Pramac Ducati’s Jack Miller has revealed that a visor tear-off was sucked into his Desmosedici’s airbox which caused the engine to lose power and eventually forced him into retirement from the second Misano MotoGP.

The tear-off came Fabio Quartararo on lap two of the race and added insult to the injury of a cold tyre highside in morning warm-up.

“Sunday started badly for me with a big old highside on a cold tyre in the morning warm-up, and I ended up pretty battered and bruised from that one,” said Miller.

“Then in the race, I had a tear-off from someone’s visor end up in the air box and that just made a bad day worse.

“No points, but it was a strange race after last week here – the guys who scored big points last time like Franky (Morbidelli), Pecco (Bagnaia) and Vale (Valentino Rossi) didn’t score much or at all, so somehow I’m still only 20 points off the lead and with our worst track of the year behind us, thank goodness.”

“This championship fight is going down to the wire, that seems pretty clear to me and realistically has been ever since Marc got injured.

“Everyone has stepped up their game but there’s also been lots of mistakes. Limiting the mistakes is going to be a big thing, but you can’t be too conservative, got to keep pushing for podiums and wins if you can.

“It’s a hard balance and we’ve probably all had trouble mastering that so far – explains why there’s been so many ups and downs for most of us, I guess.

“I’ll be happy to get out of here after two weeks to get to a new track, to be honest. We’re coming up to tracks which our bike really gets along with like Aragon, Le Mans, Barcelona, Valencia and then Portimao at the end.”