THE FUTURE’S ORANGE
Many of the world’s great ideas and inventions have been conceived and forged over the dinner table. It’s not a new thing. Maybe a drink or two has played a part, a lack of inhibition giving a freedom to ‘think outside the box’. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of rubbish plans hatched over dinner - a proverbial yin to balance out the inspirational moments’ yang. I, much like you I imagine, have numerous personal experiences of both excellent and terrible ideas: over a particularly well- lubricated dinner 10 or so years ago, my old mate Hoefty and I decided we should attempt to attend every MotoGP round in Europe - legendary idea. We also decided that walking 10km in the Tuscan summer sun to Mugello was not only a great idea but also one that would be like a scene from an Italian Renaissance painting. Perfection. With one of us bald and the other ginger, this turned out to be a distinctly less than optimal idea. Hoefty and I lived and we learned (and we burned) but we weren’t afraid to try.
Fortunately for the greater population there are far better ideas to be had than those dreamt up by me and my mates. Legend and rumour has it that it was over a similarly eventful dinner (boozy or otherwise) at EICMA in around 2014 that the KTM top brass in attendance had an idea that they should form a factory team and enter the MotoGP World Championship. In the closest ever era of the sport. I mean, how hard can it be? And just like that, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing was born. It could’ve gone spectacularly wrong. It could’ve gone spectacularly right. As the 2020 season (appropriately one of the craziest on record) approaches its climax, KTM’s decision is looking distinctly like a good old-fashioned stroke of Austrian genius.
At a predictably cold and damp Le Mans, we at Fast Bikes were lucky enough to spend some time with two genuine giants of the Red Bull KTM Factory Racing story: Mike Leitner, Red Bull KTM race manager and Sebastian Risse, KTM’s MotoGP technical director.
Most of us mere mortals struggle to decide how best to make a start on a mundane task like tidying the garage. So presented with a dream and a vision so big, how did KTM go about tackling the task of creating a box-fresh Grand Prix team? Well, in
