Official: Jack Miller in MotoGP with LCR Honda

This year’s MotoGP’s silly season has seen many badly-kept secrets, and one of the very worst of them is now out in the open. Today, the LCR Honda squad confirmed what everybody has known since July, and suspected since the beginning of June: Jack Miller is to make the leap directly from Moto3 to MotoGP, to ride the Open class Honda in the LCR team alongside Cal Crutchlow.

Miller may be riding in the LCR Honda team, but his contract is directly with HRC. Lucio Cecchinello has long insisted that he has had no direct involvement with the deal, Honda working hard to secure the services of Miller for the future.

Miller’s contract is for three years, according to GPOne.com, and the young Australian will spend the next two seasons with LCR. That would put him in the frame for the second seat in the Repsol Honda team, with both Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa out of contract at the end of 2016.

The bike Miller will be riding is the Open class machine produced by HRC. Next year’s bike will be radically different from the bike of this year, and will consist basically of this year’s engine minus the seamless gearbox.

It will be much closer to the power of the factory bikes, though it will only have the spec software, rather than Honda’s custom electronics. The uprated version of the bike is to be given a new name: no longer will it be known as the RCV1000R, it has been rebranded an RC213V-RS.

Miller is to be partnered with Cristian Gabarrini in the LCR Honda team. The crew chief who formerly worked with Casey Stoner has a history of working with young riders, and as an HRC employee, can nurture the 19-year-old Australian’s talent.

There had been rumors that Valentino Rossi’s former crew chief Jeremy Burgess was to work with Jack Miller, but those rumors appear to have been a fabrication leaked to discredit a particular section of the Italian media.

This article was originally published on MotoMatters, and is republished here on Asphalt & Rubber with permission by the author.