Canceled the first day of the Argentine motorcycle GP

The logistics of a competition like the Motorcycle World Championship is complex, especially when it comes to moving all the material outside of Europe, since in the Old Continent this transport is done by truck and by road. An invisible question, which is taken for granted but that for once has become the protagonist of the start of a grand prix, or its non-start. As happens after each transoceanic event, as soon as the last Indonesian Grand Prix was over, the championship workers rushed to accommodate all the material in boxes that were later transported to the Lombok airport, where they were placed in five planes that had to be in charge of take them to Argentina, for a trip that is around 21,000 kilometers, with several stops.

In these boxes, motorcycles, panels to build the boxes, material for the pilots, suppliers of helmets, overalls, kitchens, television material, and a long etcetera of what ends up being an itinerant city are transported. Of those five planes, two undertook a route to Tucumán, the closest international airport to the Termas de Río Hondo circuit (about 100 kilometers away), via Qatar and Ghana, and the other three did so stopping in Kenya, Nigeria and Brazil. . One of these three suffered a problem at the Kenyan airfield in Mombasa. Added to these was the fact that the first of those who had landed in Tucumán, who had to return to Lombok for more material, also had a technical incident at one of his stops. This last contingency could be solved, although the plane stopped in Kenya was not.

For this they had to look for two pieces that had to arrive one from Europe and the other from the Middle East, something that did not happen until this Thursday, which was going to mean that the flight was not scheduled to leave Mombasa until late this day. to land in Argentina, theoretically, the same Friday. “We will have the information later. If it comes out this afternoon at around eight then it will be fine, ”explained Carmelo Ezpeleta, the head of Dorna, organizer of the championship, who added the factor of the war in Ukraine as one more complication.

“We have learned a lot in these 30 years and we know that the situation with aircraft is now very complicated. This has been complicated by the war in the Ukraine. Many of the transport planes are Russian, about 20%. And that has meant that we have lost several planes. We have been talking about this for a long time but there are no more flights possible. We have no other solution than to wait for the parts to arrive and for the plane to arrive on time », he lamented. And it is that Dorna calculates that right now in the world there are only about 140 planes with the characteristics to satisfy its logistical needs. “Not all of us are worth it because of the material we carry, so it is not easy to make changes. Unfortunately, this is so. We are used to solving many problems, but we have to accept that this is how it is and that this is like the weather, part of the game.

All this has affected some 16 teams from the three categories, which has forced the cancellation of Friday’s practice day and the reconfiguration of Saturday’s, with two free practices (one more than usual) plus the two official ones in Moto3 and Moto3 ; and three in MotoGP, also with the usual Q1 and Q2 that will configure the starting grid of a category in which once again Marc Márquez will not be in the game. Neither the Spaniard, still recovering from the new episode of diplopia (he is replaced by the German Stefan Bradl), nor his partner in Honda Takaaki Nakagami, drops out at the last minute after having tested positive for coronavirus. This in a MotoGP with Enea Bastianini still as the leader and with nine riders separated by just ten points, a group in which there are four Spaniards: the brothers Pol and Aleix Espargaró, and the two Suzuki riders Álex Rins and Joan Mir.

All waiting to get the most out of the Argentine event, the penultimate before landing in Europe, the moment that is usually considered as the real start of the championship. A World Cup that after Qatar experienced a complicated return to Indonesia, with the asphalt as the first protagonist and the rain as the second, and that now crosses its fingers so that the temporary calculations to solve this logistical problem are fulfilled and that from Saturday things go back to normal.