If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
So Jack Miller posed the question. Again and again.
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On an Australian Grand Prix Saturday that saw the early-morning mist and drizzle lift to showcase Phillip Island at its finest, the local riders stepped up to the plate. In Moto3, Darwin’s Joel Kelso took pole position. In Moto2, Sydney’s Senna Agius qualified second.
Both of the up-and-coming Australians have had success at Phillip Island in the past, finishing on the podium at their home race (Kelso in 2023, Agius last year) and came into round 19 of the season with realistic expectations.
Miller, though, had nothing much to hang his hat on.
Sitting 18th in the world championship with just 60 points, perhaps the best part of Miller’s 2025 was that it led to a 2026, Pramac Yamaha re-signing him – and dumping contracted teammate Miguel Oliveira – in September as Yamaha sets its sights on developing a V4 engine to drag itself back to the contention it has barely been in since 2021.
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Miller’s vast experience with V4 engines at Honda, Ducati and KTM before moving to Yamaha for his 11th MotoGP season was pivotal in him being retained, his past arguably more important than his present.
Saturday showed that a razor-sharp racer still lurks within given the opportunity.
After coming through Q1 to make Q2, reserved for the fastest 12 qualifiers and somewhere Miller hasn’t been since round 10 in the Czech Republic in July, the 30-year-old was a standout in a stunning qualifying result that was full of them to earn third on the grid, his first front-row start since the 2023 Japanese Grand Prix, and the first time an Australian rider had qualified on the Phillip Island front row since Casey Stoner took pole for Honda in 2012.
In the 13-lap sprint, and with Yamaha’s one-lap prowess expected to regress to the mean – pole-sitter Fabio Quartararo faded to seventh – Miller dug in. He fought Ducati’s Alex Marquez – second in the world championship – for third place in the early laps before KTM’s Pedro Acosta swept past them both. As Marquez dropped back, Miller attached a tow rope to MotoGP’s fastest bike in a straight line and hung on to Acosta for dear life, his outside chance of a podium dependant on one final assault.
Come the last lap, Miller had a look at passing Acosta at Turn 4 – the corner renamed after him three years ago – and again at Turn 10 of the 12-turn layout. At the final corner, where the bikes wind up to hit 350km/h on the start-finish straight – he had a sneaky peek at an audacious pass of the 21-year-old Spaniard before, sensibly, thinking better of it.
Fourth place and 0.066 seconds off a sprint podium when you’ve only scored points in two sprints all year – and eight points total in the past seven rounds – was quite the result. And he knew it.
“I got stuck with Alex [Marquez] a little bit … I had one attack, and then the second attempt, right as I was going past him, Pedro [Acosta] came past both of us,” Miller said.
“I was trying to have an attack on the last lap, because I didn’t want to do it on the second-last lap simply because I knew he’d slip past me on the front straight. Last lap, Turn 4 he was real protective, then Turn 10 I eyed up, and then I tried to set my line up for Turn 12 and had a little look, but it would have ended in disaster if I kept that one going …
“But I’m happy enough with the job today. If you’d told me fourth yesterday afternoon, I’d have shaken your hand on it … but when you’re so close to a podium, it’s always tempting.”
After he downloaded his own race, Miller was asked if he was surprised that Australian riders qualified on the front row in all three classes.
“The other boys holding up their end of the bargain, absolutely … me, on the other hand, probably not,” he laughed.
“Joel with pole and Senna in second – Senna has really good race pace and can go really well around here – it’s an unreal day for Australian motorsport today.
“There’s a lot of laps between now and the end of tomorrow, but if the boys can hold up their part of it and I can hold up mine, it can be an unreal day.”
BEZZECCHI PLAYS DOWN VICTORY CHANCES AFTER SPRINT DRAMA
He couldn’t, could he?
Such was the manner of Marco Bezzecchi’s win in Saturday’s sprint – a simultaneously dramatic and comfortable 3.149sec victory that came after he clouted a seagull on the warm-up lap, then lost a heap of time when he nearly rear-ended Aprilia stablemate Raul Fernandez at Turn 10 on lap six before later passing the Spaniard and clearing off – that a Bezzecchi victory on Sunday is a distinct possibility, even with the Italian starting the 27-lap Grand Prix with the equivalent of one arm being tied behind his back.
Bezzecchi came into the Island weekend battered and bruised after his first-lap coming-together with Marc Marquez a fortnight ago in Indonesia, and with a double long-lap penalty to serve in the main Australian race after being sanctioned by MotoGP’s race stewards for the crash that left Marquez sidelined with right shoulder surgery in Australia, and potentially for the rest of the season as well.
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The twin penalties are likely to cost Bezzecchi six seconds of time on Sunday; while tyre wear and race strategy in a full-distance Grand Prix are more nuanced than a flat-out sprint, there’s no question Bezzecchi has the sheer speed to achieve what would normally be considered impossible.
His rivals, almost to a man, weren’t prepared to rule him out; Bezzecchi himself was more circumspect.
“In the end, first of all we don’t know the [weather] conditions for tomorrow, and the soft tyre was super grippy but in the last lap, it was dropping a lot for me,” he said.
“It’s difficult to keep [the soft tyre] as an option for the longer race, plus two long lap [penalties] makes everything quite complicated. The target for me is to try to take out the best from the race. If that’s top 10, I will be happy with top 10, if it’s top five, the same … or more.”
Bezzecchi’s Saturday was eventually successful, but wasn’t without its dramas. The seagull scare required some deep breaths to get over, while his near-miss with Fernandez could have been an all-time own goal on a day Aprilia had the pace to secure its first-ever sprint 1-2 finish.
“When I started the warm-up lap, they also started the warm-up lap,” Bezzecchi said of the flock of seagulls that had camped down at the circuit’s first corner as the countdown to the race wound down.
“It was a difficult moment because I didn’t really know what to do. I was just trying to protect myself. After that, it was quite scared that maybe the bike was damaged, but fortunately it was not. Obviously, I’m quite sorry for this seagull but I couldn’t do anything [to avoid it].
“In the warm-up lap, I tried to come back into the focus for the race, but it was difficult. I suffered a lot with the front tyre in the beginning, I thought maybe the aero [on the bike] was broken.”
Asked for his tip for Sunday’s race, Bezzecchi paused before rattling off some suggestions. Convincing as he was, there’s a world in which he can double the dose in twice the distance, assuming his body plays ball.
“Raul [Fernandez], Alex Marquez, [Ducati’s Fabio] Di Giannantonio … it’s difficult to find a favourite one, they are all super fast,” he said.
“My back, now that I’m getting cold, it’s starting to get quite painful. Today, I took some painkillers, and this helps. But I will have to recover a lot this afternoon.”
The only Aprilia guarantee on Saturday? Bezzecchi’s world champion teammate Jorge Martin – on pole in Australia the past three years, but absent this weekend after his fourth major injury of a brutal title defence – surely switched his TV off watching at home at 6.30am Andorran time when Bezzecchi took the lead, lamenting a win that – based on history – he could have justifiably felt should have been his …
‘A PASSENGER’: BAGNAIA WILTS AS DUCATI’S FIVE-YEAR RUN ENDS
While Aprilia’s Saturday was groundbreaking, Ducati’s was too – for reasons you wouldn’t want, and were unprecedented.
Never before has Marc Marquez been so missed.
The Quartararo-Bezzecchi-Miller front row represented the first time in 100 Grands Prix (Valencia, 2020) that there was not a single Ducati on the front row of the grid; the non-Ducati podium trio of Bezzecchi, Fernandez and Pedro Acosta (KTM) was the first time ever in MotoGP’s sprint race era (2023 onwards) that the Italian brand didn’t have a sprint race medallist.
Alex Marquez started strongly but faded to sixth, while Gresini Ducati teammate Fermin Aldeguer – a dominant winner of the most recent Grand Prix in Indonesia and the winner of the 2024 Moto2 race at the Island – crashed out.
Worse still was the factory Ducati team bringing up the rear, two-time MotoGP world champion Francesco Bagnaia’s spiralling season reaching new depths as he faded to 19th place, 32 seconds behind Bezzecchi in 13 laps. Marquez’s substitute Michele Pirro, who hasn’t raced in Australia in 13 years, was the only rider behind him.
Bagnaia – who waited more than two hours after the 20-minute sprint to finally face the press – was crestfallen.
“The bike is shaking a lot, but we don’t know why,” he said.
“In the sprint race, I wasn’t able to ride the bike – I was a passenger again, just trying to control the shaking. Many times I had to close the gas exiting from the corners, and this is strange.
“I think if Marc [Marquez] was here, he was on the podium. But right now, we are focusing on understanding what is not working well, because when it’s working well we are OK.”
Bagnaia will start Sunday’s Grand Prix from 14th place, penalised three places for impeding Bezzecchi in qualifying earlier on Saturday.
Ducati’s one ray of light on Saturday was Di Giannantonio, the 2023 Australian Grand Prix podium finisher who had rapid pace in Friday practice, messed up qualifying and started just 10th, and then tore through the pack late to finish just 0.106secs off the podium, shadowing Acosta and Miller across the line.
Di Giannantonio has demonstrated searing speed late in Australia before – last year’s charge to fourth came from 12th on the grid – and while he was optimistic of his chances on Sunday, he acknowledged that Ducati’s advantage over the rest is shrinking.
“We did a great comeback, my pace was really good when I was alone, but I have a big regret for the qualifying,” he said.
“Tomorrow we need great first laps to try to recover. I’m starting 10th so I need to pass many strong riders, I need to pick up the pace quite a lot. It’s true that [Bezzecchi] has two long lap [penalties], but to fight with him … I see that as quite far off.
“Our [Ducati] project is a great project, but the other manufacturers are growing faster than us at the moment. We are in a great position where the bike is working good overall, but the other manufacturers are bringing more new pieces, and at the moment they are working a little better than us.
“Now, the competition is coming stronger.”
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