Pedro Acosta got better in MotoGP 2025 after ‘forgetting championship dream’

Pedro Acosta admits the KTM “didn’t improve a lot” during the 2025 MotoGP season, with its gains coming “from the moment I started to forget about the championship dream”.

KTM and Pedro Acosta were expected to fight for race wins in 2025, and possibly even contend for the world championship, following the Spaniard’s stunning 2024 rookie campaign.

But it would take until the second half of the season for Acosta to get a first podium, with the 21-year-old’s better end to the year still failing to yield a maiden win.

The 2025 KTM struggled especially with tyre consumption, as well as being weaker in braking zones, with Acosta’s frustrations about the bike boiling over at certain points.

Reflecting on his year, he says small updates to the package after the summer break didn’t do much to improve the RC16, with his better results down to his own mentality shift.

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

“I mean, the fairing was helping, the swingarm was helping a bit.

“But we still saw that we had many problems with tyre consumption, that we find it difficult to be competitive at the beginning of races because we don’t have grip.

“For this, from the moment I started to forget about the championship dream, I started to just try to get 100% from my package.

“One day, that was a top five, another one I was struggling a bit more, and then there were others where I was able to fight for the podium, at minimum, in the sprint races.

“For this, maybe my mind that is the thing that has grown the most.

“It’s true that I was feeling better with the bike, but we didn’t have many mechanical changes.

“For this, it’s difficult to say that the bike improved that much.

“Maybe we found also, since I had this arm pump surgery after the Jerez test, we found some different things. But the bike was not that different.”

He added: “It was a first part of the season to forget. We were really struggling without really understanding why.

“And then, after maybe we cleared our mind, maybe changed the target a bit, and see that maybe we have to find a bit more consistency to become a better rider, we were finding something extra.

“It’s true that there were some ups and downs after the summer break, but much more consistently in this top five or maybe on the podium.

“We have to be happy in one way, thinking like this, but with it being true that we were missing a lot this season to be as competitive as Aprilia, who improved so much, and Ducati is still the main manufacturer.”