P94
Interview
KTM'S TECHNICAL DIRECTOR OF MOTOGP SEBASTIAN RISSE
Sebastian, has the bike
changed much between this
year and last?
We did quite a big revision dur-
ing 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 proj-
ect, we wanted to avoid this.
Over the winter, we were work-
ing with new riders. That means
we must adjust a lot of things to
their requests. But it's fundamen-
tal 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, Feb-
ruary 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 geome-
try, 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 ag-
gressive. In the end, you must take
the maximum out of the package
however you do it.
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
It has been far from a happy transition for the silky
smooth style of Johann Zarco on the KTM.
