Pedro Acosta joined MotoGP this season at just 19 years old — he turned 20 in May, two months after the start of the championship. As expected, he has had to face a reality vastly different from what he encountered in previous categories.
The Spaniard from Red Bull GasGas Tech3 explained in an interview with Dominika Grnova that there is much to learn as a rookie, and that the schedule is particularly demanding from a mental perspective:
– For sure it’s much harder [than he imagined]. In the end it’s many new things for a young guy like me – about electronics, about power management, about tyre management, strategy, many meetings. Also now a MotoGP weekend is super stressful with the Practice on Friday afternoon, qualifying on Saturday morning and directly for the Sprint race. Every day you have an important say let’s say, and the stress is super high. And sometimes you need to know when to push and when not to push in order to save a bit of energy to be more ready for the next session – or maybe to save a bit of power to make the time attack at the end of Friday’s Practice. Sometimes it’s more the mental than physical side.
In any case, Acosta didn’t hide that he is enjoying MotoGP a lot: ‘In the other hand is super nice, it’s really a racing bike, it’s really racing, it’s really competition, for this I love it’.