Against all expectations – including, at times, his own – it appears Jack Miller will keep his place on the MotoGP grid next season, with the 29-year-old likely to sign with former team Pramac Racing to ride a Yamaha in 2025.
Does Miller’s career lifeline owe itself, at least to some degree, to his passport? Yes.
Does that matter? No.
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Miller’s retention in the series for next season isn’t the first time a rider’s nationality has tipped the scales in a decision-making process, and won’t be the last. It’s not even the first time for Miller, who – without his passport and some external assistance – might not have made it to MotoGP in the first place.
It’s the reality of all top-tier international motorsport, one where the stopwatch is the primary selling point for a rider or driver looking to get to the pinnacle and stay there, but not the sole determining factor. Miller knows that more than most.
DORNA’S HELPING HAND
Rewind to 2012, and Miller was a 17-year-old first-year Moto3 rider with plenty of speed, an acerbic wit and a questionable haircut. That he’d even been able to make it to the world championship was close to a miracle in itself.
Jack’s parents Peter and Sonya upped sticks from Townsville to take their-then 15-year-old son to Spain in 2010 to race in the Spanish CEV, the most cutthroat 125cc domestic series in the world. The family bought an old motorhome and parked it alongside the beach in Castelldefels just outside of Barcelona, and young Jack was thrown in at the deep end riding a bike he’d brought from home and with precious few dollars to fund it.
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His performances showed enough promise that a place in the German 125cc championship opened up for 2011, which came with a handful of wildcard appearances in that year’s 125cc world championship (now Moto3). A full-time Moto3 ride came with the low-budget Caretta Technology team the following year, but results were scarce, a fourth place in the rain at the Sachsenring in Germany – a track he knew well – the one outlier.
By the end of 2012, the Miller family’s budget was running out, and offers to stay in the world championship were close to zero.
“Our money was done by then,” Peter Miller told this author for a story in Inside Sport magazine in 2014.
“That was it. [Business] back at home was crap, and things were running down.”
Come the Australian Grand Prix that October, the penultimate round of the 2012 season, it looked to be over for Miller before help came from a left-field source. On the same day compatriot Casey Stoner won his sixth straight MotoGP race at Phillip Island before his retirement at the end of that season, Miller had a nightmare Moto3 outing, penalised for jumping the start and finishing 21st.
But Stoner quitting at the age of 27 was a problem for MotoGP promoter Dorna, who wanted to continue having Australian representation on the grid in a key market that was home to one of the series’ most revered circuits for the future. Peter met with Mike Trimby, the secretary of the International Road Racing Teams Association (IRTA) and Dorna managing director Javier Alonso.
“Dorna wanted to have an Australian up there, and they said Jack was seen as being the next big prospect, so it was in their interest to help keep him in the game,” Peter recalled.
“To get some help from Dorna after everything we’d been through was pretty special.”
That “help” saw Miller placed with the Racing Team Germany outfit for 2013, where he finished a promising seventh in the world championship before negotiating – by himself – a low-pay big-risk contract with the crack Red Bull-backed KTM Moto3 outfit run by Finnish manager Aki Ajo for the following year. Miller battled Alex Marquez all the way to the season finale in Valencia to finish runner-up in the championship, winning six races.
When Honda came calling with the opportunity to bypass Moto2 altogether and ride in MotoGP for 2015, Miller leapt at the chance.
Australia had riders on the full-time MotoGP grid after the departing Stoner was replaced at Repsol Honda by a young Spaniard named Marc Marquez for 2013, but Bryan Staring (26th in 2013) and Broc Parkes (23rd in 2014) were journeymen who were making up the numbers. Miller was seen as a young, viable, ascendant prospect for the future.
Fast-forward to 2024, and Miller has stayed in a series where riders come and go, won four Grands Prix with two different manufacturers, contributed to Ducati outfits winning multiple teams’ championships (2021 and 2022) and, until this season, had finished on the podium every season for the past five years. It’s a career that would never have had the chance to happen without, in its nascent days, Dorna’s offer of assistance.
THE ‘WORLD’ CHAMPIONSHIP
With Miller mired in his worst MotoGP season since his 2016 sophomore campaign, it came as no surprise that KTM moved to promote Spanish rookie sensation Pedro Acosta in his place for next season at the Italian Grand Prix in June.
The Australian had hoped to stay on with KTM’s second team, the GasGas-branded outfit Acosta has ridden for this season, but the rider market madness triggered by Marc Marquez signing with Ducati’s factory outfit soon after Mugello meant KTM snapped up Enea Bastianini and Maverick Vinales from Ducati and Aprilia respectively instead, leaving a blindsided Miller scrambling for options.
Alternatives didn’t emerge. Miller’s name was linked to World Superbikes and a renewal of ties with Ducati in the production bike series, while reports out of Spain suggested Phillip Island circuit owners Linfox tried to buy the satellite Gresini Racing Ducati team from owner Nadia Padovani to keep Miller on the grid, which fell over.
PIT TALK PODCAST: In this week’s episode of ‘Pit Talk’, hosts Renita Vermeulen and Matt Clayton dissect the key moments from Round 11 in Austria, how Pecco Bagnaia was able to reclaim the championship lead over Jorge Martin, look at Marc Marquez’s charge after a horror start and assess Jack Miller’s weekend of promise that ended with a crash.
Ahead of the British Grand Prix, Miller conceded “my phone ain’t ringing” with offers from teams with available seats, but that weekend at Silverstone opened a lifeline.
Miller, his former Moto3 team boss and now manager Ajo, and Dorna’s chief commercial officer Dan Rossomondo were spotted going into a meeting with Pramac Racing, who Miller rode a Ducati for from 2018-20.
Miller was promoted from Pramac to a seat at the Ducati factory team alongside Francesco Bagnaia in 2021 but has remained on good terms with team owner Paulo Campinoti since, and Pramac had two seats available for 2025 as it switches to Yamaha machinery after two decades with Ducati, another ripple effect caused by Marquez’s shock move to become Bagnaia’s teammate.
That Dorna would be present at such a meeting is no surprise for a category that brands itself as a ‘world championship’.
Of the 22 riders on this year’s grid, 16 are either Italian or Spanish – only Miller, French pair Fabio Quartararo and Johann Zarco, Japan’s Takaaki Nakagami, Portuguese Miguel Oliveira and Miller’s KTM teammate, South African Brad Binder, aren’t from the two countries, which host seven of the 20 rounds of the series. Binder is the sole rider on the grid without a home Grand Prix.
Compared to four-wheel global cousin Formula One – whose 20 drivers represent 15 different nationalities and only one country (the USA) hosts more than two races – MotoGP is considerably less diverse.
With Formula One’s owners Liberty Media acquiring MotoGP earlier this year, there figures to be an increased emphasis on marketing and promotion that has underpinned F1 since Liberty took over in 2017, which has seen the sport explode in popularity with an emphasis on social media, calendar expansion and the transformative Netflix ‘Drive to Survive’ series from 2019, which would have never seen the light of day under former owner Bernie Ecclestone’s restrictive stewardship.
With Aprilia’s American-owned Trackhouse Racing team bypassing the chance to sign Californian Moto2 rider Joe Roberts in favour of intermediate-class peer Ai Ogura (Japan) next season, Miller looks set to be the sole native English-language speaker in the field in 2025, with no British rider on the full-time grid since Cal Crutchlow retired four years ago, and with no permanent American rider in the premier class since the late Nicky Hayden in 2015.
Miller, speaking at last weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, understands the discourse surrounding the potential extension of his career for reasons other than performance after a dire season where he admits to feeling “let down by myself”, acknowledging “there’s truth to the rumours” of a potential return to Pramac.
“We’re in contact and trying to sort something out … I feel like my time [in MotoGP] is not done yet and I feel like I have a lot more to give,” he said.
“I would love the opportunity to try and show more. I don’t want it to be on my passport, I want it to be on my speed. Obviously Spain and Italy have extremely strong riders at this point in time, but I don’t want to be here just because of my passport, that doesn’t give me any interest at all. I want to be here because I believe I can challenge with these guys.
“I don’t want to be here just because I’m an Australian. At the end of the day, these people are spending millions upon millions of dollars to go racing. Whether or not you’re Australian or Spanish or Chinese or whatever, if you’re going fast they’re going to sign you.”
A SPECIFIC JOB DESCRIPTION
One by one, Miller’s potential roadblocks to one of the two vacant Pramac seats have fallen by the wayside, with Moto2 championship leader Sergio Garcia announced to be staying in the sport’s intermediate class for 2025 last weekend in Austria.
Spaniard Garcia, 21, heads the Moto2 standings ahead of MotoGP-bound Ogura and Trackhouse-spurned Roberts, with Spaniard Fermin Aldeguer the only Moto2 rider confirmed to be joining Ogura as graduates to MotoGP next year, the 19-year-old set to take over Marquez’s vacated Gresini Racing seat.
A potential line-up of Oliveira – replaced at Trackhouse by Ogura – and Miller at Pramac Yamaha for 2025 offers an elegant, short-term solution to Yamaha’s litany of problems that can’t be solved overnight, and need experienced MotoGP-hardened hands to help return the Japanese manufacturer towards the top of the sport, a position it has plummeted from since Quartararo won the 2021 championship.
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While Yamaha has pulled clear of fellow former force Honda at the back of the field this season, it trails European manufacturers KTM and Aprilia by some margin in the battle to be a distant best of the rest behind Ducati, which won 17 of 20 races last year and has won all but one Grand Prix from 11 weekends so far in 2024.
Yamaha has just two riders – Quartararo and the injury-ravaged Alex Rins – to take on eight Ducatis and four bikes from KTM and Aprilia this season, and the pair finished in 16th (Rins) and 18th (Quartararo, after a long-lap penalty for track limits infringements) in Austria last Sunday, 37 seconds and 43 seconds respectively behind race-winner Bagnaia, one of five Ducatis in the top six finishers.
With four bikes in 2025, Yamaha will have double the data and feedback to accelerate its long climb back up the pecking order, and having a rider line-up with knowledge of all four other manufacturers (Oliveira has ridden for KTM and Aprilia, Miller for Honda, Ducati and KTM) makes sense for the short-term. The duo – born two weeks apart in 1995 – have comparable MotoGP résumés (Oliveira has five victories, Miller four) and the experience Yamaha desperately needs to support Quartararo who, at 25, remains one of the sport’s brightest talents and has already proven he has world champion qualities.
Quartararo has advocated for experienced riders at Pramac in a bid to push the Yamaha project forward, and the team called upon recently-retired 15-time MotoGP race-winner Andrea Dovizioso to test its bike at a private test at Misano in Italy this week.
Spaniard Augusto Fernandez, the 2022 Moto2 champion who, like Miller, was cast aside by KTM in the June rider market merry-go-round after competing alongside Acosta at GasGas this season, is set to sign on as a full-time test rider for Yamaha next year.
Speaking in Austria, Quartararo indicated his preference for riders with extensive MotoGP miles beneath their belts.
“We have to improve fast, and it’s true that with two experienced riders things can go faster,” he said.
“With a young rider, of course it’s great for the future, like Aldeguer … he is going to a factory [Ducati] where the bike is already working and he is good to build for the future.
“To have a young rider or experienced rider, you can find positives in both ways … right now, it’s true that we need an experienced rider, but it’s true that with the amount of time we have, having two experienced [riders] is not too bad also.”
It’s a specific job description that doesn’t bode well for a longer-term future for Miller as MotoGP gets set for a significant regulatory revolution for 2027, but after how grim his 2024 has been, it’s one with a future beyond the next nine race weekends, after which his KTM contract comes to a close.
It’s an opportunity that lends itself in part to Miller’s nationality, his diverse CV and Yamaha’s very particular requirements, but it’s one he’ll gladly accept – any criticism of his passport playing a factor again be damned.
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