We knew it was coming soon. We just didn’t know when. When Pedro Acosta, with a 2.5 second lead in the Saturday Sprint, crashed as a result of momentarily dropping his gaze to his dash, we thought it was another of his gremlins.

No. In Sunday’s GP he took the lead from pole setter Jorge Martin (Aprilia) on lap 9 and maintained a lead of most of a second to the flag.

Marc Marquez (factory Duc) had plain old bad luck: “From the very first lap I realized something was wrong with the front brake.

“I pulled the brake and the lever was dead. There was nothing there.

“…then suddenly, from one lap to the next, around the middle of the race the brake started working again.” He finished 5th, salvaging 11 points.

Second-place Martin is now 12 points ahead of Marquez in the championship. He said of Acosta, “In the third corner he was braking like an animal! He was making a big step there. Also corner 5.”

Marco Bezzecchi was 3rd (Aprilia). At the start “I tried to pass Jorge and he immediately passed me back. I did a few corners behind him and right away started struggling with the front. In fact I lost a bit of pace and Acosta passed me very quickly. When I found myself behind him I lost the front at turn 10 and went way wide.”

Did his front tire fall out of its temperature window?

Ai Ogura (Aprilia), returning from injury, was 4th, last man in the fast first group who were all within two-and-a-bit seconds of the leader (the rest were nine or more seconds out of first). When asked if he’d had a good race he answered, characteristically, “Yes.

“The most important thing…was that I had no problems following my hand injury and a few weeks without a MotoGP bike.”



Acosta said, “Super happy about the race. It’s true that I struggled a bit more than yesterday in the first laps. Also, Jorge was pushing a lot at the beginning and I was struggling a bit to catch him.

“I was trying to maintain this .5 to .7 {lead} the whole race, and maintain the fuel, because it was quite a tricky track for that.

Red Bull Ring is straightaways followed by zones of hard braking.

Marc Marquez, asked to comment on the remainder of the championship fight, said, “…there are four of us fighting for the title. Acosta, since KTM reopened its engines at Silverstone, has had a competitive bike again. And that makes him another world championship rival. I think the four of us – Marquez, Martin, Bezzecchi, Acosta – will be very close in the final races.”



KTM’s regaining its lost 500 revs by being allowed to replace defective components in their engines is all very well, but what about Acosta’s view that his crew’s more radical set-up changes are the big improvement?

And whose changes are they, exactly? In one case, there is Acosta himself, saying, “Sometimes you have to push the technicians a little.”

Elsewhere there is reference to “a complete shift in philosophy adopted by his Red Bull KTM Factory Racing team.”

And then this comment from Misano: “Acosta forced his technicians to completely rebuild and reconfigure the KTM RC16 geometry overnight.”

From Aragon: “Now I’m racing with a really long bike.



And, “I’m struggling a lot, stopping the bike.

KTM motorsport director Pit Beirer said, “From Aragon onwards we took a new direction that differs from all the years before.”

Who is the “we” in this new direction? Pedro Acosta? His crew chief? Engineering management?

Trackside people know that when there’s front wheel locking, a common cause is insufficient weight transfer to the front as braking begins.

Long, low set-ups, preferred in a corner-speed riding style, do not permit “braking like an animal.” Whatever the particular changes, both in set-up and in Acosta’s riding, it is heartening to see the locking was fixed, allowing Acosta to get on with racing, not struggle with bike issues.

Quick, decisive response to problems – not frittering time away in nickel and dime changes that risk nothing and produce nothing.

An example. In the late 1930s/early ‘40s a major US maker of large aircraft piston engines was having chronic failures of the planetary propeller reduction gearing on a new design. Literally years were frittered away in tiny changes – brass bushings, silver-plated ones, sintered ones, floating.

Finally a machinist making a buck seventy-five found the problem. The planet pinion carrier was as much as .019” off-center from the crankshaft gear. The planet pinions and their bushings were being crushed. With actual understanding came a permanent solution.

Another example. A wealthy California racing sponsor bought 40 Yamaha two-stroke cylinders and had his crew perform a different small modification to each of them.

One after the other, they were dynoed and found to produce less power than stock. Is the conclusion that stock is best? No, because all good tuners in the 1970s knew changes had to be made in concert, not one at a time – taller, wider exhaust port, shorter exhaust header pipe, more compression, and maybe retarded ignition timing. Race-winning power.

If, as the rider brakes from high speed, weight is not transferred rapidly enough onto the front, the tire will lock, forcing the rider to brake moderately at first, then ramp up the lever pressure as the front tire heats up. Wasting time. Bad.

Moving the front assembly back a bit or making the bike taller speed up weight transfer in braking. Then the rider can “brake like an animal.”

Without real knowledge, the above is just speculation.

CHAMPIONSHIP POINTS
JORGE MARTIN 306
MARC MARQUEZ 294
MARCO BEZZECCHI 264
PEDRO ACOSTA 234
FABIO DI GIANNANTONIO 230

The next MotoGP is Motegi, in Japan, Oct. 2-4.