There’s no invitation, no WhatsApp group chat with forwarded details, no guest list and absolutely no airs and graces.
But if you know, you know.
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For years ahead his home Grand Prix, Aussie rider Jack Miller and his family have thrown a pre-weekend low-key gathering at one of the holiday houses dotted around Phillip Island’s suburbs, where all roads lead to one of the world’s most revered motorcycle racing tracks. There’s enough food to feed an army, and nobody goes thirsty for long. Anyone who’s had anything to do with Miller along his journey from his dirt-track beginnings to his move to Europe as a teenager to his 12-year tenure in the premier class of the world championship might show up, or might not.
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Aunties, uncles and cousins rub shoulders with MotoGP bosses, agents and team managers. Childhood sponsors who just wanted to chip in back in the day swap stories with riders past and present. It’s a way of injecting something ‘normal’ into a weekend that is anything but.
It’s also a tradition that’s about to end.
Phillip Island’s final world championship calendar appearance this weekend coincides with Miller’s final season in the category before he moves to World Superbikes with Yamaha for next season. Including Australia, there may be as few as four more rounds – should Qatar get cancelled because of the continuing unrest in the Middle East – remaining.
And while the family BBQ is a little different these days – there’s more grey hair and young kids running around than there once was – the reason behind it remains the same. It’s a thank you, an appreciation of the past, and a time to get together and be present before the craziness starts.
“It’s such a busy weekend, a busy week in general with the lead-up, so you learn to manage your energy levels,” Miller tells Fox Sports.
“You’re getting pulled from one thing to the next but it’s all for the right reasons, people want to see you do well. You can’t say yes to everything, but you know people want the best for you and that’s a cool feeling.”
MotoGP, of course, will move to a brand-new city parklands circuit in Adelaide from next season, the first of the 850cc regulation revolution that’s the biggest change to the premier-class since 2012, when Miller was still finding his world championship feet in the lower categories.
It’s a two-pronged future he won’t be part of, as he closes the book on a chapter of home races that have ranged from the euphoric to the ironic, results that have prompted floods of tears to chugging of beers in equal measure.
Calling it a rollercoaster undersells it.
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MILLER’S ISLAND HITS…
Rewind to 2012, Miller’s first full season in the world championship paddock in Moto3 after a handful of 125cc cameos the previous year, and you’d have got very long odds on him surviving until 2016, let alone a full decade afterwards.
October 28 that year remains one of Phillip Island’s more memorable days, with locals on all three world championship race podiums.
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In MotoGP, Casey Stoner – in his penultimate race before his retirement – won at the Island for the sixth year in succession. Compatriot Ant West finished second – ahead of a certain youngster named Marc Marquez – in Moto2; West was later stripped of the result after testing positive to a banned substance. In Moto3, Australian Arthur Sissis finished third for his maiden career podium.
Miller? On a weekend where more than 122,000 fans poured through the gates to say goodbye to Stoner, the-then 17-year-old probably barely got a sideways glance. From 23rd on the grid of the same race as Sissis, Miller jumped the start, copped a ride-through penalty, fell to 27th and finished 21st. It was as depressing as he was anonymous, and a sign of the extreme highs and lows that were to follow.
From the depths of despair in 2012, Miller was on top of the world two short years later when, already confirmed to be making the near-unprecedented step from Moto3 to MotoGP while bypassing Moto2 altogether for 2015, he won a wild 2014 Moto3 race at the Island in a top four separated by four-hundredths of a second after 23 laps across 37 manic minutes.
Alex Marquez pipped him to that year’s world title by two points even after Miller won the season finale in Valencia, but Australia was the high point of a six-win breakout season in a deep field where eight riders would eventually make it to MotoGP.
Miller’s first big-bike statement at home came in his third MotoGP race at the Island, in 2017 when, after dragging an uncompetitive second-tier Honda to the second row of the grid in qualifying, he showed his speed and lack of experience in equal measure, bolting to the front for the first four laps as the Island masses roared.
It couldn’t and didn’t last, fading to a still meritorious – for what he was riding – 10th.
Nine years on, it’s a memory that still makes him laugh.
“Leading on a Marc VDS Honda … I honestly didn’t realise where everybody had gone and I was out the front absolutely sending it,” he grins.
“Everyone else was protecting their tyres and being smart about it. Heaps of people afterwards asked me if I’d heard the crowd go up because I’d taken the lead, or wondering if I’d been pushed along by the crowd – not at all. I was a bit bloody surprised to be honest.
“I definitely went for too much in the first few laps, and then ‘Vale’ (Valentino Rossi) and Maverick (Vinales) came past me on the straight so fast that they almost pulled the stickers off my bike.
“Being in the lead and not really knowing what pace I should set or how hard I should be pushing was actually pretty difficult, so I learned something.”
Two years later, that knowledge of the power of persistence turned into a podium when, at the head of a pack fighting for fourth on the final lap, Miller finished third when the race-long battle for victory between Marc Marquez and Vinales ended with the latter crashing out of second place three corners from home.
“It wasn’t a win, but it felt like it a little bit,” he remembers of perhaps his favourite of his 23 MotoGP podiums, sharing his home rostrum with Marquez, the sport’s reigning champion, and good mate Cal Crutchlow, who finished second.
“I managed the race and tried not to push too early, and I got to fourth and I thought that would be the best I could do … on the last lap I saw dust, saw Maverick down, defended the last two corners, and that was it.”
… AND MISSES
For every year Miller has enjoyed being the pigeon at his home Grand Prix, there’s been times where he’s endured being the statue, too.
The aforementioned 2012 Moto3 race was one, but two more recent examples arguably sting more.
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In 2022, as the Island prepared to host MotoGP again after a two-year pandemic pause, circuit owners Linfox left Miller speechless when they told him they wanted to re-name a corner of the track to recognise his career, one that has progressed to him becoming the only Australian to start more than 200 premier-class Grands Prix.
“To have part of that track named after me like Wayne (Gardner), Mick (Doohan) and Casey (Stoner) – I’m not in the same league as those guys, so that’s a little bit embarrassing,” he said at the time.
“But it’s amazing, more than I could ever dream of.”
There was no debate; it had to be turn four, known colloquially as Honda Hairpin for years, and where Miller’s extended family from both sides of the Tasman have always gathered to watch. That Miller’s best Island results came as a result of late-braking dive-bombs at one of the track’s few slow turns – his Moto3 win in 2014 was memorable for that alone – made it perfect.
Nearly.
Almost predictably, days after the corner was renamed in his honour, Miller was taken out at that very turn of his first home Grand Prix in three years while running in fifth place by none other than Alex Marquez, who he’d engaged in a tense and sometimes acrimonious Moto3 title fight with eight years earlier. Marquez’s instant contrition – he profusely and repeatedly apologised as both riders were extracting themselves from the gravel trap – was at least partly a function of reading the room …
“I was mid-corner, just about to release the brakes and get on the gas, and got a front wheel to the middle of my spine,” Miller said afterwards.
“Me and Alex have obviously had our battles in the past, but there’s no reason to have any hard feelings … what’s there to have hard feelings about? We’re all out there trying to do our best and sure, he might have got a little bit carried away, but we’ve all made mistakes.
“To end up finishing in the gravel there … a bit of irony, you have to admit.”
Fast-forward to last year, Miller’s first with Yamaha and for a manufacturer who has gone from MotoGP’s benchmark to doormat in short order since Fabio Quartararo won the 2021 world championship, and Australia was a rare weekend to, initially, celebrate before he slumped to 17th in the championship standings.
From absolutely nowhere, Miller qualified on the front row in third – he’d never qualified better in 13 attempts at his home GP, and his average starting position for the season was 12th – and finished six-hundredths of a second off the sprint podium in fourth for his best Saturday showing all season.
It was rare promise that made his Sunday downfall hurt more, Miller crashing out of fifth place on lap five when his best result for the season beckoned, and led to him emotionally berating himself afterwards.
“I’m disappointed to let everybody down, let the team down, let the fans down,” he said.
“It was a strong weekend, we showed great pace, so I’ll try to take the positives. But it’s sh**ty, just a sh**ty situation … it’s never nice crashing out, whether it’s your home Grand Prix or on the other side of the world.”
‘HALF MY LIFE AGO’: A CHAPTER CLOSES
The prospect of an equally promising showing for Miller this weekend? Remote, at best.
Much as Phillip Island remains one of the circuits where, as he puts it, “the rider can still make the difference even if you don’t have the machinery underneath you”, the form line and Yamaha’s slide further into irrelevance makes the chances of even being in fifth place to crash out of somewhere between improbable and impossible.
With Yamaha’s nascent V4 engine project in the final year of the 1000cc regulations seeing it cast further adrift from the back, the Japanese brand and its riders are playing out time before the calendar flips to 2027.
Of Yamaha’s four riders, only MotoGP rookie Toprak Razgatlioglu is staying on, with Quartararo off to Honda, his factory teammate Alex Rins considering a four-wheel racing future, and Miller switching paddocks for World Superbikes.
Miller sits 19th in the championship standings of the 22 full-time riders in the series, but is the second-best Yamaha behind Quartararo (14th), both on track for the lowest-finishing positions of their careers.
This weekend won’t be Miller’s last at the circuit where a corner will forever carry his surname; next year’s World Superbikes season opens in February at the same track before the production-bike series also shifts across the border to South Australia, WSBK moving to The Bend from 2028.
But it is the closing of a circle, and one that’s left him feeling, predictably, nostalgic.
It struck the 31-year-old when he arrived at Motegi in early October for the first of the flyaways through Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia and (possibly) Qatar in a six-week whirlwind that the end was coming fast, and not just for him.
Peers like Vinales, six days older than Miller and who he’s shared a MotoGP grid with since 2017, 30-year-old Rins, who debuted that same year, and former KTM teammate Brad Binder (who debuted in 2020) are finishing up in MotoGP, too. The upcoming 850cc regulation change has seen factories opt for youth to coincide with the new era, with Senna Agius taking the baton of the sole Australian on the premier-class grid, as Miller has been for most of his tenure.
“Me, ‘Vinny’ (Vinales), Brad, Alex … we’ve all been racing each other since 2010, so it’s pretty cool but pretty s**ty at the same time to be dealing with all of that together,” he says.
“We’re all in the same boat at least, so that makes it feel a little bit better. It’s half my life ago, basically.”
It’s why, when the chequered flag drops on Sunday afternoon, no matter where Miller finishes, he’ll savour that in-lap back to the pits. There’ll probably be few dry eyes, and there’ll definitely be a tyre-shredding burnout at the corner that bears his name.
“It’ll be a super special weekend, that’s for certain,” he says, his voice trailing off.
Come Sunday night back at the Miller base for the weekend – whether the fire is on or the sunscreen is being applied, depending on the Island’s capricious weather – there’ll be some tears, plenty of hugs, and more than likely a few sore heads the next morning.
If you know, you know.
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