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 the “old-school” riders for the way he approaches his racing. Herve Poncharal, Acosta’s new team boss at Tech3, revealed in Malaysia that the Spaniard did something that few young riders do.
“He was very smart, which I appreciate,” Poncharal tells Autosport about Acosta. “Instead of saying ‘I’m going to MotoGP, I want to go in the box, I want sit on the bike, start to do my position and I will give you some tips about what I need’. Opposite. He said ‘I’m very happy to be in MotoGP with you next year but for the moment it’s better not to talk too much. I don’t want to spread my energy, I want to keep my energy for only one target. I have only one goal, which is to win the Moto2 title’. He said to me and to Nicolas Goyon my team manager… we said the minimum we needed to share and he said ‘let me win the championship and then I will be full on with you’.”
Keeping himself grounded is something Acosta has been doing from the start of his grand prix career, largely out of necessity. And even standing on the precipice of MotoGP, generating the hype that he has already – with many onlookers declaring him ‘the next Marc Marquez’ – he still wants “to be a normal boy”.
“Imagine a 16-year-old guy, arriving in Qatar [in 2021] with 8000 [Instagram] followers only and go home from Qatar with 180,000,” he says. “I remember that the phone was broken because it was [constantly ringing]. And the phone never switched on again. And I said ‘boys, this is not for me’. I want to be a normal boy. The only thing that’s different from me to the other guy is that I ride a bike in the world championship and this is my job. It’s the only thing. But I still want to be the same boy.
“Also, after this race I changed my phone number because everyone – also people I’ve never seen in my life – was talking to me by WhatsApp. And I don’t want this in my life. Also, I deleted Instagram from my phone in these days. It was too much pressure to have. Media was talking, you read because if you see one news story that says ‘Pedro Acosta is blah, blah, blah’, you are going to read it. Almost if you don’t want to, you are going to read it. I don’t know, man. This world is not for me. I just want to go to the track and go wide open and enjoy.”
"I want to be a normal guy that goes to university in these days. When I go partying, for example, I never talk about this. I never take a reservation or whatever. I go there with all the people and just have fun" Pedro Acosta
Today, Acosta has 407,000 Instagram followers, which he uses to engage with fans and promote his racing activities. And while the pressure of expectation as he quickly became a winner at grand prix level was jarring at first, Acosta has morphed into a true showman, celebrating victories and podiums with a flare that marked Valentino Rossi out as something of a ringmaster during his pomp.
Whether it’s delivering pizzas to his crew and rivals in parc ferme, throwing racing gear into the crowd or giving a title combatant a little wave at the end of a warm-up session, Acosta is acutely aware of what people want to see. But it’s also something that comes naturally to him.
“I try,” he says when asked if he considers himself a showman as well as a racer. “But more than anything, because it comes natural, I like to have fun. It’s true that I arrived to the championship and I was super shy. But the crew helped me to put all this energy out. And the day that I don’t laugh and the day that I don’t make jokes and the day that I don’t do any – let’s say – ‘stupid’ things, I feel that I go to bed and I have too much energy!
“I need to burn this fire that I have inside me, man! Imagine that I was a fan not so long ago. I know what the people want to see. And it’s something that comes easily to me because I like to see people laughing, I like to make jokes, I like to make things that are normal for a 19-year-old guy because – I repeat again – I want to be normal. I don’t want to be in a bubble. I want to be a normal guy that goes to university in these days. When I go partying, for example, I never talk about this [racing]. I never take a reservation or whatever. I go there with all the people and just have fun. The only difference between one guy and me is that I’m going to go to a disco and you’re going to know that I’m there. But, man, let’s enjoy.”
Acosta may want to “be a normal guy” but he knows he has a role to play in growing MotoGP’s popularity. The series has tried to recapture a shrinking audience by introducing sprint races, which did have a positive effect on the spectator figures for Saturdays at grand prix weekends. However, he makes an astute observation that shows much more work is needed.
“I think we need these things [social media] to show the people because you go to the streets and ask anyone – anyone – who Valentino Rossi is, they are going to know,” he says. “Also, if they don’t see any races in their life, they are going to know [who he is]. The same as Messi, the same as Ronaldo, the same as [Michael] Jordan, the same as [Lewis] Hamilton because they are [part of] general culture. They are boys that you know who are sportsmen but [they go above the sport].
“We need these things because now you go to the streets and ask who is Marc Marquez? People know him, but it’s going to be much more difficult than Valentino Rossi. Guys that, for me, made good people in the past: Scott Redding. Nobody is going to know him. Alvaro Bautista. Nobody is going to know him. [Danilo] Petrucci, [Andrea] Dovizioso. We need all the show to come up. In media or whatever, we need to show that MotoGP is here and MotoGP is a nice show to see. It’s one thing that we need at the moment.”
Undoubtedly, what Acosta does on track will have a bearing on the interest MotoGP gets in 2024. He has “no targets” for his rookie season and is wary that a good race in Qatar, having already tested there for two days prior, will not automatically set the tone for the rest of his year.
Acosta’s success up the ladder has already divided the camps: there are those who think he is basically the second coming. And there are those who think he will fail because certain career statistics haven’t matched certain other riders’ and somehow that makes him a fraud. For him, “it’s a game” now, not a problem.
“About the pressure, imagine when I was 16 years old: I had a camera 24/7 behind me. And I was listening to things like ‘you are the next Marc Marquez, you are making history, you are breaking records, we never see something like this, you will jump directly to MotoGP’.
“This was pressure. Now it’s like a game. People can talk and people can think. But now I don’t think about what the people are talking about. If, one day, Pit [Beirer] or Jens [Hainbach] or whoever from KTM come and say ‘man, now you are completely stupid’ – maybe I will start to think about [what people say] because they are my bosses, also Aki, also Herve.
“But they’ve known me since I was a kid, the people around me. People around you can say whatever they want: when you win you are the best and when you lose you are a loser. I don’t know, man. When you say something good you are a hero and when you make a mistake you are hell. It’s not easy these things, but we have to accept it. It is what it is.”
"I just want to go to the track and go wide open and enjoy” Pedro Acosta
Sitting down with Acosta, it’s now clear how he is able to be all of the things his various team bosses have told Autosport over the last few years. He’s mature beyond measure for a 19-year-old and incredibly intelligent. He understands what is needed of him on track, but knows half of the job is also what happens off of it and how the former cannot exist without the latter.
MotoGP has had a steady stream of strong rookies who have stepped up to the class over the last few years. But none have quite possessed all of the qualities Acosta has, certainly not straight away.
KTM has struck gold with Acosta, a testament to its talent development programme. But it seems like MotoGP will be the one to reap the most out of the Spaniard as he steps up with the riding ability and marketing sensibility to truly boost the series.
