Joan Mir will ride for Honda in 2023 and 2024, while Miguel Oliveira and Raul Fernandez join Aprilia-RNF

• Joan Mir will ride for Honda in 2023 and 2024.
• Miguel Oliveira and Raul Fernandez are joining Aprilia-RNF.
• Pol Espargaro had already said he was joining the KTM/GasGas team, which had changed its name this year.

Joan Mir, a former world champion, has agreed to ride for Honda in 2023 and 2024. At the same time, Miguel Oliveira and Raul Fernandez are joining Aprilia-RNF. All of these changes happened on Tuesday.

Mir won the title in 2020, but his team Suzuki is leaving MotoGP, so he didn’t have a ride for the following year.

“Honda Racing Corporation is happy to say that Joan Mir has joined their team. The 24-year-old will ride the Honda RC213V for the Factory Team and compete with Marc Marquez for two years “In a statement, the team from Japan said.

Honda needed a rider because Pol Espargaro had already said he was joining the KTM/GasGas team, which had changed its name.

This season, that team is called KTM/Tech3, and one of their riders is a Spaniard named Fernandez.

Oliveira, a Portuguese rider, is racing with the main KTM team this season. The team has already said that it will sign Australian Jack Miller for next season.

Mir, who will turn 25 on September 1, will be part of a dream team at Honda. His teammate, Marquez, is also from Spain and has won six world championships. However, he is still recovering from a crash in 2020 that broke his right arm and forced him to have a fourth surgery on it at the beginning of June.

Mir rode a Honda to win the Moto3 title in 2017. In 2019, he joined Suzuki and moved up to MotoGP. In 2020, when Covid cut the season short, he won the title. In Valencia, he also won the one race he did in that season.

Mir broke his right foot when he crashed in the last race in Austria. He won’t be able to race this weekend in Misano, Italy, because of this.

“We will take advantage of all my experience accumulated over the years in MotoGP with Suzuki to contribute as much as possible to the project and to fight together to become world champions again,” he said in the Honda statement released on Tuesday.

Oliveira and Fernandez will also be joining a team that is changing. Next season, RNF will switch from using Yamaha bikes to using Aprilia bikes.

Oliveira has won four Grands Prix in his 27 years. Fernandez, who is 21 years old and in his first season in MotoGP, is currently 24th. Last year, he won eight races in the Moto2 class and finished second.

This is the first time that Italian company Aprilia, whose main team includes riders Aleix Espargaro and Maverick Vinales, will have a satellite team and, as a result, four bikes in MotoGP.

“It has not been a simple process, but together with Aprilia we were very clear on the riders that we wanted. They are both young riders with a good combination of experience,” said RNF principal Razlan Razali.

Also Read

Lewis Hamilton & Fernando Alonso avoided long battle of words after Belgian Grand Prix

Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton take it easy on social media after...