Brad Binder says he didn’t anticipate how much of a “challenge” his first weekend racing at the Sachsenring in the premier class would be.
The KTM rider struggled for form across practice for the German Grand Prix as he failed to breach the top 15 on the timesheets across Friday and early on Saturday, though a small step made in FP4 saw him manage 11th in that particular test before qualifying 13th-missing out on a pole shootout passage by just 0.036s.
Encouraging pace on used tyres gave the South African hope that he could make forward progress in the race, and he duly delivered as he made a lightning-quick to run eighth in the early stages before carving his way through to his eventual finishing position of fourth by the end, though he ran out of time to challenge Fabio Quartararo for the final spot on the rostrum.
Binder says he is “really happy” to bag fourth after “nothing really clicked” at the start of the weekend, the one-time premier class race winner satisfied that he managed to nurse his tyres well throughout the 30-lap encounter after “expecting them not to” last.
“This weekend was a challenge, I didn’t expect it to be so difficult to be honest,” said Binder.
“FP1 I was stone last and nothing really clicked at the beginning, I really struggled to figure out how to ride the MotoGP bike really well here and it took me a few laps to figure things out and the first three-free practices felt like I hadn’t found any pace and wasn’t riding well at all.
“Then in FP4 I made a little step which was good, so in general I’m really glad we were able to eventually find a bit of pace and we worked really well on old tyres in warm-up to try and be ready for the race.
“I’m really happy to finish fourth because when we look at where we started the weekend compared to where we finished it was really great.
“The start was the important thing, I knew that if I got a good start it could completely change my race because it’s so difficult to pass here.
“I ended up getting a great start and was like seventh or eighth on the first lap, and the more and more I tried to attack before the race I was really wearing out my rear tyre so I really focussed on trying to preserve it.
“It was really hard to have the confidence to push because I really didn’t want a race like Barcelona where I was a passenger the last five laps because my tyres were destroyed, so I’m really happy with today because I managed to make the tyres last all race when we expected them not to, so hopefully we can do well in Assen also.”
Binder’s strong run to the top five saw him move ahead of Aprilia’s Aleix Espargaro to eighth in the overall riders standings behind team-mate and current form man Miguel Oliveira, the Portuguese pilot having not finished lower than second-including an emphatic victory in Barcelona-across the past three contests.
