Is Pedro Acosta a Fabio Quartararo or is he a Marc Marquez?
There are a lot of questions, existential questions, for KTM's MotoGP programme to answer - but among them this one is a deceptively big one.
The extent of Acosta's willingness to put his faith into KTM in any kind of medium term is such a massive question mark, and KTM's recent 'rescue' investor Bajaj Auto would probably genuinely be wise to take stock of this before any decisions are made on KTM's MotoGP future overall.
Acosta is contracted to ride for KTM in 2025 and 2026. There is no KTM programme confirmed into the new rules in 2027 (though KTM has argued nobody's programme is confirmed into 2027) - but right now it's the RC16 that's the concern rather than a hypothetical '27 bike.
Before Jorge Martin - a fellow client of MotoGP power player Albert Valera - set off the ongoing Aprilia stir that he intends to leave after this season, Acosta was the central figure in the rider market.
At one point that status began to outstrip the actual on-track performances, leading to a groundswell of understandable - if premature - feeling that Acosta has queue-jumped a bit in terms of his importance as a rider. A bit of a Black Panther-style 'is this your king?!' outcry as Acosta gets shown up at KTM by known-quantity Maverick Vinales.
Last time out at Silverstone, nobody at KTM was showing up Acosta, and this maybe emboldened him further - or maybe infuriated him. One way or the other, he spent the whole weekend speaking in very blunt terms about the state of the MotoGP project. He would occasionally sugarcoat it with talk of KTM (the brand) or contractual commitments, but then he'd twist the knife again.
Acosta described the RC16 as "clearly not good enough" on Friday and never really detuned the rhetoric from there.
A 14th-to-eighth run in the sprint was "not what I wanted for my career, it's not what I'm working for".
"I will do this and next year. But I can't come here just to make laps. I want to come here to compete. Even if it's a top five. But I want to fight with other brands."
Then, Sunday's Grand Prix was "a race of hopelessness". With the reiteration that "I don't want to come here with KTM and just burn fuel".
A Silverstone overreaction?
KTM was hardly atrocious at Silverstone - rather, it's just been left no margin for weekends like these by the concession-aided improvements of the likes of Yamaha and Honda.
And this was ultimately a weird weekend. Ducati looked more vulnerable than in aeons, choosing the right front tyre compound was a headache up and down the grid and the on-and-off wind was unsettling some bikes (Ducati, KTM) more than others (Yamaha).
It won't always be like this.
"Of course this track is very particular, very unique," stressed Maverick Vinales, who for much of the season has been KTM's most 'sunshine-and-rainbows' rider by far, which probably correlates with the fact he's also generally been its most impressive rider.
"Grip on edge is not our strength. In this track you need a lot of grip on the edge to get out of corners. You have really round corners with a lot of banking [lean angle]. For me, we need to forget this track and concentrate on Aragon. Because this for sure wasn't the real potential out of the bike.
"We need to try to improve details - but for me it's this track that doesn't suit the bike. In Le Mans and in Jerez as well, we were quite fast. We need to try to not get very upset by this result, and to move on to the next one."
Brad Binder, by far KTM's longest-tenured rider of the current line-up, has his own demons to sort out before he can worry too much about the bike's upper bound of potential.
"I mean, it's not ideal, for sure!" he said when asked by The Race about the current situation for him and the even-more-embattled Enea Bastianini.
"Don't get me wrong. I mean, f**k me, I know I'm not meant to be racing in 15th position. But it is what it is right now. That's literally my level.
"I feel like I could go with the boys a bit in the beginning and then I start having these funny moments, and the last thing I wanted was to not finish four races in a row.
"I was riding around just to the limit that I felt, I had big moments as well, and I said 'what the hell am I doing?'. Little bit tricky, I need to find some confidence again - and I'm sure we'll figure it out."
Acosta does not share that confidence. He felt at Silverstone that his feeling with the bike is good now and that he's seen the bike's potential, and that it is not sufficient.
Impatience?
"I signed the contract to come fight for a championship," Acosta said. "That is clear. Fight - even if lose - but fight.
"The problems are not something new. Maybe this year the laptimes are more closer, faster, this and that, it's even worse for us - maybe having more brands being competitive, like [Johann] Zarco coming back on the podium [with Honda], Yamahas and these things, are even harder for us.
"It looks like we're not so good like we were thinking. And maybe this means [we need] to change things.
"I read that Yamaha brought a new chassis, they made a pole position, and he [Fabio Quartararo] was going to win the race."
"I don't accept [this] and I'm not patient," he said in another answer. "Opportunity passes once in life. I will not take all life to be a champion in this championship. I need help from the factory - that's it."
When it was tactfully pointed out - by friend of The Race MotoGP Podcast Lewis Duncan - that Acosta, who was speaking on his 21st birthday, had time on his side, Acosta met that assertion with an impressive answer.
"You are young until you are not. You know? Many stars in this championship grew so fast, and disappeared as fast. Freddie Spencer, you remember that guy? Won two titles, then had something in the arm, never came back the same again."
Better known to the modern MotoGP audience as the erstwhile chief steward, Spencer won the second of his two 500cc titles aged 23 - and was effectively done as a top-level rider aged 24, old injuries catching up to him, new injuries compounding his strife.
It is a big example to bring up, and underlines a risk KTM should've anticipated coming out of 2024 - that Acosta's ambition may quickly overtake its development rate.
All the while he will not dare speak publicly about the idea of a future elsewhere. "I believe, like you cannot believe, in this project," he insisted at Silverstone.
"These guys - the work they made in Moto3 was awesome," he eulogised. "The work that they made in the last years of Moto2 was awesome. How they are preparing the Dakar, how they are preparing the motocross, how they are preparing the supercross, the enduro.
"I mean, these guys are f***ing winners. And somehow we are missing something in MotoGP that we have to find.
"These guys really know how to win championships, how to go to the most challenging races in the world and win there, or dominate, whatever. I mean, look at how [Daniel] Sanders did the Dakar - with all the respect in the world, it looked like he was riding with one hand. These guys are winners - sooner or later we will make a really big step. But I need this step soon. The soonest they can."
An honest clarity
Acosta's right. It's as simple as that.
There is a bit of dramatism to invoking Spencer, and maybe if Acosta finds himself on the receiving end of a Spencer-level wear-and-tear he has bigger problems anyway than the number of MotoGP championships.
But...maybe no, not really. Maybe this is kind of the only thing that matters. Maybe this is the implicit agreement we as the viewing audience sign with the riders - we watch because you guys convince us that this achievement, kind of meaningless in any real-world sense, is actually the most important thing that could ever happen to you.
Acosta is a future MotoGP champion at 21. He does have time on his side. But riders get injured. Injuries cannot be guaranteed to heal like you want them to heal. And seasons are so, so, so long these days.
You don't have to go all the way back to Spencer. Dani Pedrosa came into MotoGP aged 20 and as a consecutive winner of titles in 125cc, 250cc and 250cc again, and it took him until just his fourth premier-class start to win in MotoGP. How many MotoGP titles did he think he was going to have after that maiden Chinese Grand Prix win in 2006? And...once again, how many does he have now that it's all said and done? Zero.
That ticking clock that Marc Marquez felt at the age of 30, that pushed him to tear up a lucrative Honda contract in favour of a real chance at winning again - Acosta is no fool for feeling it at 21. For what it's worth, neither is Jorge Martin - whose example I suspect weighs on Acosta's mind, too - a fool for feeling it at 27.
Quartararo's felt it, too, while 'slumming it' on a stagnant Yamaha M1. But alternatives were uncertain, and the money on offer was good, and the roadmap in front looked sensible. And the title he already had from 2021 helped very much. "It's much more easy," he said last off-season.
That patience is paying off for him right now, but it still hasn't definitively paid off - and there are never guarantees.
For Marquez, the 'I'm champion' factor - six times over - still wasn't enough. Or maybe it tipped him the other way, into a place where he felt like there was nothing to lose.
So is Acosta a Quartararo or a Marquez? Is he desperate for a reason to stay, or just waiting for the first contractual opportunity to go free, whether that's 2026 somehow or 2027? Is his true view of KTM that of KTM the motorsport juggernaut or KTM the company that's just left self-administration and is repaying its creditors 30 cents per Euro?
Or is it a KTM that has built genuinely good bikes since its arrival to MotoGP, but never a provable championship contender?
Only he and those closest to him truly know. We can only read the clues.
But I don't think those clues are pointing in the direction KTM would want them to.
