Just one day after announcing his signing with Ducati for next year, Acosta was back competing on his KTM at the Assen circuit, setting the third-fastest time at the end of a scorching Friday. He’s two tenths of a second behind Bezzecchi’s Aprilia, but the Spaniard isn’t satisfied with his bike’s stability.
“We’re not ready to fight for the top 3; we can’t even fight for a top-5 finish,” the Murcian explains bluntly, having also had to deal with various issues on his KTM for the past few races.“It’s out of my hands,” has been the mantra of recent races, while irony takes over: “If you see me stopped, you’ll know something went wrong.”
Was that last lap at the limit?
“It wasn’t really at the limit, but we’re not ready to fight for the top 3 right now,” Acosta said. “That’s not our battle. We need to try to improve the bike, make it more stable, because it’ll be tough to do 26 laps like this. When we manage to improve this aspect, we’ll take a really big step forward. Overall, we were fast, considering that in these temperatures I posted the same time as last year. As temperatures drop, lap times will drop too.”
What’s the top priority to work on?
“Even though we finished third today, we can’t even compete for a top-five finish. It’s a matter of speed going into the corners; when you get to Turn 6 or Turn 14, the bike moves around a lot. It was already doing that last year, then with this year’s changes everything normalized, but today it was moving around too much—sometimes it was even hard to stay on the straight. I rode a lap behind Bagnaia because he was the only fast rider in front of me, and it seems like the bike moves a bit less when you’re behind someone.”
Last weekend in Brno there were some technical issues—have they been resolved? What were they?
"I don’t know if they’ve been resolved; if you see me stopping somewhere, you’ll know something’s gone wrong again. They’re trying to figure out what it is—it’s hard to say; it’ll take time."
It’s tough to deal with a weekend like this.
“As I said last weekend, if we have technical problems , it’s out of my hands—there’s nothing I can do about it. What could the solution be—to go slower? We might as well not get on the bike and not race at all. When you’re on the bike, you have to have confidence.”
It’ll be the first weekend without the lowering device.
"I think it will change a lot; we’ll reach the first corner in a lower gear than before, so the first day will be a complete unknown. The sprint will be quite an unknown, because you know how bikes of the same brand start, but you don’t know how the others will start—it’ll be interesting. I don’t think it’s any worse or better now, though I would have done away with it entirely. If it’s an inevitable change in four months, the riders just need to get used to it.”
We saw several crashes today—is it a grip issue?
"We’ve gone from crashes due to the cold to crashes due to the heat. For me, Assen isn’t where I’ve had the most trouble with grip since the start of the season, but it’s strange. Where Aldeguer and Alex crashed—Aldeguer had already crashed there last year, and the same goes for Marc on the Honda in that section—so it’s hard to say if it’s due to the track. But we also have to consider today’s track temperatures.”