Suzuki’s Mugello MotoGP weekend was consigned to a double zero in the space of one lap, the eighth of the race, as Alex Rins and Joan Mir both hit the deck.

But while Rins felt something good was salvageable from his run and raged at Takaaki Nakagami over their collision, for Mir the crash was merely a logical conclusion to an absolutely dreadful three days of competition.
“I knew that we couldn’t make 23 laps with the package that we had,” Mir said. “What happened was that I was behind [Jorge] Martin and another rider [Alex Marquez], and then I was a bit sucked in [by the slipstream] at the end of the [main] straight and I couldn’t stop well the bike, I was a bit off the line and lost the front of the bike.

“So… better like that, let’s say. Because … it’s not normal, the feeling that we had during all this weekend.”

Nothing went particularly right for Mir all weekend. He was slow in practice, never threatened for a Q2 spot in the dry conditions or when the track was dampened by rain, and didn’t come through with a customary Suzuki first-lap charge. At the time he went down, he had been running 16th – attrition would’ve maybe turned that into a handful of points, but no more.
The Spaniard expressed total confusion at the “unbelievable” fact the tyre allocation was the same as in 2021 and yet the bike felt “completely different”.
Mir insists that the 2022 Suzuki is not that different to last year’s, yet the early-season words of Ducati rider Jack Miller – who wondered aloud whether the extra grunt from Suzuki’s new engine would compromise its tyre management and fuel-saving – start to feel eerily prescient. Not that Mir lacked fuel or rubber in Mugello, but he made it clear that something has changed that hasn’t been properly accounted for or countered.