Brad Binder: 227.5mph? I haven’t hit the limiter yet!

Speaking after a fifth place in Sunday’s main grand prix race, the South African smiled:

“Honestly, I haven't hit the limiter yet, so clearly there's still a couple of ks there for us!”

Aside from the top speed itself, Binder and KTM also turned heads by being 12.1km/h faster than his best speed during last year’s event (354.0km/h)

For comparison, the highest 2022 Mugello speed was a 363.6km/h by Ducati’s Enea Bastianini, who was also the quickest Desmosedici this time around with a similar 364.8km/h.

“It's weird. You don't feel 3-4-5 ks extra. The place where you really feel it is when you sit up to brake at the same place and you're going 10-15 ks faster [in a slipstream],” Binder said.

“That’s when you feel the difference and when you notice, ‘I came in pretty fast there’.

“But it's impressive. In the Sprint race I got some really good slipstreams and my bike was hauling! The guys have done an amazing job and it's quite cool to have that record again.”

Binder and team-mate Jack Miller then topped warm-up with 362.4 and 360.0km/h respectively, but the afternoon grand prix ‘only’ saw a peak of 358.8km/h from the RC16.

“We had a headwind on the main straight. I think that's where the speed goes,” Binder explained.

Binder in a spin on Sunday

Binder, eleventh in the Sprint after serving a Long Lap, switched from the soft to medium rear tyre for the full-length race. With hindsight, and the knowledge that team-mate Miller (seventh) had no real endurance issues with the soft, it was perhaps a mistake.

“About 10 laps in and I started to think maybe I have a shot of trying to catch the guys in front of me and then lap after lap, I was just going a little bit slower, little bit slower, a little bit slower… And it was all down to just rear grip,” Binder said.

“I was spinning so much and by the time I got to 5 laps to go, I had absolutely zero tyre left on the right hand side and the thing was spinning up straight. So it was really tricky to get the bike home.

“We used the medium tyre thinking it would last a bit longer, even though we didn't really have to if we looked at the wear from yesterday. But I think with less grip I had maybe a little bit more spin and if you spin a lot you also destroy the tyre. So I think maybe that's what happened today, but I actually don't know.

“Mugello was a little bit more of a challenge than I expected for us, but it is what it is.

“Everyone's here to win but at the end of the day, when things aren't going well, a fifth is not bad. But when things have been going a hell of a lot better [for us this season], fifth don't feel so great.

“So it's funny how [expectations] evolve, but that's sport, when you feel like you have more and you can deliver more of course, you always get that sense of a bit of disappointment.”

Binder has now dropped behind Jorge Martin for fourth place in the world championship standings heading into this weekend’s German Grand Prix.