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Pedro Acosta Interview: "I Have Lived With Pressure Every Day Of My Life For The Past Three Years"

By David Emmett |

Pedro Acosta is a gangly, slightly scrawny figure in his bright GASGAS-red team clothes. He wears a near permanent smile that manages to balance exactly where cheeky ends and sassy begins. He looks like the teenager motorcycle racer that he is, like a kid fresh out of the Red Bull Rookies and ready to tear up Moto3.

Until he opens his mouth, that is. Then you are sitting across the table from a wizened old veteran, a man who sounds like he has a decade or three of racing and life experience to build on. "An old head on young shoulders," as GASGAS Tech3 crew chief Paul Trevathan puts it. Which is why KTM have fast-tracked the 19-year-old Spaniard into MotoGP, giving him one of their best crew chiefs to work with.

After three races, their faith in Acosta has been more than justified. The Spaniard has adapted much more quickly than even the most optimistic pundits had predicted he would. Battling near the front at the first round in Qatar, his first podium at Portimão, inherited after Maverick Viñales suffered a mechanical failure, and then a front row start, and a fourth and a second place at the Circuit Of The Americas. Acosta is fourth in the championship, and leading KTM rider. And he is only just getting started.

I had an inkling that Acosta might be good after the Valencia test. Going back and comparing the time gap to the fastest riders over the years, the only rookie to be closer to the front was Marc Marquez back in 2013. At the Shakedown test in Sepang, Acosta was already lapping with the best of the field.

I interviewed Acosta in between the Shakedown and IRTA tests at Sepang, for a feature for the Dutch magazine Kicxstart. It was before we got a chance to see just how good Acosta really was, but the interview gives you a real insight into where that speed and talent comes from, and just why Paul Trevathan calls him an old head on young shoulders. He shows a maturity and insight, and a hyper-awareness of his own abilities and weaknesses, which allows him to handle them better.

Perhaps most impressive is his ability to ignore the hype which surrounds him. Which is where I wanted to start the interview.

Q: When you entered Moto3, you blew everyone away, especially winning from pit lane in Qatar. And at the Portimão Moto2 test you were really fast, and everyone I spoke to said he's going to be champion. And you said you put a lot of pressure on yourself that year. It seems like almost your entire career, been surrounded by pressure and hype?

PA: Well, I'm living the last three years of my life having pressure every day, you know? Imagine a kid that arrived to the championship, I arrived when I was 16. And imagine doing the first four podiums in a row of the season, winning three races of four. Man, for everyone this was was huge. Huge. Also for me.

KTM
GasGas
Pedro Acosta
MotoGP
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Comments

Kid sounds more like 39 than 19. Except for this bit, which I loved ... we are on the way to to achieve good things, but you cannot sell the skin of the bear before you take it, you know?

We use that expression, word for word, in french too.

Superb interview and how amazing it is to think it was just after the shakedown test. We can all see where Pedro is at now.

Like someone else said here earlier; he didn't get the memo that passing was nearly impossible in MotoGP nowadays! That he does that cleanly, without roughing up his opponents, is quite refreshing too.

A generational talent in my view.

 

 

Thanks Kropotkin good interview.

This kid is quick and articulate. His English is fairly good for a teenager.

Interesting insight into the dynamics in the box. The boss wants a win. Team will put pressure on the rider, the rider wants the best possible package.

The season starts at Jerez.

As with all of the interviews I do, I very lightly edit the speaker's words to remove clutter (saying "you know" every second sentence, for example) and change the word order a little. But I change as little as possible and try to stick as closely as I can to the original. 

So Acosta does speak good English. But I have made it sound fractionally better.

Much like CE or Rossi, Acosta reads these articles to me in his own voice. And man, it is like this, you know?

I’ve used different browsers, logged in and out, cleared history, but I only see one question and answer here. Is there more that I’m missing?

Is your site supporter status expired?  I had to renew mine recently.  Unfortunately the auto renew function does not work and nor do you get any notification emails that renewal is approaching or that you are expired.  A measure of the integrity of the reporting here is that David prioritises writing yet more multi-thousand word articles over fixing the still-broken features of the site from the rebuild 18 months ago ... including THE INCOME STREAM! :D

Just part of the charm of an enthusiast solo operation, re-sub up and you should be back in business.  The actual payment and reinstatement of access to the subscriber content worked perfectly and quickly for me, I was back reading almost as soon as payment went through.

David, if you read this and have another maintenance run on the site, please fix your income-generating to-do's first, but we'd also love to have working 'new comments' functionality return, still broken (or rather seemingly random, sometimes working sometimes not) since the rebuild.  But please know how much we appreciate the fast and lean site, devoid of the intolerable degree of advertising of other motogp websites.  Happy enough to put up with the idiosyncrasies in order to get the sweet content and annoyance-free delivery.  Keep up the good work.

the odd time I've teased you about it was purely taking the mick. Was just a normal situation when on tour, always somewhere to be and always needing to be on some schedule, stressing out about missing some connection or other in a strange land.  We've all been there.

I checked back and definitely got an auto-renewing subscription in 2023 but got no notifications this year about it either coming up nor actually expiring.  I probably paid with paypal.  

Used to get notifications on the old site, I just chalked it up to the seeming randomness of the doesn't-seem-quite-finished new site.  No big deal, once you can't read the articles anymore, check and re-sub.  The only reason I mention it is there might be a non-zero number of people who don't bother, but might have left it be if it were automated, hence reducing DE's income somewhat.

News bomb this AM, Kawasaki quit Factory WSBK. Providing engines and sending some staff over to a new Bimota team.

Huh? Anyone see this coming? Did Rea maybe?

Sad news right? Perhaps linked, the groundswell of "we may have just entered that delayed economic downturn" murmurs/indicators seems to have just recently emerged. 

Buckle up? I did a while ago and was surprised it didn't arrive last Fall. But then again, I have Marc for the 2024 Title too, so there's that. 

Wow, didn't see that coming. Maybe it's just the end of race reps as we know them after Yamaha end manufacturing of their R1.

The fact that Kawasaki have a 49% stake in Bimota, as of 2019,  doesn't surprise me that they are going down that route.

"Fast Upgrades"

I was alarmed at first. David's article is great as usual. Steve English is probably typing right now too. Interesting news. 

"Halo project," great phrase. After Euro5 and retro standards we get another homologation special era? Can/would Honda do such a SPFU thing? I can feel my brain expanding.

What if the WEIRD Chinese Ktm etc collaborations beget some bizarro attempt? Anyone noticing the Chonda 800cc CBR650 knockoff stinking up the back of the Supersport grid and wonder what's next? Enjoying that the future = the past as GSXR750's are a top dog in USA nationals with R6's and almost liter Duc twins. Petri dish there. Wait until the R9 gets here! And...

I’m thinkin’ you’re kinda right with possible upgrades to the Kawasaki engine…

….. but the price cap is neither here nor there.

I mean think of all the bits and bobs that make those mega-dollar bikes so expensive: carbon or magnesium rims, carbon bodywork, alloy tank, alloy/mg subframes, sexy suspenders etc etc and it almost all goes in the loft of the workshop building the WSBK bike, never to be seen again.

Basically everything bar OEM engine and frame is irrelevant so the fact an M1000RR costs moonbeams only has bearing on the WSBK bike because of how much they can get for the redundant parts on Craigslist, none of it used on track or helps the WSBK bike.

The cap is to there to keep things like the D16 and RC213V out of WSBK.