‘I’m not making this s**t up’: Inside Aussie’s season from hell, and his chance to make amends
Jack Miller was in no mood to sugar-coat things.
“That was s**t … the start to the end wasn’t very much fun, to be honest,” the Australian said.
At the time, Miller was debriefing his lacklustre run to 19th place in the MotoGP sprint race in Barcelona last Saturday.
More broadly? He could well have been talking about his 2024, first lap to last.
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Harsh? Not according to Miller who, 24 hours later after his final race for KTM ended in an anonymous 13th-place finish in Sunday’s season finale, conceded his two-year tenure with the Austrian manufacturer had been underwhelming in the extreme.
“I’m disappointed for everybody, it’s not what we wanted for all parties,” he said.
“It hasn’t been what I imagined or envisioned.
“This year has been a struggle, there’s no hiding from that fact. Buriram [Thailand, where he finished fifth] was nice, being back fighting for the podium again. It was wet conditions but we showed true grit, and I think that describes these last two years.
“I never f**king gave up one moment, even when I was landing on my head every second weekend. I was trying my best. I’m a racer and I want to be competitive, and unfortunately I haven’t met my expectations in the last two years so I’m disappointed with that.”
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What Miller can’t be disappointed about is that this year – his worst in MotoGP since 2016 – won’t be his last. Out of contract, out of form and fast running out of options, an old flame came calling in September, with something new they needed him for. Right place, right rider, right time.
That Miller will stay on the grid for the newly-formed alliance between Pramac Racing, his former home riding a Ducati from 2018-20, and Yamaha as it becomes the fallen Japanese giant’s second team owes itself to timing and a very specific job description that the 29-year-old is one of the few suitable people to fill.
It won’t be easy, it might be short, and it’s probably a case of simply delaying the inevitable. But it’s a chance, and it’s one he’s ready to embrace after a year that tested his resolve and had him staring his career mortality in the face.
“It was well and truly dicey … it was done in my books at one point over the summer [mid-season] break,” Miller told Fox Sports’ ‘Pit Talk’ podcast in October.
“We’d had that conversation with the family … that was a pretty s**tty time to deal with.”
Given a career reprieve, how can Miller make it count? Did he even deserve it? Can he extend it? And might the verdict on how good of a job he does come after he’s off the grid?
WHEN DID IT ALL GO WRONG, AND HOW BAD WAS IT?
To answer two questions about 2024 in two words: ‘immediately’, and ‘very’.
With the Grand Prix season two minutes old in Qatar in March, Miller crashed out at the start of the second lap of the feature race at Lusail, remounting to finish dead last. A few laps later, KTM’s teenage rookie Pedro Acosta, riding for the Austrian brand’s second-tier Tech3 GasGas team, was scrapping with six-time MotoGP champion Marc Marquez towards the front of the field.
The optics were bad, but in reality, they didn’t make one bit of difference. When Acosta’s 2024 MotoGP graduation from a Moto2 championship he was yet to win in October 2023 was announced, it was clear a seat at KTM’s factory team was in his future.
Miller was coming into the final year of a two-year deal, while teammate Brad Binder had a contract in place until 2026. It was obvious who was going to make room for a rider thought by many as being the best rookie since Marquez in 2013; with two podiums in his first three Grands Prix, Acosta proved worthy of the hype.
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Things momentarily got better for Miller when he finished fifth in the sprint and Grand Prix in Portugal next time out – albeit behind both Acosta and Binder – but that 16-point haul in round two was to become his strongest weekend of a dire year. He finished top-five in just one more Grand Prix, in Thailand in October, and had five events where he didn’t score at all in his first season without a podium since 2018.
It was a drop-off that made his so-so debut season at KTM look good, and a huge let-down from his final three years at Ducati; even with the advent of sprint races from 2023 onwards doubling the number of starts and chances to pick up points, his 2020 season in a calendar curtailed by a pandemic was more prolific.
Jack Miller’s past five MotoGP seasons
2024 (KTM, 40 starts): 14th, 87pts. Best Grand Prix result: 5th (twice). Best sprint result: 5th.
2023 (KTM, 39 starts): 11th, 163pts. Best Grand Prix result: 3rd. Best sprint result: 3rd (twice).
2022 (Ducati, 20 starts): 5th, 189pts. Best result: 1st.
2021 (Ducati, 18 starts): 4th, 181pts. Best result: 1st (twice).
2020 (Ducati, 14 starts): 7th, 132pts. Best result: 2nd (three times).
Miller was under no illusions that his time at KTM was up, thanks to Acosta’s ascendance and his own underwhelming form. The axe came after just six rounds at the Italian Grand Prix in June, leaving him scrambling for a seat when KTM signed Enea Bastianini (from Ducati) and Maverick Vinales (Aprilia) for its Tech3 set-up, leaving Miller and Augusto Fernandez – who’d beaten Acosta to the 2022 Moto2 title – out in the cold.
From Italy onwards, Miller’s results followed a similar pattern. His one-lap qualifying pace, for so long a calling card, deserted him as he made Q2, reserved for the top 12, just four times in the final 13 rounds.
His decisiveness on opening laps, allied to KTM’s ability to get its power down off the line more effectively than its rivals, routinely saw Miller gain places early in races, only to plummet back down the order as excessive tyre wear – long a Miller bugbear – bit hard.
Michelin’s new-for-2024 rear slick tyre, much grippier than its predecessor, became an unsolvable mystery, and one Miller struggled to explain when asked. A slow-motion video of Miller’s KTM shuddering violently through the final sector of the Motegi circuit in Japan in October as he got on the gas left the assembled press pack more sympathetic to a sensation Miller had pointed to as a reason for his struggles all season.
“I’m not making this s**t up, it’s been doing it for 10 months, ever since we put this [rear] tyre in,” he said.
“I haven’t been able to find a solution, as you saw. The solution is trying to ride through it, but it’s like a wall that you keep hitting your head against.
“We haven’t been able to resolve it. It was really good to see it in slow-motion like that because you can really see … if you watch it in normal speed, you don’t notice the swingarm and so on stressing like it was. It was good to get it clear in slow-motion for the engineers to see.”
By season’s close, and after that muted KTM send-off in Spain, Miller ended up 14th in the championship, his worst showing since 2016 on a second-tier Honda (18th) in what was his second MotoGP campaign.
He didn’t duck his role in that aforementioned disappointment, but headed for home in Townsville from Barcelona with plenty of optimism thanks to his renewing of ties with Pramac.
WHY DID PRAMAC WANT HIM, AND WHAT DO YAMAHA NEED?
When Marc Marquez made it clear he wouldn’t consider a move to Pramac at that same Italian Grand Prix weekend – and its team leader Jorge Martin signed with Aprilia for 2025 soon after – Pramac decided enough was enough with Ducati after a two-decade association with the Italian manufacturer as an official customer team.
Yamaha, with just two bikes on the grid in its factory line-up with Fabio Quartararo and Alex Rins, wanted a bigger presence and – crucially – more relevant data as it looked to dig itself out of a development black hole it had gone down since Quartararo won the 2021 title, the intervening years seeing Ducati – and its armada of eight bikes – become the MotoGP benchmark.
A Pramac/Yamaha alliance was announced soon after, which cracked open a door for Miller. He’d stayed on good terms with Pramac boss Paolo Campinoti since graduating to Ducati’s factory team alongside Francesco Bagnaia in 2021, and Yamaha needed riders with knowledge of other manufacturers as it looked to bridge the gap to the front, and leave fellow Japanese stragglers Honda alone in the basement.
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In Miguel Oliveira and Miller, it had two ideal, available, candidates. Both turn 30 next year, both have Grand Prix-winning CVs, and both have experience with the rest of the grid; Portuguese rider Oliveira has ridden for KTM and Aprilia, while Miller’s 10 MotoGP seasons have seen him ride for Honda, Ducati and KTM.
Miller’s developmental skills have long been one of his strongest attributes – Ducati had him leading its project on the rear ride-height device that has been a bedrock of its success during his time there – and Yamaha’s thirst for knowledge made riding for the one manufacturer he’d not worked for all that more attractive.
“Having the experience of three different manufacturers as well as quite different configurations of bikes … with Miguel as well … some input from the other manufacturers and what we’re feeling can help,” Miller said at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in September, when his deal with Pramac Yamaha was announced.
“They’ve got a clear strategy and a clear direction ahead, so I’ll look to try to get in where we fit in.”
Miller was a rookie in MotoGP in 2015 when Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi engaged in an all-Yamaha duel for the title, and told Fox Sports in October that he feels the DNA of a successful bike still lurks within the YZR-M1, despite the seasons since Quartararo’s 2021 title seeing the brand slip from the summit.
“To be aboard the M1 is almost like a dream come true,” he said.
“Through the whole Lorenzo and Rossi era, and then even with Jonas [Folger] and guys like that, it seemed like at one point every bloke that hopped on it, whether they were a rookie or not, were getting podiums on that thing and it looked like a dream to ride.
“It’s changed in the latter years, but the bones of that bike are still a fantastic bike. I believe if we work up from that and try to bring some of our experience and ideas across, hopefully we can start to get it together.”
HOW DOES MILLER LAST LONGER THAN 2025?
Yamaha wasn’t just a suitable landing place for Miller’s skill set; it was his only landing place, as he was the 22nd and final rider signed for 2025 when his deal was revealed in September.
With little leverage in terms of recent results and no options elsewhere, a one-year arrangement wasn’t ideal; part of Miller’s willingness to move from Ducati to KTM for the 2023 season was that he was mentally drained from going from one one-year contract to the next throughout his time with the Italian brand, jumping at the job security a longer offer with KTM provided.
In September, Miller downplayed the lack of longer-term job security.
“I did some of my best work on a one-year contract, so I’m no stranger to that,” he said at Misano.
“Look, we’ll see what the future [beyond that] holds for us both. To work with them will be a lot of fun – a lot of hard work – but they’ve got a great project already and I think it’s only going from strength to strength with the satellite team coming on for 2025.”
Miller’s single-year deal – compared to Oliveira’s two years – means the Australian will once again, as he was with Acosta waiting in the wings at KTM this season, be vulnerable.
Largely overlooked in the deluge of post-season news emanating out of Barcelona after last weekend’s title decider and this week’s post-season testing day was that Pramac Yamaha will also field its own Moto2 team next year as part of the new alliance, with 24-year-old Italian Tony Arbolino, the runner-up in the 2020 Moto3 and 2023 Moto2 championships, and Spanish 20-year-old Izan Guevara, the 2022 Moto3 champion, as its riders.
Both Arbolino – long championed by Quartararo as a MotoGP rider in waiting – and Guevara represent the future, which means Miller has a tricky needle to thread in 2025.
He’ll need to be good enough and prove valuable enough to progress the Yamaha project, but maybe not so fast that Pramac will feel the time is right for a younger rider to immediately step in. He’ll need to outperform Oliveira, if only to give Yamaha’s brass pause for thought when it inevitably moves on from one of its experienced veterans.
And he’ll need to prove his value for the longer-term, with MotoGP’s 2027 regulation change to 850cc machinery the most likely chance Yamaha – and the other manufacturers left choking on Ducati’s fumes after two seasons where the Italian brand won 36 of 39 Grands Prix – have to get back to fighting for more meaningful results.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine Miller will still be on the grid by then, and his impact on Yamaha’s future might only be obvious once he’s hung up his helmet. But it’s a future that, based on the post-season test in Barcelona on Tuesday, is looking brighter just as Miller joins.
Due to contractual reasons, Miller wasn’t permitted to speak to the press after his first outing on the YZR-M1 in Catalunya, but Quartararo felt the new-for-2025 bike had made a step forward over its predecessor.
“Chassis and engine was the biggest step that we did, we could try it in the proper way,” Quartararo said after finishing the one-day test in a promising second place on the timesheets, lapping faster than he’d managed in qualifying for the Grand Prix three days previously.
“Even without pushing in the time attack, we could make quite a good lap time even if the track is not the same [condition] as the race weekend. The direction taken was a good one, and bigger steps will arrive in the next test.”
That next test will take place at Sepang in Malaysia in February, the intervening months giving Miller the chance to put himself in the best place to make the most of a career rescue rope he felt might not come.
“I do genuinely feel like I’ve still got more to give,” Miller told Fox Sports in October.
“The work I put in for this season, to get bugger-all out of it has been a very hard pill to swallow. But it’s made me all the more hungry.
“I know that if we can get comfortable and understand the [Yamaha] motorcycle, try to make things work, I can almost guarantee that’ll help me to put in another epic off-season and hit the ground running in 2025 with a project like that … they have some great leadership involved there, and they’re trying to turn things around.”
