KTM motorsport director Pit Beirer explains why they haven’t quite achieved the 2022 target they set themselves so far, and he reveals what’s next
Exactly 100 races have now passed since Austrian motorbike manufacturer KTM made its debut in the top motorbike class MotoGP at the 2016 season finale in Valencia. The balance: KTM has taken six victories in this period. Brad Binder triumphed twice. Miguel Oliveira has won four times, with two of those four victories coming with the Tech 3 team.
KTM are happy with the race pace of the RC16 in what is currently the sixth full year of the MotoGP project. What is worrying, however, is the pace in qualifying. “Yes, the one lap, that really gives us a lot of trouble,” confirmed KTM Motorsport Director Pit Beirer in the ‘ServusTV’ programme “Sport & Talk aus dem Hangar 7” about the qualifying weakness of the manufacturer based in Mattighofen in Upper Austria.
“Of course, race pace was always in the foreground for us,” said Beirer, to tie this in with the example of the recent British Grand Prix, where Oliveira finished less than three seconds behind winner Francesco Bagnaia (Ducati) in P6 at KTM’s anniversary event.
KTM at Silverstone: 20 seconds faster than 2021, but …
“The race was ten seconds faster than last year. The fastest KTM was 20 seconds faster. You finish 2.7 behind the winner, but nobody really cares if you finish sixth,” Beirer said.
“Of course we know that too. And we are facing reality,” assures the KTM Motorsport Director and concludes: “Our next key has to go through qualifying. We’ve been carrying the weakness for a while now.”
Beirer does not reproach the riders Binder and Oliveira in connection with the current qualifying weakness, quite the opposite: “Something has to come from us. We’ll work on that. And then we’ll do other races. “
The problem: If you don’t qualify directly for the second qualifying segment (Q2) in the combination of the first three free practices, and then to make matters worse you don’t progress in Q1 either, then you’re on the fifth row of the grid at best. “The guys belong on the first or second row of the grid. And then, of course, we could also fight for the podium positions, which we also started for,” said Beirer.
Beirer announces special qualifying bike
“We wanted to be regularly competing for podiums this year,” the Motorsport Director reminds us of KTM’s objectives for the 2022 season and points out: “If we simply look at the race pace now, then we are there. Then we can see very clearly that after two or three laps we can simply keep up with the leaders. But the race starts at the start and not after two or three laps. “
In fact, the key to a strong race result for Beirer lies even earlier, namely in good free practice sessions as the basis for a strong qualifying, which in turn is the basis for a strong race: “It actually starts on Friday, Saturday. You simply have to grow into the race weekend differently. And we have to turn that around really urgently now, because we want more.”
According to Beirer, the trend in the modern MotoGP scene is “quite clearly” towards “building real qualifying bikes that are simply tailored specifically for the one lap”. At KTM, however, they “simply haven’t had the time or the power to implement that so far”.
“But that will be our next big step”, Beirer announces for the future such a special qualifying motorbike from KTM.