Brad Binder's 'awesome' day in Austria: one of MotoGP's greatest wins

Pedro Acosta‘s win at the Red Bull Ring last weekend ended a three-and-a-half-year drought for KTM, and it did so on the same weekend Brad Binder, the last man to give the team a MotoGP victory, was likely riding his final Austrian Grand Prix.

One KTM rider arriving, another fading out: fitting, then, that the timing pushed Binder back into a familiar retelling of his own greatest afternoon at this track.

That afternoon was 2021, and it remains the standout for a career built on chaos: a soggy, 28-lap Styrian Grand Prix that Binder won by staying out on slicks when five of the sport’s best — Marc Márquez among them — gambled on wet tyres and came in.

It’s the second and last time the South African has stood on a MotoGP top step, and it will be brought up, gently or not, every time this grand prix returns to the calendar.

This year the questions carried extra weight: Binder leaves KTM for WorldSBK and BMW in 2027, ending an association with the manufacturer that stretches back to 2015 — wins in all three grand prix categories, a rookie MotoGP victory at Brno in 2020, and six seasons in the premier class that never quite delivered what 2021 promised.

MotoGP has adopted sprints, altered the qualifying format, and tweaked the start-grid procedure since then — and may do so again for 2027 — but for gripping chaos there is still nothing better than a weather-hit flag-to-flag race, a system now over 20 years old that lets riders swap bikes mid-race as conditions change.

Round 11 of an 18-race 2021 season, still shaped by pandemic restrictions, arrived at Red Bull Ring for the second time that week. What happened next is the reason Binder is still asked about it five years on.

Binder, South Africa’s most decorated grand prix rider (and 2016 Moto3 world champion), was midway through his second MotoGP campaign in 2021. He had already earned a place in KTM lore by giving the company its maiden MotoGP spurs in 2020 as a rookie by winning the Czech Grand Prix at Brno. It was only KTM’s fourth term in the premier class, compared to the 60 years Honda has accrued, 63 for Yamaha, 11 as a works team by Aprilia and 23 for Ducati.

2021 was tougher. He posted less than a dozen top-five finishes; one of those coming at Red Bull Ring with fourth place for the Styrian Grand Prix and the first of a double-header that summer. The circuit sits at the gentle sloping foot of a shallow mountain, and the weather can change swiftly. At the second Red Bull Ring date, he was riding just inside the top 10 and in a race where eventual world champion Fabio Quartararo was working magic on the factory Yamaha, Valentino Rossi briefly held a 200th career podium finish and Marc Márquez would eventually crash.

Then, with four laps to go, the grey skies started to loosen their load. The pack bunched, riders struggled through sectors that were clearly damper than others. All notion of pace, rhythm and consistent lap times went out the window as lean angles decreased with the caution. On lap 24 of 28, the first five riders, led at close quarters by Márquez, decided to swing into the Red Bull Ring pitlane.

“The approach is always the same: to stay on the slicks as long as possible,” Binder’s crew chief at the time, Andres Madrid (now leading Enea Bastianini’s crew), recalled to Motor Sport in Austria last weekend.

“The rider decides when he wants to come in. The only thing we can do is look at the sectors and advise him if the others are pitting, especially when you see a rider like Marc Márquez, who is usually the reference, doing it, then we send some messages. It is more like information than instruction. They make the decision and all we can do is have the other bike ready.”

Márquez, followed by Pecco Bagnaia, Jorge Martin, Joan Mir and Quartararo, would glance to his left while touring into the pitlane. It’s hard not to imagine there being a look of surprise under his tinted visor as Binder motored on past and into the lead. The others leapt onto their second motorcycles with wet trim and tyres and rejoined the fray as the rain intensified.

“I thought the guys had jumped it one lap too early,” Binder remembers now, with a sly grin. “It was not wet enough yet. I did some quiet math and decided to go to the end. Just try to survive.””

“I think there were only three laps to go and, in that moment, it was hard to say whether it was worth it,” Madrid says. “If Brad came in a lap later, then it was ‘game over’ because he was already quite slow and the others would have taken advantage on wets. I was outside in the pitwall canopy with Johnny [Eyre], his mechanic, and after he stayed out I said ‘OK, what about the next one [pulling him in]?’ and he turned to me and said something like ‘just let it ride!’ There was nothing more we could do.”

Binder teetered on worn, slick rubber as the rain poured and, critically, the working temperature of his equipment plummeted. “The grip was so bad, and the front brakes weren’t working,” Binder said. “It was a blessing because the engine braking alone was enough for it to lock. I was going into each corner sideways. I was standing on the rear brake but the engine braking was too much.”

Binder’s lap times dropped by more than 10 seconds and all the while the quintet who had opted for change were slicing through others who had gambled like the South African. The margin shrank from 30 seconds to 10. Bagnaia, in particular, was on the pipe, and Binder, who had won at Red Bull Ring also in Moto2, was riding on pure feeling.

“There wasn’t really one corner where I thought ‘oh, that’s it, I’ve gone’,” he recalled. “The cool thing with the Red Bull Ring is that it’s mainly straights and there is run-off everywhere, so if you blow a corner then you are kinda fine; there is space. My main goal was to go as fast as I could on the straight and as slow as I dared in the corners. As soon as I could bring it bolt upright, then I’d hook it. It was my plan for the last two laps.”

For understanding the full extent of inappropriate Michelins, Binder was in uncharted territory. “In those days the 10-78 tyres were the hard option – but not the hardest – for most of the tracks,” Madrid explains. “Back then the bikes were less demanding on the tyres. We could see some other manufacturers, like Ducati, preferred to stay with a medium option whereas we were one of the brands switching to the harder front compound.

“When it rained at Red Bull Ring we were using that tyre and in those conditions it was completely out of the [operating] window and it locked a lot when up straight and had no grip. It was super-super sketchy. In Austria we also raced with the bigger brakes and those were out of temperature too. Carbon does not work at all when it’s cold. It’s like pulling a rock-solid lever and nothing happens. I’m sure Brad was pulling all he could to stop the bike.”

“What he did – on that track, in the rain and with the temperatures dropping – was amazing,” Michelin’s two-wheel motorsport manager Piero Taramasso said.

“The rear is easier to manage because you can slide and you can control but if you lose the front you crash. Brad was able to keep a minimum temperature in the tyre. Front tyres tend to work at around 110 degrees and I’m sure in those conditions the temperature would have dropped to 35-40, and you have to keep pushing to keep this minimum. If you go lower than that then for sure you crash.”

Astoundingly, Binder was not completely backing off. “I’m sure I was still making over 300km/h (186mph) [on the straight]. It felt normal in that way. I just had to keep it under the spin target. Especially on that last lap. You had to roll the gas all the time to keep it going.”

“I was watching with one eye open because I was waiting for the crash to come,” Madrid says. “But it was only two laps. We saw some other riders were coming fast and Bagnaia made a mistake, so we got lucky as well from that situation. We were lucky not to be caught; another half lap they would have been with us.

“I’ve been working in racing for 26 years, many on two and four wheels, but it was crazy because in parts of the track there was some standing water, some puddles!” he continued. “We know that some slick tyres in the damp – if the temperatures are high – then they can work, but standing water with slicks is just aquaplaning because there is no tread to help evacuate the water. Honestly, it was unbelievable. You needed balls to do this.”

Despite a mighty scare sideways into Turn 3 on the last lap and again when he ran off track on the final corner, Binder made it to the line almost 10 seconds ahead of a rampaging Bagnaia and KTM, clad in Covid-era face masks, went bananas.

“I’ve watched it back and more than once I’ve thought ‘I was so lucky’,” Binder says. “Somehow, I stayed on the bad boy. It felt like I was putting all my chips on black and the ball falls into black! Normally when you win a race then you kinda know you are going to win: you can see you have extra pace, and you know it is going to happen but you’re not sure how you will do it. That day I had no idea but, somehow, it worked.”

“One of the first things I did afterwards was to check the front tyre temperature and the brakes and both were really, really cold,” Madrid adds.

“These kinds of things don’t happen every season,” states Taramasso. “They happen every ten-fifteen years. We know that our tyre compound works in those conditions because there is some silica inside and it does well in wet conditions. In damp patches we know it is OK, in humidity it is OK, but with rain, puddles and standing water?”

Five years on and Binder would finish sixth at Red Bull Ring; eight seconds behind Acosta and for his highest classification of 2026 so far.