2023 FIM MOTO2 GRAND PRIX WORLD CHAMPION
RECORD BREAKER!
What could be better than winning an FIM World Championship title? How about wrapping up your second crown with two rounds still remaining on the calendar? Well, that is exactly the amazing feat that Pedro Acosta – KTM achieved this season when he raced to the 2023 FIM Moto2™ Grand Prix World Championship.
FIM Moto3™ Grand Prix World Champion in 2021, the nineteen-year-old super-swift Spaniard used 2022 as a learning year in Moto2™ with three race wins on his way to fifth in the world and then came out and simply dominated this season.
It has not by any means been easy for Acosta who has faced stiff opposition this season, but the multi-time youth champion – who started off his two-wheel career as a five-year-old on a Motocross bike – has been the rider to beat in this incredibly competitive class.
A narrow victory at the opening round in Portugal at the end of March threw down the challenge to his rivals in the arduous twenty-round series and he backed this up with wins in America, Italy, Germany, San Marino, India and Indonesia along with podium finishes in Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Japan, Thailand and Malaysia.
While the chasing pack was undeniably fast, Acosta’s speed coupled with his consistency gave him the advantage and when the championship chasers pitched camp at the PETRONAS Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia in early November the title was within his grasp.
A super-strong second-placed finish was easily good enough for Acosta to claim the crown with rounds in Qatar and Valencia still to go and, at nineteen years and one-hundred-and-seventy-one days old, become the youngest-ever FIM Moto2™ Grand Prix World Champion, beating the record set by Marc Marquez in 2012.
PALMARES
FIM Moto2™ Grand Prix World Champion: 2023
FIM Moto3™ Grand Prix World Champion: 2021
2021 FIM MOTO3 GRAND PRIX WORLD CHAMPION
INSTANT IMPACT!
Pedro Acosta got his first taste of motorcycles at the age of five when he was bought a motocross bike and just twelve years later he has been crowned as FIM Moto3 Grand Prix World Champion having risen through the ranks almost as quickly as he can carve his way up the leaderboard.
A multiple youth champion, the seventeen-year-old was a front-runner in the FIM Moto3 Junior World Championship before graduating into the big league where he had an instant impact with a second-placed finish at the opening round in Qatar.
If that was not enough to make the paddock sit up and take notice, at round two he became the first rider in the history of the class to win from a pit-lane start – a sensational victory that saw the super-talented Spaniard move into an early championship lead.
Doha began a run of three victories and he would take a further three – in Germany, Austria and again in Portugal.
Despite disappointing finishes in France, Italy and Spain, by the halfway point of the series he had carved out a forty-eight-point lead and he clinched the championship with one round still to go to become the first rookie in thirty-one years to take the lightweight title.
At just seventeen years and one-hundred-and-sixty-six days old he is also the second-youngest GP champion in history behind legendary Italian Loris Capirossi.
PALMARES
FIM Moto3 Grand Prix World Champion - 2021
