A non-score over the Austin MotoGP weekend has left Joan Mir in a familiar place in the standings: adrift of Honda stablemates Luca Marini and Johann Zarco (and also rookie Diogo Moreira).

A tyre calamity at Buriram skews the picture massively, and he can hardly be faulted for his zero at Goiania, where he was plainly unwell all weekend. But the two DNFs at COTA were Honda-spec Mir at his worst, an obviously rapid rider who just does not have a good enough handle on the bike.

This can be acceptable, given Honda is still in its 'rebuild' phase and has at no point looked any better than the third- or fourth-best bike in MotoGP this year. But Mir's approach to COTA suggested not just a total disinterest in delivering what he sees as 'average' results, but an overestimation of the credit he has in the bank with his current employer.

Mir went down from fourth place on Saturday, as he hounded Pedro Acosta for the final spot on the sprint podium. He wasn't to know it at the time, but had he stayed behind Acosta he would've inherited third place post-race due to a tyre pressure penalty for the KTM rider.

On Sunday, having already consigned himself to a long-lap penalty for cutting a corner and making no particularly evident effort to cede the required amount of laptime in the immediate aftermath, he went down from sixth.

On both occasions, and this is verbatim, he insisted he had "zero regrets" over how he had approached the race - and, while apologising to the team on Saturday, stressed the role he believes Honda must play in curbing his tendency to crash.

"I think that I was in a position yesterday and also today to go to attack, and to recover as much as I could on the [corner] entry the amount of speed we lose on the [corner] exit," said Mir on Sunday, pointing to Honda's ongoing rear grip limitation.

"And the front collapsed. That's a bit the story of these last two days.

"We have to improve the rear, to ride in a more relaxed way in the front.

"I will try to do my best to help the team to do so, but the reality is that now if we don't improve that, it will be difficult to fight with them [other bikes] if I don't take these risks."

That kind of rhetoric wore thin for many when it was coming from Fabio Quartararo at Yamaha and Acosta at KTM. Ultimately, both manufacturers have not improved enough, and both will lose their star riders to rivals.

Perhaps Honda is in a similar boat, but Joan Mir has not been Fabio Quartararo, and has not been Pedro Acosta. Though he has had his undeniable high points at Honda, he has by no means established a body of work that positions him as an elite rider dragging an underperforming manufacturer forward.

Highest-scoring riders since start of 2024

At KTM
Acosta 582
Binder 362
Bastianini 134

At Yamaha
Quartararo 320
Rins 102
Miller 79

At Honda
Zarco 216
Marini 179
Mir 120

Asked by The Race whether a rethink of his approach was warranted right now while the bike is still not at the level he wants it to be, Mir said: "For how I understand racing - I think this is costing me a lot of crashes here, at Honda. Because I like to start the race knowing that I have a chance. If I don't think that, inside myself...I spent the most difficult years in '23 and '24 here, for this reason - mentally, no? And I don't want to go again through that.

"I'm one of the people here that, I don't enjoy this just for being part of it. I enjoy when I have the option to fight for something big. And that is causing me a lot of crashes. But here in COTA I had to do it."

Mir also believes that the team is "supporting me in that way".

Only Alberto Puig and others at Honda can really say how much "support" there truly is for this kind of approach. But there's some tangential evidence that it's not exactly overwhelming.

Honda is believed to have secured Quartararo's services for 2027 and beyond. It has committed to both Zarco and Moreira beyond this year. And it is being persistently linked with a move for Moto2's David Alonso.

Mir has a point in that fifth-, sixth-, seventh-place finishes don't ultimately make that much of a difference for a brand with Honda's history, nor for a rider who won the world title in 2020. But at a certain point going into races knowing that your prospective lead rider has coin-flip odds to reach the finish must really chip away at everything: patience, confidence, trust, what have you.

Mir wants a better bike from Honda. He is also giving Honda every reason to, by the time it has that better bike, hand it to someone else.