In July of last year, Jack Miller had all but admitted that his MotoGP career was coming to an end.
A bruising year and a half at KTM had forced the Austrian manufacturer to go back on its word and not offer him a new deal for 2025. With no real options elsewhere on the grid, it seemed MotoGP’s most outspoken rider was going to have to consider a move to the World Superbike Championship or give up on active competition altogether.
Fast-forward to February and life couldn’t have taken a better turn for the 30-year-old. Miller has a factory contract with Yamaha to race for Pramac in MotoGP and a bike that is already working well to his liking.
In fact, the pre-season testing went so smoothly that Miller himself has been surprised by how well he has adapted to the M1. Having two extra days of running in the Sepang shakedown certainly helped, but team-mate Miguel Oliveira also had the advantage of the added track time, and yet he has been struggling in comparison.
The first thing that caught Miller’s attention was the front-end feeling of the Yamaha M1, describing it as “phenomenally fantastic” and a “blessing”. It allowed him to be on the pace straight away at Sepang, a track where Fabio Quartararo also thrived on the factory-entered bike.
Even as Yamaha appeared relatively weak in the low-grip conditions at Buriram, Miller still ended up 11th on the timesheets with a time that was only 0.012s off Quartararo’s best.
The Australian feels there is still some more pace to extract from the bike, which gives him encouragement ahead of the start of the season on 2 March.
“I always knew that the Yamaha had decent bones, so it was more just wondering how my riding style would adapt to that and understanding what I'm going to have to do differently,” he said in Thailand.
“I'm pretty happy with where I'm at. I'm enjoying riding, every time you put a new tyre and you think 'I should have released the brakes a smidge earlier and carried a little bit more corner speed' and stuff like that. It's a fun bike to ride in that sense.”
There are some still areas Miller feels Yamaha needs to improve upon, particularly the rear end and engine performance. But overall, there is a genuine sense of optimism as Miller puts his KTM years behind and starts afresh with Pramac.
“I feel like we've made some big steps on the bike and will continue to make some gains throughout the first few races. The trajectory is good for this,” he said.
“I feel a little optimistic going into the championship. The battle is truly done with testing, keen to go racing now.”
Miller completed a sprint simulation as preparation for the season-opening Thai GP. Although his average time wasn’t representative due to a faulty engine map, he was still pleased with his pace over long runs.
“I did the sprint sim and was pretty happy with my pace, it wasn't too bad,” he explained.
“We had an issue starting the thing with one of the maps, the race maps, we had to default [to the] qualifying map in there. So I had to get a lap straight away and she [the bike] got pretty hectic for the last three laps to hang on to. But it was handy to have her to do that to understand what you've kind of got to do in that situation.”
Yamaha is the fourth different manufacturer Miller has raced with in MotoGP. However, he already knows the people at Pramac, having raced with the Italian team between 2018-20 when it was part of Ducati’s satellite structure.
Miller feels Pramac has done an impressive job so far in operating the Yamaha M1, having run the Demosedicis in MotoGP for almost two decades.
“I think it's not easy for us as riders to change [bikes], but it's even more difficult for the team to change because they've been working on the same bike for the past 10-15 years,” he said.
“And then to go and change and have to learn a whole new machine has not been the easiest, but they've done a fantastic job. I think we're pretty comfortable to go racing now.”
