KTM riders have done their best to maintain a positive attitude while their RC16 bike has struggled so obviously in Qatar at the start of the MotoGP so far – but while that largely held up on Saturday, Brad Binder did admit seeing the KTM quartet that far down the order was “a horrible sight”.
All four KTMs were eliminated in Q1 for the 2021 season opener. In the first year after the Austrian manufacturer’s expansion to four bikes, 2019, that happened a few times (including in Qatar) – but it never happened in the RC16’s breakthrough season last year.
Binder qualified 19th, right ahead of the two Tech3 KTM riders, but would have been higher up the Q1 order if he his best lap didn’t get chalked off due to track limits. It would’ve put him just 0.006s behind the best KTM of Miguel Oliveira in 15th but he says it won’t have changed his outlook on the day.
“It’s challenging because I come in and I tell my guys, the bike is working well,” Binder said. “And it is. It’s working well, our bike is doing everything we want it do.
“It’s doing its good points well – but for this track it’s just taking too long to get the bike turned around.
“When you can’t brake hard it’s difficult for us to really point the bike in the direction we need to go. That’s been our kryptonite so far.
“We understand what we need, and we’re working to try and find something to help us in this direction, but yeah, so far we haven’t quite far what we need.
“It’s tough to see us so far down the order, for sure, it’s a horrible sight, definitely not what we expected – but I think we are going to get there. Fingers crossed we sort it out.”
When asked what result it would take for him to end the Qatar GP weekend satisfied, he said: “I was thinking about it – and I think if we could crack the top 10, it would be amazing.
“And that actually makes me sick to my stomach to even think that top 10 will be okay. But with the circumstances I think it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
Oliveira serves up the silver lining
Both of KTM’s works riders have repeatedly emphasised that the team will not be throwing in the towel for the Qatar GP and treating it like a weekend that they simply need to get through.
And while that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say, there was one session and one set of laps that made it a more convincing line than it would’ve otherwise been.
Prior to an admittedly disappointing qualifying, Oliveira had had a really good FP4. He finished it fourth in the classification, and even more crucially had put in a credible run of low 1m55s on soft fronts and soft rears that had both accrued over 10 laps of mileage.
“The pace makes us look very close to our rivals, but just the one-lap performance is so far away that we have a mixed feeling,” Oliveira said of the discrepancy.
“For sure it’s a good indicator, but in order to have an excellent race you really need to qualify better, it’s a fact. But we will do our best to make a good couple of laps and just then hang on to the fastest guys.”
Like Binder, Oliveira reiterated KTM’s weakness in “pure turning” at Losail, and like Binder he pointed to the tyre allocation as an issue – with both lamenting that the KTM couldn’t run its favoured hard front here.
Asked by The Race if he’d shared Binder’s feeling over having to set relatively lowly targets, Oliveira said: “That’s life, doesn’t make me ‘sick to my stomach’, it’s just a reality.
“We need to be optimistic all the time, we need to work on our weaknesses, we need to work with what we have.
“That’s what we’re going to do these two weekends, and hopefully we can come out of Qatar with a good feeling and looking back knowing we did everything we could these two grands prix [of the double-header].”
Petrucci “using this race like a test”
“Within the struggling KTM camp, Danilo Petrucci qualified 20th on his first race weekend with the bike, only beating Tech3 team-mate Iker Lecuona and Aprilia rookie Lorenzo Savadori.
He singled out the last sector of the circuit, featuring the main straight, as the biggest issue, and a place where he could also face a tough time in the race because of his lack of top speed.
“I wanted to be faster, we all know this is not the best track for us, but I wanted to be faster,” said Petrucci.
“For the race, I am quite scared about my speed on the end of the main straight, because it is a long braking area, where I am good [at braking], but I can be slower and someone can pass me on the straight. I have no really fast top speed.
“We are using this race like a test. We didn’t have any test in Valencia, in Jerez, in Sepang, we all just test here [in Qatar] and making progress during the race is quite difficult. Tomorrow I want to fight with the other KTMs and score some points.”
