Honda HRC Castrol will have their full MotoGP line-up back on track for the Petronas Grand Prix of Malaysia after both Joan Mir and Luca Marini received official clearance on Thursday in Sepang.
For Mir, the road back has been a long and confusing ordeal. The 2020 World Champion has been out of action since Misano, stepping away from competition to figure out a persistent battle with illness. He described a difficult period marked by vision problems and extreme fatigue that refused to improve day by day until he began treatment with Dr Charte.
"It seems day-by-day I was not able to recover until we started doing treatment with Dr Charte and I saw immediate improvement," Mir said. "We also did a lot of work at home. I'm so happy to be back because, as you can imagine, I had a lot of questions marks at that time... 'what will happen?' but to be able to answer this question and be here is such an important thing."
Unlike a straightforward physical break with a predictable healing timeline, the invisible nature of his symptoms left him waiting in the dark. "It wasn't like when you break a bone, you know more or less the timing for the recovery. When you have vision problems and this fatigue, it was honestly very hard to understand the timings," Mir explained. While he still holds a few lingering doubts about how his body will hold up once the lights go out, stepping back into the garage is a massive relief.
His teammate Marini faced a much shorter spell on the sidelines, though an equally frustrating one. The Italian rider managed only a brief appearance in FP1 during the previous round before a virus knocked him out for the remainder of the weekend.
Now, with the green light secured in Sepang, the Honda HRC Castrol squad is finally back to full power.
