Both 2020 World Champion Joan Mir and Honda HRC Castrol teammate Luca Marini will be back on track for the Petronas Grand Prix of Malaysia, after both getting passed officially fit on Thursday in Sepang.

Mir has been on the sidelines since Misano, missing a number of rounds after suffering from illness and deciding to step back to investigate the issue. Now given the all-clear to return, the #36 was very much happy to be back on Thursday in Malaysia.

“Honestly I'm super happy to be back because I've been at home for a while. It's been a difficult period with some question marks for me because simply it was a time I needed to stop, because of vision problems, quite extreme tiredness, and it seems day-by-day I was not able to recover until we started doing treatment with Dr Charte and I saw immediate improvement. We also did a lot of work at home. I'm so happy to be back because, as you can imagine, I had a lot of questions marks at that time... ‘what will happen?’ but to be able to answer this question and be here is such an important thing.

"It was very strange. It wasn't like when you break a bone, you know more or less the timing for the recovery. When you have vision problems and this fatigue, it was honestly very hard to understand the timings. ‘When?’ is the first question you ask as a rider with an injury [...] In this case it was not like that, so it was more time and patience and just being 100% sure about coming back. Tomorrow we will see how I feel also. I still have some doubts but I feel good and that's the most important thing.”

Marini, meanwhile, took brief part in FP1 last time out before he was forced to miss the rest of the weekend suffering with a virus. He has likewise been given the green light to get back on track at Sepang – so Honda HRC Castrol will be back to full power with their MotoGP line-up.