Heir to Márquez? How Pedro Acosta is coming for the MotoGP title

The Japanese Grand Prix was a celebration of Marc Márquez and deservedly so. The looming red No93 cloud that was forming over MotoGP at the beginning of the calendar year finally smothered the championship like some Flash Gordon-style eclipse. Márquez the Merciless wrapped the 76th premier class title after 11 wins and a further four podiums from 17 outings (not tallying 14 Sprint victories) and flooded social media channels with content of tears and joy.

Motegi was all about Marc, and 2025 has been all about Marc. Even when not winning he was producing antics like running off the grid at the Circuit of The Americas and sending MotoGP into a frenzy. He’s been the central chat topic. When asked by a Spanish journalist for a pre-race statement about Márquez, KTM’s Pedro Acosta testily answered: “You can read from the thousand interviews I’ve done what I think about his year.”

On Sunday though, and after the Márquez bubble had reached full bulbosity, the 21-year-old was not immune to the emotion and significance of the occasion. “We’ve been talking about it for a while but even I enjoyed the celebration,” he said to Spanish colleagues. “One of the best sporting comebacks in history. I was emotional watching the video so congratulations to him and everyone around him. They all suffered with him.”

Such is the nature of racing (to the point where Márquez himself will eventually have to turn his head and thoughts to this weekend’s Indonesia Grand Prix) that the emphasis and the questions soon roll to ‘What’s next?’. Specifically: who can beat Márquez, who will be the next Márquez, who could be the next icon? Here, Acosta’s name sticks out. Why? The combination of age (he’s the second youngest on the 22-rider MotoGP grid and has seven career podiums in just his second year), his results (he’s one of just three riders to have won Moto3 and Moto2 world championships and claimed both in just three seasons, quicker than anybody else in history and the youngest to do so) and the obvious ability (he diced with Márquez at Qatar last year on his MotoGP debut and was on the box in just his second Grand Prix).

Acosta has many of the clichéd elements in place for success, apart from perhaps the mechanical package to defeat the Ducatis. Aside from Marco Bezzecchi‘s brief dalliances with the Aprilia, Acosta’s KTM has been the only constant nuisance within the top five of MotoGP races and amidst the Italian throng of GP25s and GP24s. In Motegi, he throttled the RC16 to second place in the early stages before the KTM’s frustrating tendency to misuse the Michelin tyres came back to bite him. A braking issue into Turn 1 sent him off track.

Acosta had high expectations for his second season in MotoGP in 2025 and spent the first phase of the year with a dissatisfied demeanour when it took six races for the team and the brand to break into the top four. His regular public calls for KTM to improve the bike were accompanied by underlying gossip that he was looking for ways out of his deal with the Austrian brand for 2026, particularly as rumours bubbled about KTM’s future in MotoGP. Once it became clear that there was no effective exit strategy and KTM was continuing in the series for ’26, and his options were limited (especially with MotoGP set for a sea change in 2027 so the timing for a switch was risky) progress followed.

“After a tough start we calmed down and really started to work,” explains crew chief Paul Trevathan. “The things I asked him to improve on during the winter…now we really see it. Even now, he’s working during the week to offer something ‘new’ when he comes to the track. He looks to others, like Maverick [Viñales], whose speed on fast, open corners is phenomenal. You have to somehow understand [MotoGP] and this is what’s fantastic from Pedro.”

The No37 motorcycle improved and became more competitive and in Czechia, Austria, Hungary and Catalunya his results read: 3-4-2-4 . He would have surely had another top five in Misano if his chain had not performed a cobra dance. In Japan, despite KTM’s difficulties at Motegi for all their riders, he invaded the Sprint podium on Saturday.

Acosta’s high-lean style and technique, as well as the fizzling surge through MotoGP’s GP class structure, have brought countless Márquez comparisons, but it’s the Murcian’s mentality that also ‘marcs’ him out.

“It’s incredible,” Trevathan buzzes. “You usually get a first impression of somebody when you meet them and then you get to know them: the first impression with Pedro was ‘wow’…and it is still wow. The desire, the ‘want’, the work ethic, the way he can take in information. We call rookies like him ‘SpongeBob’ at the beginning but he’s still like that, and the way he can absorb, analyse and make a click is the freaky thing.”

More clichés: Acosta seems much older and confident than he should be for a young man at the elite level while surrounded by expectation, temptation and distraction. We talk on the eve of the Catalan Grand Prix, where the Andorra resident has already been pulled pillar-to-post by Red Bull, KTM and other sponsorship commitments. He sits down with a sigh but holds eye contact in a steely way and rattles through his burgeoning English vocabulary without pause or qualms for mistakes. He’s intense.

“I don’t know why I wanted to win… But I know I hated to lose!” he says of his youth and the countless hours spent on motorcycles in southern Spain. He was already in the FIM JuniorGP series (the world championship’s feeder class along with the Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup) when he was 14. He owned the Rookies at 16 and won in only his second Moto3 race at the same age. “I spent a lot of time [racing] and I lost a lot of things that a young guy would normally do just for one target. OK, I took this…lifestyle, but I wanted a result for it.

“I don’t know where it comes from,” he says of this urge, “but maybe it’s also like how I see the racing now: everyone is so friendly and so nice to each other. They go to have dinners…I don’t see racing like this. Maybe it is how I see competition…rather than thinking about how competitive I can be.”

Background counts. It always does. Marc and Alex Márquez came from a motorcycle racing environment with both of their parents involved in the local Motoclub Segre. Acosta’s family are constant at the races, his older sister Miriam is his PA, while his grandmother has even waded through the pitbox to plant a kiss on her grandson during MotoGP action.

Acosta’s links to KTM are stronger than people might assume. He personally called motorsports director Pit Beirer while in the Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup programme to ask for a bike for training as his family could not afford the outlay. Acosta was signed on a long-term deal and has come all the way through the Red Bull KTM ‘GP Academy’.

“My father was not pushing me to do anything,” Pedro says, dismissing any idea of paternal overbearingness. “I remember one race we did; I finished fifth, and I cried like hell. Maybe I was seven, something like this. We went to the car to go home and, f**k me, it was the first time I’ve ever seen my father that hard with me. He was screaming, ‘I don’t bring you here to see you cry! Start to enjoy this or it’s all finished!’ From that day I thought, ‘OK, you won’t see me cry again, don’t worry’.”

I wonder if Acosta might see, or have seen, racing as playful. Especially given his age. “It depends if you ask me this at the beginning of the season or now!” he answers with a big smile. “I still love it. If I didn’t then I could not go training on a bike five days a week in the same place with the same people. I enjoy it a lot with the team. We have dinner, we go karting. You spend a lot of time with these people, and you have to be honest enough with them – and yourself – to keep enjoying because it’s not easy when you are struggling. Then you only think ‘f**k, why am I not performing?! Blah, blah…’ and, in the end, the solution might be much easier than what you think.”

Pedro’s occasional flippancy with his comments and his directness with the media can give him this arrogant veneer. It feels like there’s bravado. How much of that is the real him? And how much has been sculpted by a world where your ‘window’ is only open for so long, and your saddle is always under threat?

“For sure I am one of those that grew up in the championship. I was 16, alone, no mum or dad around and I had to find the way to survive. This was cool, let’s say. You cannot imagine how much the team of Aki [Ajo, former Moto3 and Moto3 team manager and now in MotoGP] helped me to grow up and taught me wrong from right, bad from better. Maybe my character is quite hard and direct sometimes, but this [points at himself] is 100%. What I am, is what I show. You cannot make this job for 20 years being somebody you are not. If I like you then it’s OK, if I don’t then it’s OK also, but at the end of the day I show you who I am and you can decide to stay or not, be my fan or not. I just go direct.”

“Sometimes it gets him in trouble and sometimes it’s misunderstood,” Trevathan offers. “He’s not putting on the bravado; that is the guy! What he thinks comes out of his mouth. I love that directness because it saves a lot of time and energy. We can talk super-frankly to each other and sometimes you can push him a lot and he can tell you why he thinks a certain way. I think there are a quite a few people at elite level that think or feel something but cannot explain it. Pedro can explain why he needs a fix or why he’s thinking a certain way. This part is really, really good, and also makes you think ‘Is this a problem on the bike? Or a preference?’”

“I remember in Aki’s team: that was hard for me,” Acosta continues, expanding on the unrelenting and simplistic approach that the fabled Fin asks of his staff and riders. Another one of Ajo’s charges, José Antonio Rueda, is currently laying waste to Moto3.

“You need to be like a rock there [taps the table]. When you are in the mood of the team it is super-nice. I was also very shy: hard to believe, I know! I remember getting to the first test…I learned fast that either I start to f**k the others, or they will f**k me. Being in Aki’s team quite long made me strong in that way: how I think, how I speak about things and how direct I am. I know it can be good and it can also made things worse…but it’s made me the person I am now.”

Results (or the lack of them because Acosta is clearly very impatient to log his first MotoGP class victory, something that Marc Márquez managed in his second appearance and peers like Fabio Quartararo did in their second season) and set-up gripes fashion Acosta’s mood.

He’s become half-adept at putting on the smiley face and trotting out phrases like “we take the positives” or “is it what it is” throughout 2025 but he comes across as a young man who sometimes has trouble curbing his piques of frustration. “I just swallow them,” he explains of the low moments. “There is no other way. I mean, you have your team [for support] if there is an issue, and it’s not the fault of the team, then you just have to swallow it. When you grow up that fast, you miss many moments of life when you might be open with your feelings and so on…you just eat it and wait for another day.”