The appearance of Dani Pedrosa as a guest rider last season at the Styrian Grand Prix was one of the most impressive moments on the MotoGP calendar, both because of the return of the Spanish rider to competition for the first time after his retirement at the end of 2018, and due to the spectacular fall he suffered in the first start of the Austrian race, including a fire involving two motorcycles that forced a red flag and a new jump.
Pedrosa suffered a crash in turn 3 when the third lap of the race was completed, leaving his KTM in the middle of the track with the bad luck that Lorenzo Savadori hit his Aprilia, burning both bikes.
In the second start and after “one of the biggest scares of my career”, Pedrosa managed to finish tenth at the finish line. The experience ended with a bittersweet aftertaste, leaving Dani the door open to repeat it.
The question is, will the Catalan get a wild card this year with KTM. “I don’t know, we haven’t talked about it at the moment,” he says with a smile.
Pedrosa makes his debut this weekend competing with four wheels at the wheel, contesting the Imola round of the Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe with the FFF Racing team, and from the same circuit he gave an interesting interview with our colleagues from Motorsport.com Italy.
In addition to his experience with the cars, Dani also spoke about the MotoGP season and the extraordinary start of KTM, the team for which he is a test rider, after Miguel Oliveira’s victory in Indonesia and Brad Binder’s second place in Qatar.
“Without a doubt there have been two great races, first for Binder and then for Oliveira, I am happy because we have worked really well, but we still have to wait a bit, the championship always needs three or four races to find the balance, because it can that other leading teams have failed and have not found the feeling with the bike yet, we still have to wait a bit for everything to be in place. But it is important that the bike is going well from the start”, he assesses the start of the season of KTM Pedrosa.
As a test rider and developer, there is no one better than Dani to describe the new RC16, which is apparently not too different from last year’s bike.
“It can’t tell you the secrets we’ve made in the development of the bike,” the Spaniard laughs. “But it’s true that the bike is quite similar to last year’s, we’ve focused on the riders’ comments. and we have also applied my experience from last year in the Austrian race, where we encountered some difficulties. It took time to find a way to improve those points, but now everything is going better and we will see how the bike stabilizes in the next races” .
Another of the novelties presented by KTM is the arrival of Francesco Guidotti as team manager, and Dani believes that we will have to wait a bit to see his contribution.
“It’s still a bit early, I think he’s still finding his place in the team and seeing how things work, I’ve only seen him at the Sepang test (February).”
And it is finally when the man from Castellar is asked if there is the possibility of seeing him this year racing as a wild card with KTM in MotoGP.
“I don’t know, we haven’t talked about it yet,” settles the three-time world champion.
