‘Calm’ KTM MotoGP bike doesn’t react to Brad Binder’s ‘close my eyes and go’ approach

Brad Binder says his ‘close my eyes and go’ approach to time attacks on the 2025 KTM MotoGP bike doesn’t work anymore.

Friday at the British Grand Prix proved to be a difficult day for the KTM factory, as none of its riders made it into a direct Q2 place for Saturday’s qualifying.

Pedro Acosta was the fastest of the RC16s in 11th, while factory team-mate Brad Binder was 17th - over a second off the best pace set by Gresini’s Alex Marquez in Practice.

Binder explained that the 2025 KTM needs to be ridden with more “calm” than its predecessor, which his riding style doesn’t suit anymore.

“At the moment, it’s like you need do everything calm,” he said in response to a question from crash.net on Friday at Silverstone.

“You need to brake gently, turn in slowly, you can’t be really aggressive because it doesn’t really accept it, or it doesn’t like it too much.

“The way to go fast now is to be more clean.

“So, I’m used to when I need to go fast just closing my eyes and going, and this is not working at the moment.

“So, I need to change up my approach for time attacks and hopefully we can find some extra performance.”

Binder has form at Silverstone, getting onto the podium in the 2023 British GP, but says the feeling on the KTM this weekend hasn’t changed since then.

“Really similar, to be honest,” he added.

“Everything is working really similar, the feeling on the bike is quite the same.

“Really missing the ability to put that extra quick lap in. Need to figure out the time attack a bit.”

The South African says he is losing out mostly in the final two sectors of the Silverstone circuit in qualifying trim, but the data from Acosta should help him improve in the final split.

“T1 [sector one] looks fine, T2 not bad,” he said.

“It’s three and our where I’m losing mainly, T4 especially.

“The last sector is super tight, but I think we have a good reference there because Pedro is really fast in the last sector.

“So, it will be good to see how he does that so I can copy that. And then, the T3 I just need to keep a bit more speed through the fast stuff.”