Pedro Acosta secured his first MotoGP victory in Austria, turning a difficult weekend into the breakthrough result he had been waiting for. The Spaniard entered the premier class in 2024, when KTM was in the second season of a winless run that had begun at the end of 2022. The result therefore mattered beyond Acosta’s personal milestone: it also ended a long wait for KTM as a factory.

Acosta had to recover from two setbacks before reaching the top step. He threw away a 2.5-second advantage in Saturday’s Sprint with a crash, then fell again in Sunday morning’s Warm Up. In the main race, he climbed from fifth at the end of lap one to first by the finish. Fabio Quartararo, the 2021 MotoGP world champion, told Crash.net that Acosta had been the quickest rider across the weekend and fully merited the victory.

Quartararo’s own afternoon went in the opposite direction. The Monster Energy Yamaha rider qualified for a ninth-place start and finished 16th. He tried to stay with Francesco Bagnaia early on, while knowing that the pace would consume his tyres, and did not expect to remain in the points. His strategy was to attack during the opening ten laps and take something from that part of the race rather than spend the rest of it circulating without grip.

The Yamaha rider said the rear tyre was effectively finished by the closing stages, as it had been in the Sprint, and that the amount of wheelspin was substantial. He also mentioned being passed by Fabio Di Giannantonio and compared his final laps with Izan Guevara’s late-race situation. Before KTM’s Austrian victory, Yamaha had the longest active winless sequence among the factories; Quartararo’s victory in Germany in July 2022 was still its most recent one. Crash.net reported both the race details and Quartararo’s comments.