The meteoric rise of Pedro Acosta gave some troubles to KTM in MotoGP, being forced to dismisse Pol Espargaró at the end of 2023 to place the Moto2 world champion in Red Bull GasGas Tech3 this year. There were five riders under contract with just four available seats, and the KTM Motorsport director, Pit Beirer, wants to avoid a similar sceneario in the future.
The Austrian said the goal is to keep the same riders and he isn’t expecting a rider coming faster than planned like the new rookie: ‘Let’s hope our boys stay healthy and perform like we all wish and then maybe it’s not even that stressful because we stick to the four boys we have now. And I don’t feel the same pressure coming up right now like the one we had with Pedro – that a guy was just jumping through the disciplines like crazy and was knocking the door one or two years earlier than we expected some time ago. So I feel for the moment we have a great package of four riders and we can now watch a bit carefully what’s going on in the market’.
After what happened with Acosta, Beirer assured he will not sign any new rider unless there is an available seat confirmed, admitting he doesn’t want to repeat the situation: ‘I can promise you I will not sign the rider number 5 unless we have a third team or one of the boys wants to leave us. So of course we put ourselves in this uncomfortable situation. But all of you guys followed quite closely why and what and everything has been said around this topic. But of course it gave us a crazy headache and I don’t want to go through this scenario too often. I feel at the moment we are not in the front row to make big changes because we believe in the riders we have’.