Analysis: Pedro Acosta’s next move…
The Red Bull KTM star lacks a MotoGP win from his 10 podium results in just two years but his undoubted potential means his decision-making in the coming weeks could affect MotoGP greatly.
By Adam Wheeler. Photos by KTM.
We’ve had two Aprilia teams, two Yamaha teams and three Ducati teams declaring that 2026 is a go up until this week but KTM’s 1 minute unveiling video, followed by several hours of post-presentation online media sessions with all four riders – Pedro Acosta, Enea Bastianini, Brad Binder and Maverick Viñales – as well as three main management figures was the definition of new season ‘box-ticking’ for this last twilight rays of MotoGP as we know it.
Acosta’s fate, and the plans of the Austrians (and their mainly-British-owned French associate team Tech3) for what should be their third five-year contract chapter for MotoGP were the more prominent themes from the activation. Sure, Binder - looking even more trim for his seventh MotoGP term, all on the RC16, and twelfth as a Red Bull KTM athlete – was being asked about his new Crew Chief Phil Marron and Viñales was probed repeatedly on his unusual union with Jorge Lorenzo but it was the words and demeanour of both Pedro and KTM Motorsports Director Pit Beirer that gathered the most attention.
With gossip already swirling about Fabio Quartararo jumping from one Japanese camp to another and Jorge Martin continuing his tour of MotoGP motorcycles by allegedly considering a Japanese bike for the first time (and for the first time in any class since 2018), Acosta’s re-up with KTM or leap into new waters has increased in urgency, especially with Marc Marquez pausing on his commitment to MotoGP in the wake of his shoulder injury but unlikely to deviate from factory Ducati status.
Acosta showed expert ability in deflecting enquiries about his future while holding a video call with the press. “I think today is not the day to talk about that, I mean, we are in the KTM presentation…” he said when asked about his time frame for 2027 and beyond.
DARK ORANGE
The general feeling is that Acosta sees his path away from the factory that brought him to prominence since he first entered the Red Bull Rookies series in 2019 (he finished runner-up in his first two races). The impression comes from the cloud surrounding Pedro in the early phases of the 2025 season where speculation was rife that he would escape his KTM contract prematurely and steer a Ducati for 2026. That breakaway did not happen, but it stemmed from the-then 20-year-old’s grump with the competitiveness of the RC16 and the wavering period of uncertainty for KTM; not only for their continuance in MotoGP but their existence as a brand and position as Europe’s largest motorcycle manufacturer.
Acosta crashed in the first Grand Prix in Thailand. Then finished 8th, 7th and then 8th in Qatar; where he was upstaged as the company’s leading rider by new recruit Viñales (and at the Lusail Circuit where Acosta had debuted with the fastest lap and even performed an audacious overtaking move on Marquez twelve months previously). During that spell he struggled with grip and vibration and swapped between bikes with the mass damper and without, until he eventually claimed to be using his GASGAS settings from 2024. “I mean, it’s already a topic every time that I entered into the box,” he said of the vibration issue that affected his Americas Grand Prix and round three DNF. “For this we need to find a solution because we already one year like this…”
“We have to be better. Need to be closer,” he had urged on Thursday at Austin. Acosta then stirred the pot by gifting his manager, Albert Valera, a signed helmet that featured the phrase ‘turning point’. “When you have a bad situation, you need to make a turning point, let’s say. You know what I mean?” he said, somewhat vaguely, at the following Grand Prix in Qatar. “It’s about everything: the bike, learning how to push, how the brand is understanding what is going on. Everybody has to go in the same direction. It is not only the rider pushing for one and the factory pushing for another, let’s say. In the end I understand that every manufacturer wants something new but sometimes it is clever to go back and understand what is going on.”
Further comments, and a general air of being fed-up, only increased the sensation that Acosta’s impatience for competitiveness was darkening his tenure in orange. “It’s frustration,” he said in Jerez. “It’s not easy to ride like this, to compete like this or achieve a target like this. I hope we can make the flip.”
The story of 2025 showed that Acosta, Crew Chief Paul Trevathan and KTM managed to zero-in for set-up and become a regular rostrum threat. The second half of the campaign delivered 5 podiums and 7 Sprint medals. But Pedro remains one of only five riders on the current grid to have not sampled MotoGP success (the others are Luca Marini and Ai Ogura as well as the two rookies for 2026). Watching countryman and former rival Fermin Aldeguer coast to victory in Indonesia by almost seven seconds must have been nibbled at his anxiety.
From the cool and pressure-less climes of 2026 pre-season, Acosta was reflective. “At the beginning of last year, maybe my expectation was too high, and it was not easy to accept the bad moments,” he admitted to us. “Thailand, Argentina, Austin, even Jerez was not easy at all….”
“Maybe the key this year will be to be much more calm, maybe also try to be much more cold, let’s say, in the way that doesn’t make things [crazy] just for my feelings,” he added.
TIPPING POINTS
Pit Beirer later said that KTM were “busy talking to our current four riders to keep them on board”, and Acosta seemed to indicate that the door was not closed on another KTM agreement. The company and the MotoGP team seem to be in far more settled phase compared to the beginning of 2025; even if all the brands are juggling various pistons, for 2026 formidability and 2027 optimisation with the 850s, Pirellis, less aero and ride-height-free grand prix. Acosta might have the race-winning package he craves after all and the first rounds will be revealing.
“At the end of last year, we go to Malaysia [pre-season test] with some updates of my 2024 bike, but [there] was not really anything new, until mid-season,” Acosta revealed this week. “And this year I see a big step, you know? And this makes you super-confident. Also, it’s true that the general situation of the factory is not the same than one year ago. You can feel it in the faces of the people, everyone is more calm and more confident. This makes you breathe.”
In Trevathan and his team (with several hand-picked members) top-billing at KTM and Red Bull favour, Acosta has almost all of the ingredients an elite-level athlete requires. The subject of the motorcycle remains loose in the equation. This means KTM could have a few weeks, laps and a couple of races to secure their generational talent. “I have to say that I’m impressed,” Pedro also claimed in the wake of his visit to the factory for the official photoshoot and the traditional start-of-year bike-build for the race team “but we never know how much the other brands was working, knowing that in one year a new regulation will come.”
Acosta’s youth and his family’s roots (we cannot underestimate the allure of a paycheck from another brand that doubles the salary) as well as his competitive thirst do not cloud his intelligent awareness that timing and strategy are critical to career progress. “It’s quite difficult to know who will be the manufacturer to beat,” he understated. “But it’s true that I’m quite optimistic, after seeing how much KTM was working.”
He is linked to Ducati, and that means a sensible bet in joining the current powerhouse of the series and a manufacturer with sharp experience of Pirelli tyres in WorldSBK. But it means ditching Red Bull and sliding into the pitbox next to Marquez; who has successfully vanquished every single teammate in his MotoGP stint, ending the careers of two. And, as a result of 2025, edging a Ducati legend like Pecco Bagnaia out of the factory team frame. Yes, Acosta is billed as Marquez’s successor, but good luck as his main rival for the next 24 months while also developing a fledgling technical platform.
KTM POISED TO RETURN
Beirer did not carry the air of a man resigned to losing the rider that finished P4 in the world in 2025. The German has plenty of meetings in the agenda for the coming weeks as KTM need to agree terms with Dorna to continue in MotoGP (as do the other brands and satellite teams), rubber stamp the plan for the 850’s development and investment and also bank Gunther Steiner’s Tech3 squad association for the same term. Somewhere at the top of that pile has to come Acosta but also the other three racers… and all in-and-around a hectic phase of tests in Malaysia and Thailand, a championship launch in Kuala Lumpur and the first Grand Prix in the final week of February. The activities in Sepang will be crucial for all 11 teams in the series…but extra significant to how KTM can balance their assets.
“He made no secret that he expects still another step on the bike [before] we’re in the situation to give him a contract for the future,” Pit told us. “We made a very clear plan how we’re going to phase the beginning of the season and how we’re going to phase the Sepang test. I’m pretty sure that also the Sepang test will be important to show not just Pedro but all our riders what we’ve delivered over the winter.”
“Now it’s also time to make the framework on the contract side,” Beirer continued. “I feel in the next four weeks everybody really needs to be sure that ‘this is my partner who produces material which costs a lot of money and the resources…’. In the next 4 weeks I feel really important things need to be decided.”
The fact that KTM were one of the first to display their 850 engine for MotoGP 2027, and shared video images of the bike’s early rolling chassis testing during December 2025 is a positive sign that they will indeed be part of the grid until the end of 2031. “Even in all the difficulties for the company, don’t expect that we could’ve built an 850 just because I wanted to build one,’ he stressed. “I had to get permission from the board of directors and supervisory board to do so. That commitment was there a long time ago otherwise there’d have been no bike on track in December.”
“Thanks to Bajaj we’re still here,” he admitted. “With their strong commitment, they saved the company. They gave us the chance to work, to repair and we are on a really good way to repair this company. Now we have all their backing to go into the future of MotoGP.”
If Acosta does join the flurry of social media silly season chatter in the coming weeks, even before he’d raced the 2026 RC16, then KTM can still look to Binder’s resilience and Viñales rejuvenation and perhaps even Enea Bastianini’s unpredictable speedbursts. And then there is the matter of the KTM ‘pipeline’ and a certain 19-year-old by the name of David Alonso who could easily gobble some of Pedro’s hype in the coming years of MotoGP.
Thanks to Neil Morrison and David Emmett.