KTM has revealed that seven engines failed on this year’s RC16, with motorsport director Pit Beirer describing the run of KTM MotoGP engine failures as the “most horrible time” of the Austrian manufacturer’s premier-class project.
The crisis arrived just as KTM was emerging from its company-wide financial problems, and was doubly baffling because MotoGP engine specification has been frozen since the start of last season. With the design unchanged, there was no obvious reason for reliable units to start letting go. KTM eventually traced the fault to a quality-control problem in a high-stress component supplied from outside the company.
Why the KTM MotoGP engine failures were so hard to fix
Finding the fault was only half the battle. Because the engines are sealed under homologation, KTM could not simply swap the affected parts out without the agreement of rival manufacturers, who were understandably suspicious of any request to open them.
“This year, I thought we go back to a normality, then this engine issue almost killed us,” Beirer said. “Beside our other [financial] problem at home, this was for me the most horrible time in this whole MotoGP project. We lost completely control and could not react, with having a [faulty] part in the engine, having sealed engines.”
It was the repetition that broke the team’s confidence. “When one engine breaks, it feels like, ‘Okay, can happen’. So you don’t panic,” Beirer said. “But then another one, and then you bring a replacement and that thing is breaking again. You don’t understand and you don’t know where to start.”
KTM’s engine rebuild landed in time for Aragón, and the factory arrives at Misano in better shape. Pedro Acosta sits sixth in the championship on 193 points after taking sixth in Saturday’s San Marino sprint, having given KTM its first sprint win of the campaign at Buriram.
Source: Crash.net
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