The next MotoGP star? Who is Joe ‘no relation’ Roberts?

Joe Roberts may have missed the Moto2 podium in Qatar, but the MotoGP paddock’s latest American star – no relation to three-times 500cc world champion ‘King’ Kenny Roberts – started the race from pole position and finished just 0.131sec outside the top three.

The 22-year-old is the first American to start from pole since Ben Spies qualified fastest for the 2010 Indianapolis MotoGP race and the first American to run at the front of a Grand Prix since Spies finished second to Casey Stoner in the 2011 Valencia MotoGP race.

There are two reasons behind Roberts’ dramatic turnaround, from a best qualifying performance of 21st quickest last year and a career-best finish of tenth, in his GP debut at a rainy Brno in 2017.

First, machinery. Roberts started his full-time GP career in 2018 aboard the brand-new NTS and last year switched to KTM, when the Austrian factory got its Moto2 chassis all wrong.

This season Roberts is on a Kalex – the German chassis maker that’s won the last seven Moto2 riders and constructors’ titles – and the bike does everything he wants: turns into corners well and finishes corners well.

Roberts was fast in the Rookies but he was unable to find a Moto3 world championship ride, so during 2013 he returned to the USA to race a middleweight for the first time. The move went well: he won his first five US Supersport races, riding a CBR600 for Team Hammer, run by racer/journalist John Ulrich.

Roberts returned to Europe in 2017, contesting the Spanish CEV Moto2 series, then got his first full-time GP ride in 2018, aboard the Japanese-built NTS.

On Sunday in Qatar he battled for the lead for much of the race with Sky VR46 rider Luca Marini, then with Tetsuta Nagashima, Lorenzo Baldassarri and Enea Bastianini. He was the only front-runner to choose Dunlop’s harder compound front.

If he had gone with the softer compound, perhaps he would’ve made the podium party, but he was anything but disappointed with his weekend.

“I’m happy, but also, I’m like, man, so close!” he said. “Honestly I can’t be upset, it’s the best result I’ve ever had. We ended up going with the harder front tyre to try and conserve it, because last night in qualifying the softer front started tearing up a bit.

“I pushed so hard on that last lap to try and get the podium, but I kept losing the front in the left-hand corners because there’s not so many lefts here, so the hard tyre kept getting cold.

“It was interesting being up the front and seeing the dynamic. I think I was quite strong from the beginning to the middle; it was easy to be there. The bit I struggled with was the last five laps.

“When Baldassarri and the other guys came by they had a little bit more of something, and I didn’t want to risk throwing away such a great result because of feeling I had from the front.”

First-time winner Nagashima dedicated his victory to his late friend Shoya Tomizawa, winner of the first race of the inaugural Moto2 season, at Losail in April 2010. The 27-year-old father of three is starting his fifth season in Moto2 with his seventh team. His previous best results were close-run fifth-place finishes at last year’s Dutch TT and British GP. He is the fourth Japanese rider to win a Moto2 race, after Tomizawa, Yuki Takahashi and Takaaki Nakagami.

KTM’s Moto3 fightback starts here

KTM was beaten by Honda in the last three Moto3 riders’ and constructors’ world championships, so the Austrian factory has made big changes to its RC4 for 2020.

The chassis has been heavily revised – with a different frame, geometry and riding position – to improve turning, so riders can enter corners faster. Engine internals have also been tweaked – using knowhow from KTM’s RC16 MotoGP engine, which shares the same bore and stroke – to improve corner-exit acceleration. A new air intake and bigger airbox are important parts of a useful increase in power and torque.

“The bike has changed a lot compared to last season,” said Gino Borsoi, sporting director of the Aspar team which runs Qatar winner Albert Arenas and Stefano Nepa on RC4s. “The turning, especially into slower corners, has improved, without losing stability in fast corners.

“Last year our biggest disadvantage against the Hondas was on the straights. This year’s engine gives better corner exits – in the 20 to 60 per cent throttle opening area – so we have closed the gap. Mid-range is so important, because now that we have enough bottom power to get us out of the corners, we can run a longer gearbox for more top speed.”

Honda’s NSF2020RW has undergone minimal changes for 2020, except for the gearbox, which reverts to the 2018 design. And although KTM won the opening race of the 2020 Moto3 season, NSF250RW machines filled the next eight finishing positions, all of them crossing the finish line less than a second behind Arenas, with runner-up John McPhee failing by 0.053sec to draft past the Spaniard on the run to the finish line.