Brad Binder (KTM/9th): Chaos even before the start / MotoGP

From 17th place on the grid, Brad Binder was only able to minimize the damage at the “Circuit of the Americas” in Austin on Sunday. The South African eventually finished ninth, losing by 15 seconds to eventual winner Maverick Viñales.

Afterward, Binder was satisfied — at least as far as his start was concerned. “I had a good start, so we started with the special feature of the day,” reports the 28-year-old from Potchefstroom, who already had a problem with his thigh in the warm-up. “People ran away from me because my back tire couldn’t hold me. I just couldn’t make it work.”

“Then driving to the starting line and not knowing how things were going to go was difficult. As I approached Turn 1, I pulled all the way out because there was a ball inside. But then someone fixed their bike and broke the left wing along with the right wing back. Doing 20 laps at COTA without these two wings was a mess.” Binder explains: “The bike moves to one side – especially on the straights. It’s not very stable and you have to take a lot of countermeasures. If you lose the whole rear wing, you don’t have that power anymore. It’s very difficult to manage.”

Binder was P15 after the chaos started. “From Lap 5 onwards my rear tire worked really well. I was able to go faster by more than a second per lap. But it really wasn’t a good weekend. Unfortunately, things went wrong at the wrong time. We’re not as bad as the results would suggest. Regarding the tire problem, he says: “It was the first time something like that happened to me. It’s normal that sometimes the previous day’s tire needs time to work, but not the new tire. We were really unlucky with that.”

Jerez’s summary is filled with a bit of irony: “At the moment I’m just happy to go somewhere else. To be honest, it looks bad on paper, but things weren’t too bad this weekend. I’ll be there again. I think we played a lot this weekend and then we made a mistake in the times Important. That didn’t help. Maybe I had a little hope. Austin is probably more undulating in the calendar, which was not very fun.