ACOSTA SAYS FRONT-END SCARE FORCED HIM TO BACK OFF MARQUEZ CHASE AT MISANO

Pedro Acosta’s Misano MotoGP ride ended with a podium, but the Red Bull KTM rider admitted the final laps were shaped by a front-end scare that forced him to change his approach when he was closing on the Marquez brothers.

Acosta had been steadily gaining through the race and, after setting the fastest lap on lap 23 of 27, he was almost in range of the leading Marquez duo. However, the momentum of his chase was interrupted by a moment that made him reassess the risk. He explained that the decision came in Turn 7, where he locked the front: “It was going to be tough and at the end, in Turn 7, I locked the front, and that was exactly the moment that I said: ‘Okay, now it's time to chill a bit’.”

That call effectively ended his push for more than third. Acosta said he had already identified that a podium would be enough given how difficult the weekend had been. With a “good gap” to Aldeguer behind, he felt P3 would cover the damage: “I had good gap with Aldeguer behind and said P3 will be more than enough for how tough this weekend was.”

Looking back on the full event, Acosta described a weekend that was “really tough,” particularly because he struggled more than he expected in braking zones. He said it wasn’t “so normal” for him to be that affected in braking points, but he credited a turnaround made overnight for saving the race result: “We had a really tough weekend. It's not so normal that I struggle as much as I did in the braking points. But we turned the weekend around by making a good job last night. We have to be happy. We battled with Ducatis, with Aprilias.”

When asked what had changed on the RC16 after Saturday’s Sprint, Acosta said the team made a major adjustment rather than a small tweak. “We changed the whole bike completely, I was struggling a lot yesterday,” he said, adding that Misano was a circuit where he had expected the machine to work better because “last year we had really good pace.”

Even with the earlier difficulties, Acosta felt the race itself was stronger than the previous outing at Aragon. He compared the outcome directly to his runner-up result there, insisting that the overall performance at Misano was better: “Even if I finished third, it was much better race overall than Aragon.” He also noted that the pace at the end of the race was “quite good,” and that it matched what he had seen in Aragon.

In the closing stages, Acosta reduced the gap to race leader Marc Marquez to 1.687 seconds before backing off after the front-end lock. With the podium secured, he moved up to fifth in the world championship, ahead of the injured Ai Ogura.

Acosta will return to Misano in 2027 as Marc Marquez’s factory Ducati team-mate, but for now his focus was on the lessons of a weekend he described as difficult—saved by a late bike change, and ultimately managed by choosing “to chill” after one scare too many.