MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

In the first part of this interview with Carlos Ezpeleta, Dorna's Chief Sporting Officer explained the political challenges of putting together a calendar for MotoGP. In the second half of our conversation, Ezpeleta discusses the contractual and logistical constraints on the MotoGP calendar. He gives us a peek into the 2024 calendar, and talks about balancing the input from the teams against the requests from the circuits.

Q: Coming to logistics, which is one of the most interesting factors. Races in Europe can only be held at a certain time. So for example, even though Finland was canceled, you could only race at the KymiRing in the summer. How do you slot all of that together? You’ve also got not just weather but also travel.

Carlos Ezpeleta: Yes. Let’s say that we know what events are going to be in the calendar for the year that we’re designing the calendar for. You start to sort of make a rough draft of that. Number one is your contractual obligations, which for example could be Qatar starting the calendar as the first race, and Valencia currently ending it. So, that’s pretty clear.

There is nothing quite as frustrating as the MotoGP calendar, to those inside the sport as well as those outside. Each time MotoGP's schedule is published, it is met with a mixture of excitement about the coming year, and irritation about the inevitable back-to-back races, gaps, clashes, and choices of venue. Fans are thrilled to see MotoGP at their favorite track, or disappointed that the series is going back to their least favorite track. And different fans will have diametrically opposite views of which tracks are best, and which should be ditched.

That is hardly surprising. You can't keep everybody happy, not least because putting together a calendar of 20+ events is an incredibly complex task. There are so many different factors to balance, many of which people outside the process are not even aware of. There's the logistics of getting from one circuit to another, weather, track availability, medical facilities.

You want to avoid clashes with F1 – something which gets harder as the F1 calendar expands – and try not to schedule races in the same country too close together. And there are only a limited number of circuits which are safe enough to hold a MotoGP race. Adding new circuits can be a process of years, and slotting them in means making space elsewhere.

Juggling act

In short, it is a complicated process fraught with a million headaches. The devil is indeed in the detail, and the details run deeper than most people realize.

Interviews are precarious things. A hundred things can happen between arranging the interview, actually speaking to the person you want to interview, and then publishing it. Sometimes you get lucky, and the rider you want to speak to wins a race the week before your scheduled appointment. Sometimes they break a leg and are absent at the race you had arranged to speak to them. And sometimes something major happens between the time you interview someone and the publication date.

When I arranged to speak to Joan Mir, I got lucky. The 2020 MotoGP world champion arrived at Mugello fit, healthy, and in an open and talkative mood. That was not a given, after the miserable weekend he had at Le Mans, finishing down in 14th in the sprint race and crashing out of the Sunday grand prix.

Mir spoke openly about the unexpected difficulties he had faced since joining the Repsol Honda team, and the low point which Honda finds itself in. He spoke about how he handles such difficulties mentally, how he tries to put bad experiences behind him and where he finds the mental strength to keep grinding away, trying to make progress. And he spoke about the problems facing MotoGP, how the current state of technology has taken control away from the riders and made the bike a much, much bigger part of the overall performance package.