It’s a cold, frosty Saturday in December and, frankly, being in Liverpool first thing in the morning is not something that one is easily enthused by. The 2023 MotoGP season finished just a few days earlier but world champions galore have descended on the English city for the FIM Awards. At this point of the year, everyone just wants a rest.
Pedro Acosta is probably feeling exactly the same – not that he’s showing any signs of this. As he concludes one interview before starting his sit-down with Autosport, he is a bundle of excitement talking about the Isle of Man TT, which carries on as we sit down with the 19-year-old in the conference room of the Hope Street Hotel.
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Just four days earlier, Acosta made his public MotoGP debut in the Valencia test with the KTM-backed Tech3 GasGas squad he will make the step up to the premier class with next season. And it goes well. The reigning Moto2 world champion completes 70 laps on the RC16 and is just 1.2 seconds off the best pace and about 0.4s off team-mate Augusto Fernandez.
“Not at the moment, because it was just one day,” he responds when asked if he felt like a MotoGP rider now. “I was super happy about how the day was, how the people were around me, how the team was, because for sure KTM changed everything from the smallest thing to the biggest one to help me to be happy around the team, to be comfortable. They put me with Paul Trevathan, who was with Pol in the beginning days of KTM, and he knows exactly how the bike is. I’m quite happy to have him by my side, how he is working in KTM. It was a good day.”
Acosta is something of a darling of the Pierer Mobility Group (the fancy company name that encompasses all of KTM’s racing brands) and his promotion to MotoGP has been on the cards for a long time. Winning his first grand prix from pitlane in Qatar in Moto3 in 2021; securing that year’s championship; race wins in Moto2 in his second world championship year and the title in the class in 2023 has understandably made him hot property in the paddock.
At KTM, it is “putting everything and more” into the young Spaniard: “Every time I went out on the bike, I had like 20 or 30 people around me – it was crazy!”
Autosport has heard a lot about Acosta from those around him this year. His former Moto2 team boss Aki Ajo told this writer at Silverstone that he considered him the last of…
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