The signs KTM has turned around the MotoGP bike Marquez can't understand

After two rounds of the 2022 MotoGP World Championship, we are none the wiser as to how this season will shake out. The pre-season title favourites in Fabio Quartararo and Francesco Bagnaia – and Yamaha and Ducati by extension – have had wildly inconsistent starts to the campaign, while the expected Suzuki charge so far hasn’t materialised and Honda was struck by extremely bad luck in Indonesia.

So, when you look at all three championship standings, you’ll see leaders few would have considered on the Thursday evening in Qatar earlier this month as we all pondered how the 2022 title might be won.

Despite an off-colour showing in the wet at Indonesia in 11th, Gresini Racing’s Enea Bastianini continues to lead the riders’ standings by two points, while KTM has taken charge in the constructors’ and teams’ tables – leading both by four and 12 points respectively.

KTM is the only factory squad to have got two of its riders to the podium in the first two races, as Brad Binder came narrowly close to victory but finishing second in Qatar, while Miguel Oliveira overturned a shocking run to claim his fourth career MotoGP win in the rain-lashed Indonesian Grand Prix.

While KTM enjoyed victories in 2021 as part of a brief mid-season surge courtesy of a new chassis and fuel, its form was patchy at best either side of that as it ended the year with just five points more than it managed the year before in a campaign with four fewer races.

Oliveira’s year wasn’t helped by a wrist injury he picked up in a practice crash in Austria, but such was his downturn in form that between his second-place finish in Germany last June and his Indonesia win, the Portuguese rider scored just 20 points. That is a statistic that is as surprising as it is unacceptable for a rider of his calibre.

Miguel Oliveira endured a tough 2021 following a wrist injury

Photo by: KTM Images

But KTM has come out the blocks swinging in 2022 with a package that does genuinely look consistent. Both riders eased into Q2 in Indonesia, with Binder a career-best fourth and Oliveira a solid enough seventh – where Binder put his RC16 in Qatar too. Oliveira didn’t finish the Qatar race due to a crash, but was on for a top 10, while Binder came just 0.347s from victory.

Oliveira then bravely carved into the lead at the end of lap one in Indonesia and hit the front again on lap five after a brief spell chasing Ducati’s Jack Miller, during which time he gained a reference in terms of what lap times were possible in the conditions. He then brilliantly managed the rest of the 20-lap grand prix from there, opening up a gap of over four seconds and keeping 2.8s in his pocket to brush off a late charge from reigning champion Quartararo.

"The project of the new bike got held up in about June. We had a new bike which was not the right philosophy. At the end of the championship, it's hard to make new parts without a direction" Miguel Oliveira

Commenting on his race, Oliveira noted that his good start – in which he went from seventh to second – transformed his afternoon at the new Mandalika International Street Circuit, adding: “I really couldn’t see anything behind the riders with all the spray and a lot of rain on the visor. It was definitely very hard to see the lines and to be precise, also to judge the grip level. I think by the end of the race I understood more how I could push, but to ride 20 laps in a row in the rain and to do a practice [in the wet] is a bit different.”

KTM’s year did not start off offering positive signs. Both riders left the Sepang pre-season test pretty downbeat as they ended the two days of running in Malaysia 15th and 18th on the timesheets, and even as far back as last June the 2022 RC16 project had hit problems.

“The project of the new bike got held up in about June,” Oliveira said at Sepang last month. “We had a new bike which was not the right philosophy. At the end of the championship, it’s hard to make new parts without a direction. Of course, we could have a whole lot of boxes with new parts in it, but it doesn’t mean they are better. We could just be trying and shooting in every direction.”

2022 looked like another tough year for KTM after the Sepang pre-season test

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Shooting in every direction is something KTM has been famous for since it came to MotoGP in 2017, its test days regularly comprising of its riders trying crate loads of updates in its quest to develop its machine – the marque putting in 40 million euros of investment every year on the run up to its first winning season in 2020.

But more often than not, any good form for KTM would soon be juxtaposed by dips the marque struggled to find its way out of.

The constant stream of development work grew wearisome for its riders, while even test rider Dani Pedrosa felt like enough was enough. And so KTM altered its approach coming into 2022 as the riders felt the bike they had in 2021 was not far off and was not in need of radical overhaul.

“I think last year we threw a lot of very different things in and we didn’t really find something that was notably better,” Binder said during the Malaysia test last month. “So, I think the guys came with a bit of a different approach to this test. We’re focusing on two or three key elements and trying to improve those. We don’t need a tonne of time, but we need a little bit.”

The key thing KTM needed was better rear traction, while tweaks to the chassis have given the RC16 much better turning. However, the RC16 is a bike that still scratches heads. It’s not conventional by MotoGP standards, as it’s built around a steel trellis frame rather than an aluminium one, while it uses WP suspension instead of Ohlins.

“I mean, it’s the bike that I understand least,” Honda’s Marc Marquez said after following Binder in the Qatar GP. “I understood [race winner Enea] Bastianini [on his Gresini-run 2021 Ducati], the way that he rode. But Binder was like each lap was different. One lap he was going in [to the corners] very fast, next lap he was going in slower but exiting very fast. So, still the KTM – especially behind Binder – I don’t understand. But they have a good engine, he was stopping the bike a lot with the rear tyre. And also, he was very fast at the end of the race.”

Marc Marquez says KTM remains the bike he understands the least in MotoGP

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

When asked by Autosport for his thoughts on this and whether the KTM is a bike that requires much more adaptation to over the course of a race, Binder admitted: “Well, I think it’s difficult because sometimes we’re not quite sure how to go quick on our bike either. So, sometimes it makes it a little bit difficult.

“But the big thing in Qatar was I could really be there by just sitting behind the guys, it wasn’t a big problem. In the middle of the race when I started to lose a bit of edge grip I struggled more, and by the end of the race I really had to rely on braking really late and picking the bike up because I wasn’t able to run corner speed anymore. But saying that, I kept my lap time within 0.3s, so even though you have to change and adapt quite often over a race, I was still able to be super consistent. That’s super important, but I don't know, sometimes we don’t understand ourselves.”

"We don't just want to perform three times or four times during the season and be average. We want to be up there" Miguel Oliveira

This explains Oliveira’s reticence to label KTM a title challenger following his Indonesia win: “I think it’s very early to say because we only had two races. For sure, we want to keep this strong condition going into other races as well. We don’t just want to perform three times or four times during the season and be average. We want to be up there more often, we are aware that we need to work really hard.

“That’s the normal of this category, everyone is so close together and you see the difference sometimes it makes being in the Q2 or not. It can turn your whole weekend around. So, we are focusing on being fast first of all and then being consistent in the races and scoring points.”

As is generally the case with modern day MotoGP, it’s hard to know just how good KTM is in 2022. But already in the space of two races it has at least shown enough signs to suggest its turnaround is genuine.

After a strong start to 2022, can KTM sustain its success in MotoGP?

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images