KTM brings upgrade “we asked for last year” to Malaysian MotoGP

A new KTM ride height device has been brought to the 2024 Malaysian MotoGP, over one year after it was requested.

Jack Miller was the only KTM rider to make it through to Q2 from Practice on Friday afternoon, and revealed afterwards that KTM has brought an updated rear ride height device to Sepang this weekend based on feedback from the 2023 Australian Grand Prix.

“We’ve had an update in the clicks and the ride height device this weekend, something we kind of asked for in Phillip Island last year,” Miller said.

“So, we got an update with two races to go, just to be able to play with the pace a little bit, try to slow the ride height device down and that’s helped us to not overload the tyre on the exit, and to be honest it feels really good coming out onto both the straights — we’re not getting a massive hit that’s turning into either pumping or spin, so that’s been definitely a positive.”

In general, Miller was happy with his Friday — having made it directly into Q2 from Practice, finishing Friday afternoon in ninth place — but said that the tyre allocation was a limitation this weekend.

“The bike’s working relatively well, felt good from the get-go this morning,” Miller said.

“It’s a difficult one because we’ve kind of only got one tyre that works, the other option — the hard [compound] on the rear and the two harder [compound] fronts — are a little out the window, let’s say.”

The harder tyres’ relative irrelevance meant that Friday morning was spent by most riders just managing their allocation, and using the tyres they didn’t want to keep for later in the weekend.

“This morning was just kind of wobbling around on the harder options just for a matter of numbers of tyres,” Miller said.

“But this afternoon was good, threw the softs in — when we say ‘soft’, it’s actually the ‘hard’ that we have at most other tracks in terms of the front — and it was working well, pretty happy with the pace, tyres are not dropping away too bad.

“Obviously, really happy to go straight through to Q2, we’ve been so close the last couple of weeks but definitely a little bit of weight off the shoulders for tomorrow that’s for certain.”

Miller said that the reason for the harder casing rear tyre was down to “blisters” which emerged during the February test, and confirmed that the harder option tyres are unlikely to be used in either the Sprint or the Grand Prix this weekend.

“The bike doesn’t want to do all that much with it and there’s a lot of floating,” Miller said of the hard-compound rear tyre, which also uses a harder construction than the medium-compound tyre.

“The medium [compound] front maybe, but the hard [compound front tyre] is a ‘Q’ (referring to the letters Michelin code their tyres with, a code which is only made available to the teams) which is not ideal.

“But the rear option, I mean it wasn’t terrible but especially on the right-hand side — it’s got the harder rubber all the way across, so it’s really difficult, honestly, to get the thing to work.”

Binder: Practice was “chaos”

Brad Binder’s day was made more complicated by a crash in the afternoon, and by reverting to older specifications of the RC16 — noticeably regarding the aerodynamics, as Binder used an older, simpler version of KTM’s rear wing at times in both FP1 and Practice — to understand if the development direction they’d moved in had been the right one.

“This morning was not too bad, we had to use these other tyres that we knew weren’t the preferred option just to save quantity there,” he said.

“This afternoon was a bit of chaos for me. We tried some different configurations of different balances, and a lot of stuff to try and get some more understanding for the future, but I ended up crashing on the second or third flying lap: I locked the front up straight and it just stayed tucked.

“So I ended up bailing there. Then came in, swapped again, changed things a little bit, went out again, came back, added some other wings, went out again — just a little bit of chaos to be honest.

“The good thing is we got some more understanding, it wasn’t the day we wanted by any means, I’m sure tomorrow will be good as soon as we go back to what we know.”

Binder at least said he had been reassured by his specification “back-check”.

“The thing is things were so different to what we normally use, and it was just a back-check to understand why we’ve gone in this direction,” he said.

“But clearly we have to, because it was clear that what worked previously doesn’t anymore. We’ve seen this now, and we can move on and have a much more steady day tomorrow.”