KTM’s new MotoGP team boss: ‘We are lucky bastards to be here!’

“I broke my left hip and still have a lot of metal in that leg. When I was in hospital I decided I wouldn’t race again, so in 1997 I started my own team with the target to be in grand prix racing.

“One of my best friends, who also did ice racing and roadracing, was the father of Mika Kallio [who has now won more GPs than any other Finn]. Mika went everywhere with us from the age of three or four, then when I stopped racing I started coaching him and in 2001 we did our first GPs together.”

Ajo has been in the MotoGP paddock ever since. Ajo Motorsport won its first GP in 2003, with Italian Andrea Ballerini, and its first world championship in 2008, with Frenchman Mike Di Meglio.

Two years later Ajo won backing from Red Bull and signed a 17-year-old Spaniard, by the name of Marc Márquez. The youngster dominated the 2010 125cc world championship, establishing Ajo Motorsport as a real force for developing young talent.

Another two years later he hooked up with KTM for the new Moto3 world championship, taking the title with German Sandro Cortese. In 2015 he expanded his team to contest two classes, taking the Moto2 crown at his first attempt, with Johann Zarco.

Ajo was becoming an unstoppable force. In 2016 his team won the Moto2/Moto3 double, with Zarco and Brad Binder, a feat he repeated last year with 17-year-old Pedro Acosta and Remy Gardner, son of 1987 500cc world champion Wayne. And at the same time he is personal manager to several riders, including factory Ducati MotoGP rider Jack Miller and Aprilia’s Maverick Viñales. Perhaps no one in the paddock knows more than Ajo.

Ajo has enjoyed such huge success with so many youngsters that people assume he must have some kind of magic formula.

He laughs at the suggestion.

“This is what I say to all my riders, ‘Hey, every morning, wake yourself up like this…’”

Ajo slaps himself in the face – quite violently! – and continues…

“And say to yourself, ‘We are lucky bastards to be here!’. That is what I say to Pedro, to Remy, to Jack, to everyone, every day.

“I think my riders respect me but sometimes they are laughing at my phrases, like, ‘Racing is simple when you keep it simple’.

“My job now is mainly business, with many connections with sponsors and partners, but for sure the most enjoyable part is working with my riders.”

I ask if this is the work of a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst.

“I cannot say this, but if you say so!” he replies. “The rider needs someone he trusts and can be a bit like his psychiatrist. It could be his crew chief, his manager, his rider coach or his team manager.”

If this talk of racetrack psychoanalysis sounds over the top, remember that five-times 500cc world champion Mick Doohan once said, “Motorcycle racing is 90% in the mind”.

It takes a very special mindset to ride on the very edge, week in, week out, pushing yourself to the limit, risking everything, whatever the track, whatever the weather, because there are very few sports that are more dangerous than motorcycle racing.

“Mentally this is one of the hardest sports, maybe the toughest, because there are so many different areas the rider has to handle.

“Controlling emotions, whatever is happening around you, is one of the biggest things. I’m always a bit worried when someone brings in a sports psychologist from outside. I think that’s really risky. Maybe they know about football or gymnastics, but I don’t want someone from outside talking to my riders. Maybe they know many things but maybe they don’t have any idea what we do here.

“I try to teach my riders, even though I’m not sure I could ever do the mental side of racing myself. I try to teach them things I’ve done wrong, also learning from them to understand weak points, then trying to teach that to others.

“People say to me, ‘Ah, Aki, you have an incredible team!’, but I don’t say this. We just try to use our experience and try to keep everything as simple as possible for the riders. The main point is always to focus on the right things at the right moment.

“You cannot always find the way to focus on the right points, but when you keep it simple the rider’s mind and the minds of your staff are more free, so they have a better chance to focus.

“Year by year as I get older I try to understand more and more how the human mind works. People always ask me what I teach my riders. And I say, ‘Why don’t you ask me what I learn from them?!’. If I learn from them I’m able to give them more.”

After 2010 Márquez became arguably the greatest rider of all time, so did Ajo realise this kid was something super-special?

“Marc was very young when we started working together, he didn’t even have all his grown-up teeth! With him I saw everything really quickly. The first thing I saw when I sat down with him was that he was so calm that you felt like you were working with a 35 or a 40-year-old. He was so smart, experienced and humble. He opened my eyes a lot and I learned many things from him.

“If he learned anything from me it was maybe to show his emotions, to get free, let’s say. For example, crying. I taught him that. When you feel like crying, then you need to cry, because then you are free and you are ready to focus again.”

MotoGP is now so close, so demanding, so stressful, so pitiless, across all three classes, that riders cry more than you might imagine.

“When I signed Remy for the 2021 Moto2 season I told him, ‘You are always talking about your weight [Gardner is bigger than most GP riders] and making excuses about how you can’t win. You can’t trust yourself when you talk like this!’

“I said, ‘I trust that you can win but I’ll only sign a contract with you when you show me that you trust yourself and stop talking all this f**king bullshit!’. He was crying, here in my office in the team truck. This was a very important moment. He was shocked and he said to his father, ‘This guy is a f**king bastard!’. But I think at this moment we created something special between us.”

So do you have to break riders to make them?

“Sometimes I feel I have done it too much, that I’ve come close to breaking someone to get started, but sometimes I feel this was the key. I’m not saying that it works all the time but sometimes I feel that I needed to do this to start a good co-operation: stop all the bullshit! If a rider wants us to work together and if he shows us what he is prepared to do then I’m ready to give him everything.”

Ajo enjoys his success but doesn’t necessarily rate his team’s eight world titles and 100-plus GP victories as his greatest memories.

“The best memories aren’t only the championships, maybe not at all. Many times we have had challenges with riders and maybe the greatest memories are what we’ve achieved after those challenging times, like last year with Remy, for example.

“Or with Jack. Jack isn’t a world champion yet but it was very challenging with him when he was young. He was the wild guy coming from Australia. All the stories! Maybe I can tell you them in 20 years! Finally Jack made a real change in his lifestyle to become a real sportsman, really focused on his work. This is something that makes me happy.”

Ajo’s two 2021 world champions, Gardner and Acosta, both moved up a class this year [2022], Gardner to MotoGP, with the Tech 3 KTM team, and Acosta to Moto2, still with Ajo Motorsport.

Both had bruising starts to 2022. Many people had branded Acosta the new Márquez after he won last year’s Moto3 crown, then wondered if he’s really any good after he struggled in his first few races on a bigger, faster Moto2 bike. At May’s French GP he scored his first Moto2 pole and two weeks later at Mugello his first win.

“When people said Pedro wasn’t having an easy time I wondered what they were thinking if they expect more! What 17-year-old boy should show more than what he’s showing?!

“I always say to young riders, ‘Give yourself time!’ When you have difficult moments you learn how to handle difficult moments and to get through them, then you are ready to reach the top one day. So I feel that someone like Pedro needs these difficult moments, because they are necessary and important. If everything happens too easily for a rider then I’m very, very worried.”

He thumps the table to make the point.

“I always get emotional and enthusiastic when I talk about these things, because this is the part of racing I really enjoy. I enjoy many things and I’m so thankful for what I have but this is the one part I really, really enjoy, working with the minds of the riders.”

Ajo is almost certainly the hardest-working man in MotoGP, with dozens of team staff and riders to look after, plus the riders he personally manages, like Miller and Viñales.

“When things are busy I may be in my office talking to one of my riders who has a problem and maybe there are two or three of my other riders knocking at the door!”

Finally, the obvious question: Ajo has had so much success in the smaller classes why isn’t he in MotoGP, the class of kings, not of princes?

“Of course I’m interested. I’ve had some opportunities to be in MotoGP, as a team manager of a factory team, but I’m used to running my own team. I enjoy so much working with my people and I’m so thankful that KTM and Red Bull give me the freedom to run my team like I want.

“I’m also lucky that KTM somehow allow me to work with Jack and Maverick, even though they don’t ride for KTM [obviously Viñales will ride for KTM next year]. I think they can see that this is something extra – I’m learning a bit everywhere and understanding things a little bit more and that helps me here with my team.

“In many ways I’m still doing what I was doing when I was 11 – working in a technical sport, working with riders, doing some business – so my mother still asks me, ‘When will you get a real job?!’.

Finally, what does Ajo think of Acosta? From a 2023 interview…

“Pedro is an old-school guy – he’s one of the last cowboys: him, Brad and Jack. They are different to many of the others who complain and focus on the wrong things. He says he has big balls, but I think his biggest talents are understanding life, keeping his feet on the ground and being old-school.

“To be this age and doing these things, sometimes I think, this can’t be real! We have done three seasons together and I’ve only needed to be tough with Pedro two or three times – when he forgot what’s important and what needs to be done – and this is not normal with most young guys, who need to be told quite often.”