New beginning at KTM
■ Petrux starts a fresh chapter after six years with Ducati
KTM’s young guns will have a MotoGP veteran onboard this year as two-time race winner Danilo Petrucci makes the move from Ducati to Tech3. The Italian is entering his 10th MotoGP campaign, which is more than Brad Binder, Miguel Oliveira and Iker Lecouna combined. That’s a lot of knowledge and experience for those guys to take in, whilst Petrucci brings six years’ worth of information from Ducati.
Of course, spending that amount of time with one manufacturer before switching to another can be extremely difficult. Jorge Lorenzo took time to adapt to the Ducati after so many years at Yamaha, and then failed to get the Honda to work with his riding style in 2019. Being a larger MotoGP rider will make Petrucci’s transition a little harder as well, but from what he saw in 2020, and from listening to KTM Race Manager Mike Leitner, Petrucci sees the RC16 as a bike which can work with a variety of riding styles.
“He told me that the bike is very, very rideable,” Petrucci explained. “Pol was the best rider on the bike at the end of 2020 and he’s a hard braker like me, he brakes hard and aggressively. But then, Dani Pedrosa took a big step and he’s not a hard braker. He maximised the corner exit speed. The bike can now be ridden in a lot of ways and when I followed KTM riders last year I saw that they had very different styles, but they were all very fast.” With only five days’ worth of testing before the two races in Qatar, he’s not going to have completely adapted and he’ll still be learning. Luckily for him, there’ll be less pressure on his shoulders in the Tech3 garage. Sure, they’re pretty much a factory team now – it’s even in the team’s official name – but it remains a family-run environment and Petrucci should thrive there.
He was often the surprise contender whilst he was in the Pramac Racing satellite team. Less pressure may bring better results. KTM now have three 2020 race winners in their 2021 line-up.