Pedro Acosta on “now or never” Thai MotoGP battle: “Luckily we didn’t make a mess”
“It was like now or never”
Pedro Acosta says his podium battle with KTM stablemate Jack Miller in the MotoGP Thailand Grand Prix felt like “now or never” and was pleased “we didn’t make a mess”.
The Tech3 rookie crashed out of Saturday’s sprint race while running inside the top five and endured a scrappy start to the wet 26-lap grand prix on Sunday.
But as the race wore on, Acosta charged through to the podium, taking third from factory KTM rider Miller on the penultimate lap after a thrilling battle that raged from Turn 3 to Turn 7.
It marked Acosta’s first podium and race finish since the Indonesian GP.
“For sure, it was a super nice battle,” he said of his fight with Miller.
“Also I knew it was a podium battle and it was like now or never.
“For sure it’s always super nice to battle with Jack because he is quite aggressive, but inside the limits. I really enjoyed it.
“And luckily we didn’t make a mess, because if not, inside the garage it was going to be a long afternoon.
“Anyway, we need to be happy and see how we can improve the first part of the races.”
Acosta said after his Saturday crash that he needed to rethink his approach to race to stop throwing away good results when nothing more is on offer.
That is something he realised after several errors in the early part of the grand prix and says this result has to be used to “maintain in the head that we need to finish races”.
“We need to be happy because after many races we finished one,” he added.
“So this is good. We need to continue in this way, thinking when it’s not our day we cannot make it our day.
“And we need to be a little bit more calm to to take that experience. But today was a good day.
“Maybe I was struggling to get into the rhythm compared to warm-up, and also I went wide in the first part of the race in Turn 3 and then also in Turn 1.
“So, I said ‘Ok, maybe it’s necessary to cool down a bit and continue the pace’.
“It’s true at the end of the race, I don’t know what happened, it was like boom and I started to go super-fast. We need to be happy and maintain in the head that we need to finish races.”
Acosta has very little experience of wet conditions on MotoGP machinery, while he often struggled for form when it rained in the other grand prix classes.
Asked to explain why he was so competitive in Thailand, Acosta replied: “Well, at the end I don’t really know why in Moto2 I was not really ever competitive.
“It was only the race of Australia [last year] where I was coming from the back of the grid that I was quite fast.
“I was never really fast because I remember here in 22 I started fifth and in the second corner I was, like, 20th.
“I don’t know. In Moto2 with the Dunlop tyres it was quite tricky also because it felt like a rock.
“It was much better since we changed to Michelin and if you think about everyone who is jumping on a KTM in these difficult conditions [they] were quite fast.
“Remember [Miguel] Oliveira in 2022 [in Thailand], Brad [Binder] in the water in Spielberg, and how fast Pol [Espargaro] was even in the beginning of the project.”
