MotoGP | Binder worried: “The Ducatis seem to be in another category”

Since the opening Grand Prix of the championship in Qatar, where he finished in the top three in both races, Brad Binder has failed to win any more trophies or medals. The South African has just finished three Grands Prix in which he consistently finished in the points, but has slipped to the bottom of the standings. In Germany he only finished eighth and ninth under the checkered flag (he was seventh on Sunday before losing two places on the final lap), without any chance of competing for the top spot.

Describing the weekend as “unexpected”, team manager Francesco Guidotti did not hide his disappointment with the overall result of the factory KTM team. “We thought we were in the leading group, but it wasn’t like that,” he lamented, while Jack Miller, riding the second bike, scored just three points.

While the Australian complained of major problems with the right side of his rear tyre, which hampered him from start to finish in the main race, Binder judged his feeling to be OK. The problem was that it was not enough to compete with the Ducatis, who once again asserted their superiority in this Grand Prix, finishing on Sunday monopolising the top 5 and only being troubled by the Aprilia of Miguel Oliveira on Saturday.

“It’s clear that we have to find something because those in front of us gave the impression of being in another category,” Binder admitted after the race, speaking to the official MotoGP website. “It’s been the story of the last few races. We have to try to find some rhythm to try to stay with them.”

Radical changes

KTM’s determination to make up for lost ground over the weeks has resulted in a major effort to fine-tune the bike. “We’ve gotten some useful data,” notes Binder, who saw the engineers take an interesting gamble in the warm-up.

“The bike was much better, everything was much easier to manage. Then we made another big step for the race, which helped us, with a bike that stopped a little better,” he described, while still emphasizing the gap to the competition: “We still lack the ability to pick up a lot of speed to overtake compared to the others. We don’t have great traction coming out of corners because we stop very hard on the entry.”

“We made some radical changes and we understood the direction to follow to try to maintain the performance, especially in the race,” he recalls. Can this compensate for the lack of development that seems to have been revealed? “We haven’t had any updates for a long time, that’s for sure,” confirms the South African, who is however more focused on the goal than on how to achieve it.

“More than anything, I think what we need above all is a clear understanding of where we are going. This weekend we played a lot with the balance and ended up doing things that we had never done before, which don’t make much sense but which improved the bike a bit. So it’s clear that we need to understand things a bit better.”

For Francesco Guidotti, the efforts made were clearly not enough. “At least today we gave the riders the best version of the bike we had this weekend,” the Italian stressed as he left Germany. “Maybe on Friday we were too conservative. Today it went quite well, but it wasn’t enough. We lost too much time, but we have some homework to do for the future.”

Among these tasks is also the track, as Pol Espargaró, the Spaniard to whom Binder has entrusted the task of preparing “a rocket” in view of the resumption at the beginning of August, is testing this week. Pedro Acosta, as frustrated as his future teammate, has instead decided to spend a few days at the factory to solve the problems that are plaguing him.