MotoGP will race against the clock to get to Mandalika on time

The distance between the Marco Simoncelli circuit and the Mandalika circuit is about 12,000 kilometers. This is not an impressive figure, but the perception changes a bit if you take into account all the equipment that has to be moved, including the bikes of the teams of the three categories and those of Dorna, the promoter of the World Championship.

The cancellation of the Kazakhstan Grand Prix less than two months ago and TV commitments have forced championship officials to look for a replacement event for Almati. After considering various alternatives, the second round in Misano was the least traumatic option. However, the need to link this event with the next one, which will be held a week later in Indonesia, has meant that the logistics division has to plan a minute-by-minute itinerary to ensure that the bikes can hit the track in Lombok on Friday.

The MotoGP transport team is fully prepared, but this move is a challenge, given the constraints it entails. However, Carles Jorba, Dorna’s director of operations, is an expert in this type of move. He is confident in the schedule, which will be launched just as the MotoGP race in Misano ends, about ten minutes before 2pm. Fortunately, in this case, the main event of the weekend will be brought forward by an hour compared to the usual time, a decision taken to avoid a clash with the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Singapore.

The clock will start ticking at half past two, 45 minutes after the end of the MotoGP race, when fans who took part in the traditional track invasion will be evacuated.

“We didn’t want to compromise the enjoyment of the public,” Jorba tells Motorsport.com, before going into the details of the journey, which begins with the loading of the trucks at the Misano circuit itself, in an orderly and choreographed manner to optimise time. “It takes an hour to load a truck, and then we have another six hours on the road to get to Malpensa airport in Milan. We’ve been talking to the local authorities for weeks, who have established the sequence in which to receive the crates. Everything has to be inspected before boarding the plane,” Jorba says, before pausing to explain a couple of new features introduced this year, which should make life easier for him and his team.

“In 2023 we defined measures for the production of boxes for transporting equipment, with specific shapes that adapt to the contours of the planes we use. Now we spend about six hours preparing the load of a plane; until last year it was about double,” explains Jorba. “This allows us to be much more efficient. It’s like a puzzle, once you know how the boxes are arranged. We already know, for example, that the Moto2 and Moto3 teams fit on a plane,” continues the Dorna technician, before highlighting the second of the key aspects of this first stage of the Asian tour, which will pass through Indonesia, Japan, Australia, Thailand and Malaysia, before returning to Europe at the beginning of November for the last stage of the calendar in Valencia (November 16).

“Up until now we have used four Boeing 747s, but thanks to the agreement with Qatar Airways, we will now use five Boeing 777s. This will allow us to reduce polluting emissions by around 30%, because we will go from using planes with four engines each (the 747s) to others with two (the B777s). So we go from 16 engines to ten”, explains the Catalan.

It is clear that all of this depends, to a greater or lesser extent, on the circuit staff, the loading and unloading operators and the drivers who do their job. But then, of course, everything is in the hands of external actors who can have a direct influence on whether or not the schedule is respected. “In 2022 we had a technical problem with a plane, which forced us to cancel Friday in Argentina,” recalls the man from Santpedor, a town an hour and a half from Barcelona.

If all goes according to plan, the first B777 will take off from Milan – Malpensa on Monday at 1 pm, stop in Doha and from there will depart for Lombok, where it should land at 11:15 on Tuesday morning. The last of the five planes will leave Malpensa on Tuesday at 5 pm and should arrive in Lombok at 3 pm on Wednesday. “Once there, everything will be unloaded and then travel by road, with small trucks – the roads on the island are not like those in Milan – to Mandalika,” adds Jorba.