirement. The first race of the 2026 season for the Honda rider indeed began as too many of last year’s had ended: with a retirement. In this case, the early stop was not due to a crash by the 2020 world champion, but to an unspecified technical problem that forced him to park his bike at the side of the track while in the middle of a battle with Fabio Di Giannantonio for sixth position.
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No detailed explanation of the incident has come from HRC, other than that the problem was caused by the failure of an “external component“. “It’s a real shame what happened – Mir commented at the end of the race – I was having a lot of fun, I was riding well and making some fantastic overtakes. Then something happened that we couldn’t control and our race was over. We need to check carefully what happened. We must focus on the positive aspects of this race weekend and take them to Brazil. Usually we are strong on new circuits, I think I learn quickly, so we will try to take advantage of this. Focusing on the positives, we showed our speed and the progress made by Honda“.
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Marini in the top 10
Bringing points to the HRC factory team was Luca Marini, who crossed the line in tenth position under the checkered flag, after benefiting from some retirements ahead of him: “I think the race was tough for everyone – commented Honda’s #10 – not so much because of the temperature and from a physical point of view, because that’s what we train for, but because you really had to manage everything on the bike to get to the end. After four laps we were no longer able to brake as we would have liked, which made the race very long, given that normally that is our strong point. I started very well, but then I lost three positions on the straight shortly after. Everyone from fifth to 14th place has a very similar pace, so if you make a mistake in qualifying or at the start of the race, it takes a long time to recover. But it was a good way to start the year, we learned a lot and we know what we need to do now”.
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