While Mir<\/a> then lost touch with Francesco Bagnaia<\/a> and KTM’s Pedro Acosta<\/a> at the start of the Sprint, he was able to keep Marquez at bay for lap after lap.<\/p>\n The #93 looked ragged as he ran wide on several occasions, while Mir thwarted two attempted overtakes by cutting back under at the apex.<\/p>\n Podium lap times plus Joan Mir, 2025 Japanese MotoGP Sprint<\/p>\n But having extracted all he could from the rear tyre, Mir became increasingly vulnerable. The #93 eventually launched his Desmosedici up the inside of a hairpin, forcing Mir to yield as they both ran wide with 5 laps to go.<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n Mir\u2019s podium hopes weren\u2019t completely over, with Acosta also struggling for grip. However, the KTM rider was able to stay just 0.7s out of reach.<\/p>\n \u201cHonestly, when you have the podium that close, I have something inside of me that I’m not 100% satisfied!\u201d Mir, without a podium since Suzuki in 2021, told MotoGP.com.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I’m happy because after situation that we were living in for the previous years, and also the past Grands Prix when I had a lot of bd luck, finally being able to put something nice together feels unbelievable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe fought very, very hard. I enjoyed it so much and anything that we can do tomorrow will be just a gift.\u201d<\/p>\n Could Mir be a podium contender again tomorrow?<\/p>\n \u201cPodium contender, yes. But, difficult,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n \u201cWe lost a bit of time to Pedro with that overtake from Marc. I think that was the problem of not being able to fight for the podium with Pedro at the end.<\/p>\n \u201cBut anyway, it was fun to be able to fight for the podium, even though it was a race where I was all the time pushing at 120%.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end I had nothing left, the tyre was cooked, but it feels great.\u201d<\/p>\n HRC team-mate Luca Marini finished in seventh place.<\/p>\n Riders are expected to switch from the soft to medium rear for the full length grand prix.<\/p>\n Article continues below ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joan Mir had no complaints about the firm pass by former team-mate Marc Marquez, which denied the Honda…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,9400,9398,4280,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-172543","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-honda-hrc","11":"tag-joan-mir","12":"tag-marc-marquez","13":"tag-motor","14":"tag-motor-sports","15":"tag-motosport","16":"tag-motosports","17":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Podium](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/podium-plus-mir.png\")
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