Pedro Acosta finished the Sprint race of the MotoGP Austrian GP in tenth place, narrowly missing out on the points positions. After qualifying fourth in Q1, just 0.024s shy of making it to Q2, the Red Bull GasGas Tech3 rider faced a tough challenge starting from 14th on the grid but still managed to recover and break into the top ten.
When asked if he knew where he could have found the 0.024 seconds that kept him from advancing to Q2, the rookie replied: ‘It’s difficult to say how close we were to pass to Q2 and how far we started in comparison. Because even with my lap time in Q1, I would be sixth or seventh on the grid. This could make everything much easier, but at the end it is what it is’.
The need to use the medium tyre and a problem similar to one he faced in the Catalan GP affected Acosta’s performance, as he said: ‘I’m still missing things, more than anything the race that we need to ride with the medium. For sure we were losing performance because of that, but it was the only way to make 14 laps. In the main race is not going to be easy for us to maintain the tyres and everything, but we were losing a lot of time at the beginning. Anyways, we were having one problem that was the same than in Barcelona, that was quite difficult to explain’.
Regarding the minor incident with Fabio Quartararo (Monster Energy Yamaha), the Spaniard downplayed the situation: ‘Well, he touched me at the start. These things can happen in a race, and in a track like this where from the start to the first corner is not a long way. And also we know what happened in turn 1 in this track in the past years’.
As for the physical consequences of his crashes on Friday, Acosta assured that he didn’t have major issues: ‘Well, on Friday I put cream everywhere and I just went to sleep. It’s true that Friday’s afternoon I was like, «Ah, maybe something is there». But, well, I put cream everywhere and I just tried to sleep. It was fine’.