Joining the Last On The Brakes team this week is Red Bull KTM Factory Racing's Miguel Oliveira. The Portuguese MotoGP™ star delves into his life beyond the race track whilst also covering what it's like to be KTM's most successful premier class rider thanks to his two victories in 2020.
His debut victory, as if you need reminding, came at the Grand Prix of Styria. It is forever cemented in MotoGP™ history as one of the magic moments that make the sport what it is: heading into the final corner on the final lap sitting in third and somehow taking the chequered flag first. But, just under 12 months on, how does the factory KTM man look back on that day?
"I mean, the Styria GP was so crazy," started Oliveira. "Because I was not able to score points in the previous race. And then the race got red flag, and I was I had the wrong front tyre, because I just didn't make the right decision. And so I really felt like when the race was red flagged as the previous weekend, and I felt like, you know, here I have my second chance. So I just went for it. And I grabbed it, I just cannot explain.
"The emotion was so different from the when I got here (Portimao), because here, you know, you start first, you start building up this gap, and you sort of expect that, as you come around five laps to go, you know, already that you're going to win. And until the last corner, I didn't know if I was going to end it up. third or fourth? idea. Yeah. So it was crazy. Yeah."
Just a few months later, Oliveira became a multiple premier class race winner with yet another career-defining moment by taking victory on home soil at Portimao. With that, he became KTM's most successful MotoGP™ rider without ever having been in the Austrian brand's factory garage.
"When I came aboard the Tech3 team, I was just expecting to do a normal rookie season, rookie job, but it it turned out to be a very tricky 2019 year with an injury in the middle. So I felt like my progression was like really, really flat. And I was just happy to do a normal, okay, ‘normal’ not in terms of calendar, but like a normal performing 2020 season.
"And I think that was really my first year as a MotoGP rider. Because I really got good experience I went with in the front of a race, I had good, good qualifyings, I was able to learn from guys who were actually faster than me and had a lot of experience. So it was, it was a great season and coming into this year is just I hope just to improve what I did last year."
To hear more from Oliveira, head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you usually listen for the full episode – or take a look at the full episode on MotoGP™’s YouTube channel.