Over the course of the past two seasons in MotoGP, Austrian manufacturer KTM’s performance has very much been defined as a series of peaks and troughs.
It’s been able to secure victories on occasion with both Brad Binder and Miguel Oliveira but left severely lacking on occasion – most notably in the opening stages of last year when KTM’s RC16 machine proved completely unable to work with the 2021 specification of Michelin tyres.
And that means that Binder’s exceptional performance in the opening race of 2022 is, so far, hard to define.
Charging through the field to just narrowly miss out on a win at the Lusail International Circuit, a track where KTM’s previous-best performance was a distant eighth, it was arguably the South African double race winner’s best ride to date.
But does it hint at the start of an upward trajectory or just another spike in performance?
According to Binder post-race, it might well be the former, thanks to the way that he has finally gelled with this year’s updated bike. It’s no secret that the team hasn’t had an easy start to the year in pre-season testing, with the opening two days at Malaysia’s Sepang circuit almost a write-off before KTM got its act together at the second outing at Mandalika.
“It’s true that in Sepang I didn’t leave there happy at all,” Binder admitted after his second place in Qatar. “I wasn’t quite sure what was going on there at all. But once the guys had time to really study the data with our new package, they understood exactly what was needed to fix our issues.
“As soon as we got to Mandalika, they solved our problems right away. Everything is still quite new for us and there’s still a way to go. We still need to do some more testing to get the full benefit of our package, but in general, I can’t thank KTM enough. This is a track that is super difficult for us and it’s unbelievable to think that we’re on the podium.”
So what is so different that Binder was suddenly able to be competitive not just in the race but also in qualifying, where he somewhat shed his reputation as a Sunday specialist by starting from the head of the third row?
Well, in a nutshell, it now does one of the fundamentally important things it wasn’t previously – it goes around corners.
“The bike turns now,” Binder explained. “Normally, especially last year, unless we were braking really hard, we were struggling to get the front to start coming around on lean angle.
“Now I can kind of release the brake and just roll with a lot more corner speed. It makes such a huge difference because it gives you a lot more confidence. You don’t have to be completely on the limit with the brakes every corner.”
KTM finally seems to have scrapped its previous approach of fixing problems by simply throwing new parts at the machine and is instead concentrating a little more on the package it has – and the end result is something that seems to work more consistently, and which might even give Binder the pace he needs to finally live up to KTM’s expectations of him as a title threat.
“There are some things that are the same and a lot that are different,” he said.
“So it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but if we take our base setting, what we used to run compared to what we’re using now, it’s a completely different motorbike. It’s clear that it’s working better and that I’m more comfortable with it.
It gives us an opportunity, especially when I don’t have grip, if things aren’t perfect, because we don’t have to ride so on the limit.
“I think that our bike is really solid at the moment. Last year there were times when I felt like I could have done much better than I did, but to be honest today my bike was working incredibly well.
“I think there’s still more that we can get out of this package, but the general feeling on the bike is that I’ve never done a race distance where I’ve felt so comfortable from beginning to end. We’re just going to have to wait and see further down the line, but hopefully, we can keep improving.”
Of course, things didn’t quite end as well on the other side of the garage for team-mate Oliveira. He crashed out of the race while battling for a top-10 position, and it was clear that he never really had the same pace as his team-mate – but he too nonetheless heads home from Qatar optimistic about what the future holds.
“It was a short race, only 10 laps, but I felt good with the bike and everything was working fine until the crash. The crash itself was nothing really major, not a mistake – I just went in too hot, and it was hard to stop the bike. But it’s super clear for us the way to take – we need better qualifying. We need better one-lap pace.
“At the end of the day, I prefer not to finish the race but to have good pace and be competitive to just finishing 12th or whatever. Of course, I would have taken a result inside the top 10, but in the end, Brad showed what the bike is capable of today and that we are here for good results and that the others have to count with us.
“In Mandalika we’ll try and turn things around to our side also, and we know what we have to do and what I have to do. That’s the most important thing, and we’ll have to act quickly to challenge for better results – results that I know I am capable of and that also the bike is capable of.”
That’s crucially important for him, too, given Binder’s recent run of form and the fact that he’s signed up on a long-term KTM contract that will keep him in place until at least 2024 while Oliveira’s own deal is set to expire at the end of the current season.
It’s no secret that KTM has a deep pool of talent ready to make the step up to factory machinery, with reigning world champions in both Moto2 and Moto3 both on its books in the form of Remy Gardner and Pedro Acosta, as well as 2021 rookie Moto2 runner-up Raul Fernandez.
However, it won’t be an easy task to shift either Acosta or Fernandez to the factory bike if this is just a temporary peak in form for KTM given the attention that both have been shown by other factories.
Oliveira could be placed in the unenviable position of potentially helping to recruit his own replacement, as the better he does on the KTM, the more likely it is that the youngsters will be convinced to stick with KTM and replace him in the factory team.
