Pedro Acosta revealed “KTM is improving in every race” after taking his second podium of the season at the Hungarian MotoGP round.
The factory KTM rider finished second in the first race at the new Balaton circuit to make it two podiums from the last three rounds, signposting an apparent improvement from the RC16.
Acosta was one of the few riders capable of running a similar pace to eventual race winner Marc Marquez throughout the weekend, but scuppered his potential after crashing in qualifying.
The Spanish rider admitted “a disaster” Saturday helped him “cool down a bit” to take second place, though the Spaniard still rued a missed opportunity to challenge Marquez.
“It’s a bit of everything,” Acosta said in the post-race press conference.
“Normally, the KTM, at tracks which are not fast, is a good bike. Normally I am quite good in these braking points.”
“Everything was feeling quite easy on Friday, and then Saturday was completely a disaster.
“For this, I needed to cool down a bit and try to save a normal result because I think in this track qualifying that far from the first row was more a handicap than [in other tracks].
“We have to be happy because, after the mechanics had to bring two new bikes from the crashes that I had on Friday and Saturday.
“I also was struggling in the Sprint with these passes with Martin. For this, to make good passes with Franco [Morbidelli] and also to Marco [Bezzecchi] was quite okay.
“It’s true that I think we managed in a good way. The race was missing a bit of experience on Saturday to avoid making the mess that I created.
“But I think we have to be happy about our weekend and how KTM is improving every race.”
Pedro Acosta ‘thankful’ to avoid Enea Bastianini in Hungarian Turn 10 incident
Although he ultimately earned a podium in the main race, Acosta was involved in two scary near-misses throughout the debut weekend of the Balaton Park circuit.
The first was following a crash on Saturday, which saw his bike almost strike a camera operator at Turn 8 in a lucky escape for the championship.
However, the second came during the first lap of Sunday’s race, where Enea Bastianini was fortunate to avoid injury after sliding across the live track.
Bastianini crashed at the chicane between Turn 10 and 11, but careered back onto the circuit and into the path of oncoming riders, including Acosta and Honda rider Luca Marini.
Fortunately, the pair managed to avoid collecting Bastianini, which Acosta credits to the different lines taken by him and the Honda rider on the exit of Turn 12.
“Thankfully, somehow I went quite wide and quite slow out of turn 10 and turn 11 and they take some metres from me, and I see how Enea [Bastianini] crashed when I was turning in turn 12,” he said about the Lap 1 incident.
“Somehow I saw how fast the bike closed. For this, Marini, who was quite close [to Bastianini], went to the outside, I went to the inside.
“Thankfully I can pass quite clean, because it was not easy seeing all the gravel around and also Enea in the middle.
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