KTM was competitive and fighting for top positions and podiums in the early part of the MotoGP season. Now, the team is going through a slightly more challenging period, with podiums being somewhat distant, and Pedro Acosta wants a bike developed to be competitive on more circuits.
The RC16 is particularly suited to tracks with tight corners and heavy braking, and the Spaniard from Red Bull GasGas Tech3 feels there has been a drop in performance… although he hopes for better results soon:
– Well, if you start to thinking, from the beginning of our history in MotoGP, we were strong in the brakings and in these tight corners; it’s nothing new. Maybe this season we were quite fast on this kind of tracks and now we arrive to average of the last season – from seventh to ninth. Maybe for this we feel more the change, but I’m still believing that in the moment that we go to Austria, Misano, Aragón, Thailand, Japan, we will be again at the front.
Acosta then emphasized that the KTM RC16 does not have the ideal characteristics for circuits like Silverstone, and a more competitive and consistent bike from track to track is needed: ‘In the end we need to understand that we are four guys that are really pushing the brakings, for one thing because it’s our best point. And we even start to focus on the bike, the aero, the balance, everything, on this type of corner. We need to understand that all the project is focused in this direction, because it’s the way we are going fast. But the problem is in this type of tracks, we can’t do like that. Because it’s not the way to make «V» lines [stop and go], and it’s not the way to brake hard because at the end if you brake hard, you break the speed. And if you break the speed, you are done. For this, what we need to try is to improve the bike a little bit in this type of corners – for example in turning – in order to don’t be so good in the good days, but not so bad in the bad days’.
The rookie explained his point of view: ‘Because if you want to fight for a championship you cannot be first on the good days and tenth on the bad days – you need to be minimum in the top five. And in the moment we can fight for ten victories – tu put an average – and ten top fives [over the season], we are in the game for the championship. It will be a process, I’m sure about that, but we’ll arrive’.