It may sound ridiculous to be praising a rider as sport’s next big thing with the season just two races old. But there has been enough in the performances of Pedro Acosta in 2024 to suggest he is already MotoGP’s newest superstar, and likely to leave a string of broken records in his wake.
Not bad for a teenager with just two premier-class appearances to his name. But the rider from Murcia, in the south east of Spain, has been the standout story of the season so far. After a highly promising preseason, it took just one race for the 19-year-old to mix it with a number of the class’s leading names. By the second he had climbed a MotoGP podium, becoming the third youngest rider in history to do so.
More than the results, it was the manner in which he achieved them.
Acosta was like a wrecking ball in Portugal, as he set about making a number of high-profile names – serial champ Marc Marquez and MotoGP’s current number one Pecco Bagnaia among them – look very ordinary indeed.
After being similarly humbled during round two, Brad Binder
