Thirty-eight points is a decent enough haul for three MotoGP races, but it’s not one that screams title-contending form – it is, after all, one point fewer than what is generated by a trio of fourth-place finishes.
Yet in a season where all the major pre-season favourites have all floundered to various degrees and the three races’ podiums have been filled by different riders, 38 points is currently good enough for second place for Brad Binder – and it’s quite easy to argue that he should probably be leading the championship.
Binder’s 2021 yielded a fairly impressive 151 points and sixth place in the standings, but it was a position bellied by his super-low retirement rate and a freaky – if self-evidently super-brave – win on slicks in the wet at the Red Bull Ring. He was never a factor in the title race, which was not an indictment on the South African then-sophomore because his KTM RC16 was not the bike to have for most of the season.
At the same time, it was also clear that there was something of an Achilles’ heel to sort out – subpar practice and qualifying form, relative not just to the field but to the other KTM riders, which almost always left him with a lot of work to do on Sunday.
Three weekends into the 2022 season, those qualifying struggles seem an increasingly distant memory. Binder has qualified seventh, fourth (career-best) and 12th in his three attempts – and that 12th in Argentina, which would’ve been par for the course last year, is now the outlier.
It happened because Binder accidentally upshifted while braking for a corner on his decisive final lap in Q2. Had that error not crept in – had he simply matched his previous efforts in the relevant sector – the lap would’ve been good enough for sixth or seventh. And chances are good he would’ve been higher on the grid still given the rest of that lap was a significant improvement.
This made the race more complicated than it needed to be. “I made a big mistake in qualifying, which was clear, which I think really hurt me today because it wasn’t easy to try and get through the field,” Binder said after last Sunday’s race.
“For some reason today I really struggled to pass a lot of the riders. But to have ended up coming across the line in sixth place was a good points haul – not where I want to be by any means, I would’ve loved to be fighting for the podium today and I really thought I was going to be capable of it, but it wasn’t to be.”
So, Termas almost certainly represented some points left on the table. The same – but on that occasion through no fault of Binder’s – can be said for Mandalika, where a ride height device stuck “completely down” for the whole race meant he couldn’t fight for more than an eighth place.
There were clear flashes of frontrunning potential from Binder in both of those weekends. And as for the only weekend that went according to plan, the Qatar opener, at a track the KTM had previously been historically awful at – well, there Binder scored a second place.
“I think from what I see or what I expect, I think we’ll be better in Europe,” he said after Argentina, referencing the run of 12 consecutive Europe-based grands prix that will kick off in late April at Portimao.
“Because we get to tracks with a higher grip level and the bike works much, much better when we have traction – rather than when it’s slippy – at the moment. It seems that when the track conditions are a bit difficult it’s not so easy for us because we rely a lot on rear traction.”
Those are ominous words, to go with ominous pace displayed so far, from a rider who had already long become something of an absolute machine on Sundays and seems to have now lifted his Saturday form as well.
But has this spell been enough to hint to Binder that he can dream, at least a tiny bit, of aiming for the very top of the standings this season?
“I mean, you dream of winning and you dream of being there [at the top] since before you even arrive in MotoGP, so I think the dream never goes away.
“The reality is, I think we’ve had a couple more difficult weekends than what we should have, or what I think we could have. And we’re still doing quite good.
“The big thing for me at the moment is I just really want to stay focused, to take racing one weekend at a time. And if we manage that, I’m confident that at the end of the year we can be in a strong pace and at least be fighting amongst the top.”
So, not a ‘yes’ but not exactly a ‘no’. And, looking at his three race weekends so far, a ‘no’ would’ve been quite hard to believe anyway.
