Brad Binder climbed from 13th on the grid to sixth in the Australian Grand Prix Sprint at Phillip Island on 24 October 2026, promoted a place after post-race penalties and scoring four points at the circuit’s last MotoGP event.
He came through Q1 to qualify 13th with a lap of 1:35.996. He crossed the line seventh over the 13-lap, 57.824 km distance, 7.433 seconds behind Marc Márquez, who led from pole to flag in 19:16.844.
The FIM MotoGP Stewards then handed eight-second tyre-pressure penalties to Ai Ogura and Augusto Fernández. Ogura had finished sixth on the road, and his demotion moved Binder up a place.
Brad Binder Climbs From 13th In The Phillip Island Sprint
Qualifying was the problem, not the race. Binder had to run Q1, the first qualifying segment for riders outside the automatic top ten.
Starting 13th at Phillip Island, where the long, fast corners make passing a committed business, left him plenty of work to do. Seven places in 13 laps is the kind of Saturday he has built a reputation on. His 2023 Argentine Sprint win came from 15th on the grid.
The track was dry after morning rain. Jorge Martín crashed out and was later ruled unfit for Sunday’s Grand Prix with a fractured right radius and a suspected ulna fracture.
Where Brad Binder Sits In The 2026 MotoGP Standings
The four points lift Binder to 108 for the season, 13th in the championship and level with Luca Marini. Four rounds remain of the 22.
Teammate Pedro Acosta finished fifth in the Sprint and sits fourth overall on 263 points.
It is a season well short of Binder’s best. He was fourth in 2023 on 293 points with five Sunday podiums and two Sprint wins, fifth in 2024 on 217, and 11th in 2025 on 155.
The Last Phillip Island Weekend
This was the final MotoGP event at Phillip Island. The Australian round moves to a street circuit in Adelaide from 2027.
Binder will not be there on a KTM. He leaves the premier class at the end of this season after seven years with Red Bull KTM Factory Racing, every one of them on the RC16, and races in the 2027 Superbike World Championship for the ROKiT BMW Motorrad WorldSBK Team alongside Miguel Oliveira.
He is the first South African to win a MotoGP race, taking the 2020 Czech Grand Prix at Brno as a rookie and the 2021 Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring on slicks as the rain came down. The Brno win was KTM’s first in the class.
Before that came the 2016 Moto3 title with Red Bull KTM Ajo, seven wins and 319 points, and the 2019 Moto2 runner-up finish three points behind Álex Márquez. Across all classes he has 17 Grand Prix wins, 46 podiums and seven poles.
