Pedro Acosta has a familiar good feeling aboard his KTM RC16, as he looks to back up his breakthrough victory with another at the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend.
The 22-year-old, who finally broke his grand prix duck last time out in Austria, says Friday at Motegi felt similar to the 2024 Japanese weekend, when he famously scored his first pole position.
On that occasion, the then MotoGP rookie was unable to convert his poles, crashing out of both the sprint and the Sunday races. This time around, however, a far more mature version of Acosta made a solid start to the weekend with the second-fastest time on Friday, and said the feeling brought back memories from two years ago.
“It’s a quite similar feeling to 2024 and much better than in 2025, so I’m happy,” he said after the day was done, suggesting he could again threaten for pole position.
Motegi is a track generally regarded as suited to the KTM. 2025 was also a reasonably strong outing for Acosta, as he pointed out when comparing the bike today to the one he rode at this event 12 months ago. He believes a key difference in this edition will be that tyre wear won’t be the factor it was last time he came to Japan.
“I mean, maybe the biggest difference is that they resurfaced the whole track and also the tyre [compounds] are different,” the Spaniard said. “But it’s true that about tyre management, if you take all the season, we have been much better than the last one.
Pedro Acosta, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing
Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images
“And at the end, I was quite competitive last season because I qualified fourth. I was second also on Friday. I made a sprint podium, but then I was trying a lot to survive with the tyres for this. It looks like it’s not the same situation as last year.”
Asked if he could repeat the Austrian victory, the Acosta was quietly confident.
“Close [cross] the fingers for me, you know!” he said. “At the end, we are making good job. It looks like we have found a good base bike for the start of the weekend and then just need to make the details. Yeah, I’m quite happy about how the team is working.”
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