On most days of MotoGP track action, a rider breaking a winglet against the barrier after saving a fast crash would be the biggest scare of that rider's day.
For Pedro Acosta, it was barely a footnote on his first day riding a KTM RC16 at the manufacturer's home track in Austria - as he followed up that save and barrier impact with three separate crashes.
Two of them came in quick succession in the closing minutes of the first practice session, and the latter of those crashes was a big one.
Acosta explained afterwards that the sequence of events was triggered by him slowing down to duck in behind KTM tester Pol Espargaro - putting a newer version of the RC16 through its paces this weekend - and allowing the front tyre to cool off too much.
This quickly caught him out in a relatively low-speed crash through the second part of the Turn 2 chicane, although it did also leave his bike with visible damage.
Finding the limit, the hard way! 😱@37_pedroacosta crashes out at T2 but he's already on his way back 👍#AustrianGP 🇦🇹 pic.twitter.com/rNuk6bT7we
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) August 16, 2024
The marshals helped Acosta dig the bike out of the gravel and, with the chequered flag looming on the horizon, he decided to complete the session - but crashed the next lap at the first touch of the brakes into Turn 4.
"Let's start with the first crash," he told the media afterwards. "[The front tyre] was a little bit fresh in the left side - we don't have many [left-sided] corners.
"[After picking the bike up] I saw three minutes [to go] on the dash and I said 'OK, we go - I do two laps, [do] the practice starts in the straight, and I go to the box'.
"I don't see anything dangerous [in that]. I did the chicane again slow but I wasn't expecting, to be honest, that the centre of the [front] tyre becomes cold like it was.
"It was not that I crashed because the fairing was broken. Not that the brakes became blocked. At the moment that I touched the brakes, it [the front] was really cold - 30 or 35 degrees colder than how we ride.
"At the moment I touched the brakes I locked the front."
A scary one for @37_pedroacosta at T4! 😱😱😱
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) August 16, 2024
The session has been red-flagged after the rookie's second crash 🔴#AustrianGP 🇦🇹 pic.twitter.com/k5vCP60fD9
Acosta fell off immediately once applying the brake, even before the downhill phase of Turn 4 - which meant he was quite far from his RC16 when it hit the inside barrier and spewed debris all over the track.
The situation, Acosta said, was "quite abnormal" - the warning light on his dash that would've indicated a too-low tyre temperature was not on, but this was because the tyre wasn't cool where the sensors were measuring it.
"The inside of the tyre was hot. But the surface was cold. More on the left than on the right.
"But what I was not expecting was that in the centre [rather than the edge] it was going to be cold like that.
"Because in the end when you are riding in the straight, you are already warming the centre [by default]."
He objected to the suggestion there had been anything dangerous in the way he carried on with the session after his first crash.
"'Danger' - everything in life is danger. Maybe you cross the street one day and a bus [hits you]," he joked.
"Maybe I was missing experience to know that I wasn't able to re-warm the front tyre.
"But with this new [harder] hard that they bring here - because the medium [this weekend] is the hard from last season - even [Marc] Marquez or Aleix [Espargaro], maybe they have the experience to go to the box [right away], but maybe they could make the same mistake."
Acosta's third crash of the day was also on the hard tyre, in second practice, as he lost the bike on an outlap at the right-hander Turn 9 and was instantly up on his feet, running back to the KTM garage to mount the other RC16.
Bouncing back from a crash like 🏃♂️
— MotoGP™🏁 (@MotoGP) August 16, 2024
This is definitely worth some style points, @37_pedroacosta 😎#AustrianGP 🇦🇹 pic.twitter.com/bi9yfqkOB2
He ultimately came up just a quarter of a tenth of a second short of a Q2 spot thanks to a last-second improvement by his future works KTM team-mate Brad Binder - who did beat him by over three tenths in the end.
Acosta said "really small things" were making the difference between him and Binder, feeling that he was "missing maybe the set-up" due to the track time lost to the crashes and fancied his chances of salvaging the weekend on Saturday and Sunday.
