It’s no secret that the second half of the 2021 MotoGP season has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for Red Bull KTM rider Miguel Oliveira.
A race winner at the Catalan Grand Prix in June, things have dropped off the side of a cliff since the series returned from its summer break – but it finally sounds like the Portuguese rider might have a solution to his problems.
It’s been a rollercoaster year so far for Oliveira. The opening races of the year came as something of a rocky start not just for him but for the whole four-man KTM squad, as the Austrian manufacturer got caught out by Michelin’s new tyre allocation. Unable to make the bike work with them, it took some extreme measures – a brand new chassis design.
With that new frame (delivered in record time thanks in part to KTM’s innovative 3D printing system), things got back to the winning ways of 2020. Arriving in Mugello, Oliveira was immediately on the podium in second place, before going one better a week later in Barcelona and rounding out the first half of the year with another runner-up place at the Sachsenring.
Since the summer break, though, it’s been back to a low point – even lower than their tough start to the season. Crashing out in practice for the Styrian Grand Prix at KTM and Red Bull’s home race, he didn’t break anything but was left with a bruised bone in his wrist – an injury that can often cause more extensive pain than a clean break.
However, Oliveria has been adamant that that hasn’t been the cause for his slump since leaving the second of two races at the Red Bull Ring. 16th at Silverstone and 20th last time out at Misano, only the Aragon Grand Prix managed to bring even any points at all as he came home in 14th.
What makes matters even harder is that while he’s been struggling, the same hasn’t applied to KTM’s other riders. Oliveira’s team-mate Brad Binder has continued his usual form of not being particularly competitive in qualifying but pulling out of the bag on Sunday, taking victory in Austria and being consistently in the top ten at the five races since the summer break.
Even Iker Lecuona, the relatively inexperienced satellite rider who was unceremoniously dumped from the Tech3 team earlier this year, has started to find his form of late on the RC16 – too little too late for his 2022 aspirations, but still enough to make Oliveira’s issues look even worse.
There’s been no specific answer for exactly what’s gone wrong at KTM for Oliveira, either. Unable to put his finger on any specific issue, he simply has been off the pace, KTM technical director Mike Leitner told The Race at last week’s Misano test that he and the team are at a loss to explain it too.
“After the summer break, he had this crash in Spielberg 1, and he was suffering there.” explained the Austrian. “The result in England [at Silverstone] is actually quite good with this injury.
“But yeah, since then to be fair it’s really not a 100% explanation of what’s really happening.
“Of course, he started this weekend [in Misano] with the same issues that Brad [Binder] had, then to have the chance to have a collision in the first corner means that everything is gone,” he added, referring to the opening lap contact between Oliveira and fellow KTM rider Iker Lecuona at the San Marino Grand Prix that took one of the wings off the front of his bike.
“But most of the time things like this happen when already you’re not having a good weekend. It’s not always related to bike performance and rider performance, these kinds of things. But we’ve not been on the point we want to be this weekend, it’s as simple as that.”
Oliveira himself has even gone as far as to raise the subject of conspiracy theories about the root cause of their problems given the strength of the other side of the garage.
“I don’t like to conspire or say things by half,” he said at the Misano race. “I fully believe that there are small factors that are not interconnected and that happen to us. Nothing that I really want to delve into or have a different understanding of.”
With that all in mind, that’s why it’s got to be such a huge relief to him to go into this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix with the belief that they might have fixed their issues at the Misano test.
Finding something wrong with the electronics setup of the RC16 – but refusing to be drawn on exactly what it was – he said after the two-day outing that he believes that it has turned a corner again.
“We found something in the electronics that was really wrong,” he explained. “We identified the issues and fixed them. I was able to get my bike back, something I didn’t have in the past few races. I think we have a good solution for the next races.
“We figured out what was wrong, but I’m not going to reveal it, these are technical details. We think we’ve solved it, that’s the purpose of the tests. If we didn’t find it, we’re amateurs.
“I left in a better mood than when I got here. I was more competitive, had good times, but we didn’t worry about doing time attacks. At the end of October, [when MotoGP returns to his home track of Portimao] we will have a chance to show that we have improved. My feeling on the bike is back to normal. We are satisfied.”
