Dani Pedrosa has scored more points this year than Joan Mir has.
"Plum, what the fuck are you talking about" WELL IF YOU WANNA KNOW:
Dani Pedrosa was a rider on the factory Honda MotoGP bike for checks notes 13 years. In that time he never won a championship but is generally regarded probably the best rider never to do so, and many of his championship peers of the era cite him as one of their biggest rivals and hardest riders to beat. In 2019 he was somewhat moved out of the way in favor of the suddenly on the market Jorge Lorenzo and chose to retire instead of finding another seat. Retiring in this case means, very soon becoming the test rider for a not very competitive KTM team.
So fast forward to 2023 and he's still their test rider and has been credited as one of the big factors as to why they now have one of the best bikes on the grid. Between 2019 and 2023, Honda has had four different riders on the second bike, Pol Espagaro being the only one that lasted two years and it generally being considered a bad or even dangerous bike to ride. 2023's unlucky rider is Joan Mir, the 2020 world champion who has already gotten hurt in accidents twice this year. The bike is so bad that at one point, 3 out of 4 Honda riders were out with injury and the 4th one openly said he wasn't pushing because he was scared of getting hurt.
Now in MotoGP they have this wonderful thing called wildcards, where you can pick a handful of races a year to just, bring an extra bike and extra rider for funsies. This used to be VERY fun, particularly with local experts showing up at the Japanese round and causing all sorts of chaos (in a good way; finding themselves on podiums out of nowhere) but nowadays usually means bringing the test rider in for a race weekend. That's just what Dani Pedrosa has been doing and in his two race weekend outings he got a 7th and a 4th, plus a 6th and 4th in the sprint races don't ask for a grand total of 32 points. Joan Mir out of 10 healthy race weekends has gotten a 5th, 11th, and 12th for a grand total of 20 points, plus 0 from sprint races. It should be pointed out he only has one other race finish for 17th, outside of the points, and 6 DNFs.
What does this tell us? Well I'm sure 38 year old Dani Pedorsa is having a blast this year. Joan Mir is probably NOT having a blast, and we can probably lay most of the blame on both his bad time and his results at the bike rather than him.