MotoGP | Acosta jokes about three crashes: “The ground hurt more than me”

“The ground hurt more than me,” said Pedro Acosta with his usual cheeky attitude when he met the media at the Red Bull Ring, at the end of the first day of the Austrian Grand Prix, in which he found himself outside of Q2 by just 27 thousandths.

With the three crashes accumulated today, the Spanish rider has now totalled 15, equalling Marc Marquez at the top of this not very flattering seasonal ranking.

“Surprisingly for the three crashes I had, I’m doing quite well, especially after the second one,” he said, referring to the high-speed crash at Turn 4.

Despite all these setbacks, the Spaniard was just a hair’s breadth away from qualifying directly for Q2. “With all the time we lost and all the problems we had with the rear of the bike, we’re not in such a bad position. It was a good day, by all accounts,” he admitted.

From the outside, Acosta gave the impression of arriving at this important home race for KTM with a bit of performance anxiety, but he denied this.

“No. The first crash was because I ended up behind Pol Espargaró and my tyre got cold. Then, as I was going back to the pits, I saw on the bike’s screen that there were three and a half minutes left in the session, so I went back out on track, intending to do two laps. That was the idea.”

“I rode, nothing happened, I was calm in the area of ​​the first crash in case the tire was cold, but the tire was so cold in the center that I didn’t expect it.” And then came the second crash, the one that destroyed the bike and forced the red flag: “At least the bike went ahead of me. I, surprisingly, didn’t get a scratch, so I was lucky as far as I can tell.”

Someone pointed out that maybe in that situation it would have been better to return to the pits instead of continuing with the fairing half detached. But Pedro reiterated that that was not the problem: “It has nothing to do with it, the fall did not happen because the bike had a slightly broken fairing”.

However, on television it was seen that the bike was quite damaged. “The bike was not that broken, from the images it could have looked that way, but I didn’t fall because I was missing a piece of the wing,” he said.

Despite all this, Acosta was running tenth at the end of the afternoon session, but a final lap from his teammate Brad Binder knocked him out of Q2 by just 27 thousandths of a second.

“We were looking at the gap to Binder at the end of the practice and it was nothing. To tell you it was because of the three crashes and not the riding. They took away a lot of time from me to be on the track, I couldn’t make any progress. Knowing what Brad did, which is not magic, it’s two trifles in the third sector, I think we can get through to Q2 tomorrow,” he predicted.

Regarding the crashes, now 15 like those of Marc Marquez, he concluded: “It’s what I’ve already said: I prefer to eat everything I need and everything I do wrong this year, rather than start next season making mistakes due to lack of experience”.