Binder’s got the memories, the form and an ‘insane’ bike
Brad Binder lost out on winning a trophy in his first motorbike race because of the man who played a huge part in ensuring he became SA’s first MotoGP race winner in Brno last weekend.
His father, Trevor, was a motorbike racer himself and began taking his oldest son to the track when he was five or six years old, Binder remembers.
“When my dad started racing he was quite ‘old’ for a rider. He started to race after he had me and my brother. He raced the 250cc two-strokes, and after that 600cc and 1,000cc. He probably didn’t get to ride as much as he wanted to because he was too busy with work.
“He would just go to the track and race. He wouldn’t do the practices the day before. He raced for the joy of it. I remember going to the track with my dad, just me and him.
“My first motorbike race was actually a father-son race with my dad on my little 50cc. It was a 40-minute race. The kids would race for 20 minutes and the dads for 20 minutes. It was fun. I came third and remember being so happy because I was going to get a trophy, but then my dad got on the bike and we finished fourth! So, we didn’t get a trophy that day!”
The trophies would come, lots of them, thanks to the vision, dedication and financial and emotional sacrifices by Trevor and his wife Sharon.
They knew Brad and his brother, Darryn, had something special, and took them to Europe to give their talent the chance they believed it deserved.
That Binder said he was sad his parents could not be there to see him win only scratched the surface of how much of a team effort Sunday’s win was.
“Insane” seems to have become Binder’s favourite word. Everything was insane after Sunday. The win was insane. The last three laps were insane. The KTM RC16 he rode to victory was insane. There are an insane number of people in the team, from the pits to the engineers to the backup staff.
The support from SA has been insane. His phone has not stopped. KTM were careful in the maelstrom of victory to speak of it as a team victory and not just a Binder win.
Pol Espargo, his teammate, has been an integral part of the KTM project since 2017 and he had hoped the first win for KTM would be his. He is off to ride for Honda next year, so, both secretly and not-so secretly, KTM would have been happy it is a man who has been on their bikes since 2015 with the Red Bull KTM Ajo team who will be staying with them at least for one more season.
KTM had worked hard on the bike, improving an already powerful engine, working on the electronics and suspension. It cornered like a pig, though, but, as the ontrackoffroad website noted this week “adding oval-shaped steel beam sections to its steel trellis frame has addressed that, the bike now turning on a sixpence”.
There were signs Binder’s win was coming. In Malaysia in May, he told the team the bike was, wait for it, “insane”. After the Spanish GP when he showed he was quick, he told KTM Motorsport director Pit Beirer: “Pit, I have the best bike out there. I can turn better than the others. I have the grip.”
“We were like, ‘wow’. Until the end of last year everybody told us our bike is absolutely ‘not there’. Then the rookie told us we have the best one. That shows that if a rider believes he’s in the right place with the right bike and the bike is competitive, this takes so much doubt away and makes the rider so much stronger.”
The team mechanics describe him as humble and a sponge, keen to talk about the bike and how to make it better. Now he wants to know how to keep on winning, how to get another fix of the hit that victory gave him in Brno last Sunday.
This Sunday, he will line up in Austria, home of KTM and Red Bull, the team sponsor.
He won in Moto2 there last year on a bike that he had to wrestle around the track. He has the bike, he has the form and the memories of riding with his father as a kid. Something special this way comes.