Brad Binder: ‘I can’t ride a standard superbike — it’s got so many electronic aids’

What people don’t realise or understand is that they think, ‘Oh, those MotoGP guys have traction control on their bikes’. But to go as fast as we possibly can we run the lowest TC we can.

You get to point where you just spin and if you spin too much you don’t go forward. So, we try to have the tyre driving, rather than going absolutely flat-out with the throttle and going over that crest and into the TC, because then you’re not going anywhere.

The goal is to use the TC as little as possible, because, even with the TC, if you really break traction on the edge of the tyre it won’t stop spinning. Whereas if you keep traction on the edge you can pick up the bike, get onto that bigger contact patch and get the benefit of the drive.

It’s funny because when I first rode the MotoGP bike I used to think, ‘F**k I’ve got to try turning this stuff off and give it a go without’.  You can ride the bike like that and you can go fast too but you end up absolutely frying your rear tyre, so you don’t get any advantage.

After that you modulate with the throttle and rear brake to reduce wheelies?

I use the rear brake in the wheelie zones too, because I prefer to use the rear brake than roll off the gas.

Tell us about braking with the leg dangle…

You can do it with or without the dangle. But I find, especially in places where you’re not really straight-braking, or you’re braking coming out from the centre of the track and then you need to get into the next corner, that if I chuck my leg out it makes the bike fall over a bit quicker, because I have to lean more on my inside hand, which gives me more leverage to counter-steer. It just helps me to flick the bike into the corner and get it onto the good part of the tyre.

What about turning once you’re in the corner – do you use the rear brake? Because mid-corner turning seems to be the most important thing for the lap time now…

Where some riders win a lot at the moment, especially when they fit a new rear tyre [i.e. in qualifying], they have more grip, so they can roll with a lot more corner speed. That’s where we don’t win a lot at the moment – we don’t add much corner speed when we put on new tyres, so that’s one place that’s hurting us a bit.

I think you’re so limited now by the performance of the rear tyre on acceleration, because everyone takes it to its peak, so the only place to really gain is having a bit more grip on the entry, so it literally drags you a bit better and helps you stop a bit faster. Then when you turn in, if you have that extra edge grip that keeps the bike planted, you can keep a couple of kays extra corner speed.

So you’re turning with corner speed?

Yeah, with the extra grip you can use a bit more angle and do everything a bit more aggressively.

Downforce aerodynamics is MotoGP’s big thing right now, so how do you ride to take advantage of that?

More than anything it becomes your bike. Before you add the aero the bike wheelies a bit more and whatnot, then you add the aero and it wheelies a lot less, but it’s a lot harder to move around.

“We’re playing with such small margins. If you brake directly behind a group you just get pulled in”

Also, it’s more critical when you have people around you because if you don’t have the force over your wings the whole bike is a bit out of balance.

Is that one reason there’s less overtaking now?

I just think it’s so tight at the moment. The bikes are so evenly matched that even in the slipstream you can barely get next to the guy in front, so whenever you’re trying to overtake you’re coming from quite far back. The days of seeing a guy get completely next to another rider while braking are gone. I’m sure it may have a bit to do with the aero, but more than anything it’s just how competitive and how even the field is at the moment.

Do you try to keep away from other riders?

If you’ve got a group in front of you it’s better to be half a metre on the inside and have clean air, or half a metre on the outside and have clean air, rather than be directly behind somebody, because if you brake directly behind you just get pulled in. It’s like when you sit up on the highway doing 160 kays and the bike slows, while if you sit up at the same speed behind a truck nothing happens. We’re playing with such small margins that we need that air resistance.

So, using the clean air isn’t only to keep your bike stable, it’s also to stop getting pulled in when you’re in the vacuum behind another bike.

And you’re also trying to keep the front from overheating?

Once the front tyre starts to overheat the first thing that goes is your stopping. Stopping gets harder, then after that the front tyre wants to close [tuck] when you’re on the edge of the tyre.

I remember you talking about tucking the front in the fast rights behind the paddock at Jerez [Turns 11 and 12] because KTM went so big on the aero this year. Tucking the front there must be pretty scary…

When I first tried our upgraded aero, the four-wing package, at Jerez, the front kept washing in fast corners and we couldn’t understand why until we’d really looked at the data. There was so much downforce on the front end at that speed that we were so much deeper in the fork stroke, which was pushing the front end away. But then we thought about it and that gave us the opportunity to lift the front end and drop the rear, so we could have a better bike for braking and the front was still in the right place in the corner to turn.”

There’s so much to learn with aero…

You need to set up the bike for it – the way we need to move our set-up or bike balance when we add or remove wings or downforce is quite dramatic.

What are the RC16’s strongest points?

The bike’s incredible consistency over race distance. Our all-out performance in qualifying isn’t quite there but our average performance is good, so our drop from the beginning to the end of races seems to be smaller than other manufacturers, so that’s something we benefit from.

Any idea why?

I think we don’t use the full potential of new tyres, which saves them for later. We don’t really put that huge force into the tyres, we don’t really put them under as much stress in the opening laps as the others might.

What are the bike’s weak points?

Our biggest issue this year has been that we don’t stop incredibly well and once we have the bike on angle we don’t turn incredibly well, which also hurts us on the exit because we don’t get the bike picked up soon enough. When you have long corners, where you can use a bit of trail braking and side slip to get the bike to turn, we’re really competitive. But in corners where it’s straight braking, turn in and pick up we get murdered.

When did that change happen because the RC16 used to be the opposite – really good at tighter corners?

It was only 2020 that this was our strong point. Since then everybody else has made a step and we’ve kind of stayed the same, we haven’t really improved in that area.

Obviously qualifying is your other weak point, which goes back to you saying the bike doesn’t find more corner speed with new tyres, so what can you do to get further up the grid?

We’ve been trying a lot of different things, but until we find a way to really stop the bike, so we can brake later, and until we find the turning we’re missing, it’s going to be difficult, because at the moment we don’t brake late enough, because we need to prepare the corner to make sure we make it around.

The other guys can brake a bit later, use that entry speed and corner speed and they’re still picking up and exiting at the same point we do. So, we’re losing in that initial phase. Once we get into the acceleration zone I think most bikes are really similar, purely because we’re all on the limit of what the rear tyre offers.

MotoGP is more stressful than ever now, because every session is essentially a qualifying session, so how do you stop getting in a panic and losing your mind?

The main thing is focus on the task at hand. Very often you start to look at the lap times and you fixate – every time you come out of the last corner you see the numbers and if it’s not what you want you try harder. But the reality is that you don’t have to try harder, you just need to maybe brake earlier, roll in faster and be easier on the throttle, so you don’t spin as much.

I think it’s always important to keep in mind that you need to find the quickest way around the track, which doesn’t necessarily mean you need to push as hard as you can. Sometimes you need to take a step back to go faster.

KTM has signed Jack Miller and Pol Espargaró for next year, so that’s three real throttle-cable pullers on the RC16. Is that the way to go, with three similar riders?

I think it could be good because I think the only reason Pol and I ride like we do is because that’s how you have to ride this bike. It’s a bike that if you sit back and just let it take you where it needs to go you’re not going to be fast. More often than not it’s a bike that you almost need to fight more than you want to. That’s the kind of style you need to be competitive with our bike at the moment.

Finally, what do you think of downforce aerodynamics, holeshot devices and ride-height devices?

I don’t see how much further we can go with downforce aero because it’s such a trade-off – what you gain in the wheelie area you lose on top speed and so on. It’s been around a while now, so the manufacturers see what aero makes things better and what makes them worse, so I don’t expect to see such dramatic changes going forward.

If we got rid of the aero we’d obviously not go from corner to corner as fast and the same goes for the ride-height devices, because all they do is kill wheelies. I quite like it all, because it stabilises our bike a lot, so you don’t need to hold on that tight on the straights, so it gives us an opportunity to rest a bit and stay solid.

What about holeshot devices?

I quite like them because I feel much safer going into Turn 1 with the front wheel on the ground.

I’d say keep everything as it is – if we keep the rules as they are now it’s OK for me.