Rennie Scaysbrook | May 18, 2019

It’s year three for KTM and their multi-million dollar MotoGP effort, and we got the very rare chance to sit down with Technical Director of MotoGP Sebastian Risse to see how it’s going.

Sebastien Risse with his number-one charger Pol Espargaro. “Pol squeezes the bike to the maximum on the brakes. If I look at the data, I’m really scared.”

The saying may go “third time’s a charm,” but that isn’t necessarily the case for KTM and its Red Bull-backed MotoGP project. In a time where MotoGP racing has never been as competitive, it already seems a lifetime ago the orange-colored powerhouse arrived on the grid in 2017. All bright-eyed and full of hope, the Austrians experienced a severe reality check in a 2018 season where the only real highpoint came at the soaking wet Valencia Grand Prix when Pol Espargaro outlasted all but two riders and put the RC16 on the podium in third place for a debut team podium.

Much expectation has been leveled at KTM in year three, not least of which from team partners Red Bull, who, it must be said, understands the enormity of the task at hand but nevertheless wants to see strong, consistent results for their investment.

The 2019 season has seen the arrival of Johann Zarco to partner incumbent Pol Espargaro, and the formation of a direct satellite team in the former Yamaha outfit of Tech3, doubling the number of bikes on the grid and thus the available data available to KTM’s young Technical Director, Sebastian Risse.

At the recent Circuit of The Americas MotoGP round, KTM invited a select group of journalists behind closed doors to chat with Risse about the MotoGP program and the challenges they face in getting the orange bikes up the front.

Photography by Gold & Goose

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Sebastian, has the bike changed much between this year and last?

We did quite a big revision during the year last year. We wanted to reduce the risk you take when you make bigger changes over the winter. In the end, you learn when it’s too late if there was something better. As we are still a young group and a young project, we wanted to avoid this.

Over the winter, we were working with new riders. That means we must adjust a lot of things to their requests. But it’s fundamental changes. Still, the bike has not many pieces left that are the same as last year, but it’s more the detail work than the parts.

Now, in the winter tests, February and March, of course, we had to adjust the bike again to the problems that the riders were facing. In the beginning, when the new riders [Zarco, Oliveira, and Syahrin] came, each of them was facing different problems. Also, they didn’t match too well to Pol’s [Espargaro] problem, who is very experienced on this bike. But step by step, it went closer, when we went into the winter break it was quite a common direction we were taking.

You can see also now from the outside they [the 2018 and 2019 KTMs] look quite similar. But when you look at setting and the geometry, it’s quite different. You can see the clear trend. The guys coming from the Yamaha have learned a certain riding style, and we need to adapt our bike as much as possible to that to make them happy. Pol is a very, very aggressive rider that was struggling with Yamaha for that reason, and you see that the bike is more compact, set up more aggressive. In the end, you must take the maximum out of the package however you do it.

Pol Espargaro has been there from the start and has so been the only rider to truly adapt to the KTM.

When you get a rider who is a corner speed rider and another rider who is more a point-and-shoot rider, what do you build?

It depends really on which moment of building up the corner speed you struggle. Normally it starts already on the entry. When you look at Pol, he’s squeezing the bike to the maximum on the brakes. If I look at the data, I’m really scared. He’s completely over the limit, you think, but he does it, and he does it reliably, and he’s not a crasher. So, it is possible with a certain attitude and a certain feeling for the bike, but you have to ride it really loose.

If somebody doesn’t like to do that, already the problem starts with the right entry speed. It looks like you need to put our bike quite a little bit out of line, put it sideways, to stop it in the correct way. If you don’t do this, the bike will not stop, and it will never feel ready to enter the corner. This is a point where normally you think the corner speed is in the middle of the corner, but this is where actually the key point starts.

Sebastian Risse’s relative youth hides a deeply analytical engineering mind.

You guys are the only ones that run a steel chassis. What’s been some of the challenges with making it work for MotoGP?

To be honest, the main challenge is you must start somewhere. Of course, you can make a lot of benchmarking, look at different classes, put together what you think you know and start from there. That’s what we did, and of course, the starting point is anything but perfect.

From there, it’s not too much about concept and believing in this solution or that solution, but you must use what you have, follow the rider comments and be quite open-minded.

I think then it’s [the chassis] quite independent of things such as the material. It is about stiffness numbers. It’s about where you put the stiffness.

Then on the stiffness numbers, first you need to identify what you want, and on the other hand, how you achieve it. We have quite good knowledge in how to transfer our target to a frame that does it in terms of numbers. We have very good experience on the steel frame to produce the [stiffness] numbers.

But to define the target is the biggest piece of the puzzle. It depends on the problem, depends on the limit the rider is facing. You will have to find solutions. You must translate these problems into these numbers. We are quite quick to do that. But of course, you need the time to test it. You need also the time to learn something.

Pit box at Jerez. The level of effort with not just the Red Bull KTM team but also any factory team for that matter is extraordinary.

How is this frame different to a production steel frame like on the 1290 Super Duke R?

It consists of [steel] tubes. We get the tubes from suppliers, and even some production bikes have similar tubes in some points. But the way we build up the structure is quite different. On a race bike, normally you have quite a low front engine mounting point to have some lateral flex. On most of the production bikes, you don’t see that except in supersport, superbike-style. Then you have two engine mounts in the back, which are also quite different to most production bikes because we are basically transferring the forces from the front. Part is through engine, part is through the frame.

Then you have the two mounting points to the swingarm axle and then to the rear wheel axle. That means this is quite a structured part, while on most production bikes the swingarm is mounted either directly in the engine or it is kind of a hybrid system using also frame structure, but in the end, it gets its strength a lot of times from the engine itself.

So, this concept is quite different to that. It also implies that the frame must be more rigid and more loaded in this area. On the other hand, the way that you mount the engine when this is such a rigid structure must be quite different.

Normally, for example, when you look at production steel frames, they are kind of embracing the engine, and you just clamp them to the engine. Now you have a stiffer structure, so you must keep the engine between it, but in a way that nothing is under tension. There’s quite a bit of technology in how you do this with engine spacing, in how you tighten everything.

So, in the detail, this is quite different from a production bike. This is also not so different to how our other race bikes are. We have had aluminum chassis on the 125 and 250 two-strokes. We have had the Moto2, Moto3. It’s something that repeats itself, and that is different to production.

What has been Zarco’s feeling coming from the Yamaha? What does he say the big differences are between the Yamaha and the KTM?

The Yamaha is a corner speed and entry bike, so these were the areas where Zarco was struggling first before we adjusted the bike for his confidence on the front, on brakes and entry. Then during the winter break, we came to a point where he didn’t feel so bad anymore about this. For sure the Yamaha is more stable in some situations. The stability and then later on grip and turning were the points that he wanted to work on next. But it is iterative, so you solve one thing up to a point where you say, ‘Ok, this is not my main problem anymore.’ Then you go to another area, and you improve this one, and then maybe the other one comes back. Not because you went back in the performance, but because you moved the limit. That’s racing.

It has been far from a happy transition for the silky smooth style of Johann Zarco on the KTM.

So you’re still addressing his concerns with settings changes, or have you started making changes to hard parts?

No. The hardware is also different than the details. It’s a mix. Normally, when you hear about a certain problem, of course, the first thing you have in the pocket is the setting, at least to understand what is the direction, what can and can’t touch it. Then you hit certain limitations. A lot of times with a setting you have to make a certain compromise. You can achieve this, but you can also make this worse. Then doing really hardware development you might be able to improve this compromise further. That’s our philosophy.

What of the value now in having four riders and a satellite team?

That was the biggest difference to last year, and I think a big advantage, but also, a big challenge, especially on the tire side. This is for me the most outstanding thing because when you have two riders, and maybe one of them is injured or has a bad weekend, you have a very, very limited amount of information and data. The choice of the right tire and how to make these tires work is, especially in this class now, number one, not only in terms of durability but also in terms of over-heating, treating them in the right way, not over-loading them and so on. Then if suddenly you have the data of four riders, you can make big statistics, and you can learn a lot from this.

You have much more rider comments, and in the end, you can share this work, because you need to sort out the tires. For this, it helps a lot, for example.

Can you gather all that data and put it to use in the same weekend from all four bikes?

Yes, we do that constantly.

Is it better to have four similar riders or four riders that are different from each other?

It depends for what purpose. I think for the short term, giving every rider the benefit of having maximum information for his riding, it would be better to the riders all similar. But to make a universal bike, it is better to have them different. Also, it can help you to, let’s say, fill up some holes in your data sets because different riders with different riding styles will come into different working points of the bike, of tires, everything. You get a more complete picture. But of course, you can transfer the comment and the problem or solution from one rider to the other in the easiest way when they are similar. That’s also clear.

Where are your riders the same and where are they different?

I think especially Pol is on one extreme about V-shaping the corner, about stopping a lot in the last part of entry, preparing the exit very well. Then we have the guys coming from Yamaha on another extreme, focusing a lot on the entry speed.

Then we have Miguel [Oliveira Tech3 KTM rider], kind of a white paper, who sucks up all this information and tries to make the best out of this and that. You can see that this can also work very well, even with little experience. We try to feed him with the information he needs. He will tailor-make himself to our bike. Of course, when you only do this, it can also mean that the bike moves into a direction that is maybe not perhaps optimum. But with the full package we have, I think it’s quite nice, helping each other in every area.

Portuguese star Miguel Oliveira has been impressive in his rookie year on the satellite Tech3 KTM. He’s been retained for 2020.

What seems to be the biggest issue with Hafizh (Syahrin, Oliveira’s Tech3 teammate) now? What’s he struggling with the most?

He has basically similar problems as Johann. I think Johann has more experience going through different classes, being successful in different classes and adapting himself, but the basic problems are similar.

The bike was fast in a straight line from fairly early in the project, correct?

Yeah, the engine was for sure our strong point in that phase. That’s clear. Also, because other areas like the frame need iterations, that need track time, while the engine is something where when you have very experienced people, they can do this kind of steps in the background, in the factory, on the dyno. They have certain development targets in mind so that we didn’t need a lot of iterations on the track.

A lot of hard work went in there to get to that point. Anyway, it was a strong and also very reliable basis, which helped us a lot then also to improve the other things.

How much has Pedrosa’s injury sort of hampered you in development?

He hasn’t been there at all last year so it cannot be negative. We’re still where we would have been, anyway. But, of course, we are looking forward a lot to that. We got a little bit of input from him. Also, of course, we are talking, we try to get his experience, his view on things. Of course, the longer he’s away, the more that hurts us that we can’t use this opportunity. But anyway, he’s on board, and as soon as he’s fit and we start testing with him, I think he will be a very important source.

What did he say were the strong points of the bike compared to the Honda?

The stability was for him quite good. The performance of the engine was also good. Braking was on a good level on the bike, and it was more about entry face, turning grip where he would work on.

Can you talk a bit about the advantages of having a suspension company in-house?

Yeah, for sure. The closer they [WP] are, the better. This is just 300 meters, so there are all the possibilities there to talk, to work together. Of course, a big disadvantage is purely that the Ohlins guys have so many different bikes that they work on. All that information and knowledge is transferred through the suspension company, and also between manufacturers. Of course, this cannot happen when WP is just working with and for just us. We are kind of on an island that we must develop together. And the better we work together, the better this will be.

It may be slim times right now, but if history is any indication for KTM Grand Prix performance, they’ll get to the front eventually.

What seems to be the best way to ride the KTM?

Well, if I look at the lap times today, it’s clearly Pol’s way at the moment! But we’re working on making it more universal. I think also when we improve in other areas, he will also benefit from it.

Pol is clear what kind of problems he has, what he wants to have better on the bike. Pol is the fastest rider, and, of course, we need to push him forward to help him to the maximum. So in the parallel, we are working on targets that the other guys have, and the targets that Pol has.CN