“Forgetting about the championship” transformed my MotoGP form

Pedro Acosta believes abandoning his early-season title ambitions was key to turning his 2025 MotoGP campaign around and becoming a regular podium contender.

Although Acosta made a slow start to his sophomore campaign in MotoGP, held back by an underdeveloped bike and KTM’s financial woes, his results improved steadily as the year went on.

Having broken inside the top five for the first time at the French Grand Prix, he secured a third-place finish in the Czech Grand Prix, before going on an incredible run after the summer break, coinciding with the introduction of a new aero package on the RC16.

That upturn in form was also aided by a change in mindset, with Acosta showing greater maturity off-track and reducing the number of crashes that disrupted his rookie campaign.

Although he missed out on that elusive first victory, Acosta ended the year a strong fourth in the standings, leapfrogging Ducati’s Francesco Bagnaia with a seventh sprint podium of 2025 in the Valencia finale.

While the Spaniard acknowledged that the RC16 did get marginally faster during the year, he insisted that much of his mid-season progress was down to his improved mental resolve rather than major technical gains.

“To be honest, the bike didn’t improve a lot because we don’t change so much,” he said in Valencia.

“The fairing was helping, the swingarm was helping a bit, but we saw that we still have many problems, that the tyre consumption [is high] and that it is quite difficult to be competitive at the beginning of the race because we don’t have grip.

“For this, it’s true that at the moment that I start to forget about the championship dream, I start to just try to get 100% of my package.

“One day was a top five, the other day I was struggling a bit more, and then there were other days that I was able to fight for the podium [at the] minimum in the sprint races. Maybe my mind is the one that grew the most. 

“It’s true that I was also feeling better with the bike. But we didn’t have many changes, like mechanical changes. It’s quite difficult to say that the bike improved that much.

“Since I had the arm pump surgery in my arm after the Jerez test, we found some different things, but the bike was not that different.”

After the opening 11 rounds of the season, Acosta sat a distant ninth in the championship on 99 points. However, he managed to add 208 points to his tally in the second half of the year, as he became one of the most consistent performers on the grid.

The 21-year-old reiterated that he had to reset his objectives over the course of the year, conceding that KTM still trails Ducati and Aprilia in the pecking order.

“The first part of the season was one to forget,” he lamented. “We were really struggling without really understanding why. And then after maybe clearing our mind, maybe changing the target a bit and seeing that we have to find a bit more consistency to become a better rider [the results improved].“Maybe, we were finding something extra.

«There were also some ups and downs after the summer break, but [we were] much more consistently in the top five or maybe on the podium. We have to be happy in one thing.

“Still, we were missing a lot during the season to be as competitive as Aprilia, which improved that much, and Ducati is still the main manufacturer.”

We want your opinion!

— The Motorsport.com Team