MotoMatters.com | Kropotkin Thinks

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.

The person leading the effort to put all those details together is Dorna Chief Sporting Officer, Carlos Ezpeleta. Son of Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta, Carlos enjoyed an international education in Madrid, before studying Business and Mechanical Engineering at the European University of Madrid. He has worked inside of Dorna since 2013, after interning at the company during his studies.

At Mugello, I spoke at length with Ezpeleta about the long and complex process of putting together a calendar. He explained how many factors go into it, and how long it can take from the first contact with a circuit to them actually hosting a race. And what can go wrong along the way.

In the first part, we talked about the juggling act which putting together a calendar involves. About the political and logistical constraints, and the hard choices which have to be made as the calendar expands.

Q: I want to talk about the process of putting together a calendar, because no matter what you do to the MotoGP calendar, people always complain about it. But the most interesting thing to me is the constraints you are under when you are putting together a calendar. It’s not just, “Oh, you know what? We’ll go there and then we’ll go there and then we’ll go there.”

Carlos Ezpeleta: I wish it could be.

Q: First of all, where do you start when you’re putting together a calendar? Next year or the year after, where do you start?

CE: Now is actually the time of the year to be asking that question because I’ve started drawing for a couple of months now. As you can imagine, the number one question is what’s going to be on the calendar? That’s not always clear when we’d like it to be clear, unfortunately. So, that’s probably step one.

You were asking before how long that process typically takes, and it varies. There’s some conversations with a country, with a promoter, with a government or with a circuit that start and the race comes into the calendar the year after that. And then some that take five years, four years. So it changes quite a bit. Specifically also on the construction of the circuit, is that a remodeling or a circuit that already exists and needs to be slightly changed, or building and designing one from scratch, which also happens? This job is getting more and more complicated now with the huge safety standards that MotoGP has.

Q: You can’t just sort of look at a track and think, “Oh, we’d really like to go there.” Everyone wants to go back to Spa-Francorchamps but you can’t just go back to Spa because of all of the work that it needs to make it safe.

CE: Yes, correct. Specifically during the COVID years we found out that, let’s say in many things we’re very fortunate in this sport but one of them is not that. Looking at where we could race at, we very quickly realized that out of the circuits that we could race at, we probably raced in all of them but two or three in the world already, because all the rest are probably not valid for MotoGP in their current state. So, yes, that is the number one thing. Homologation is a must for the circuit.

Hopefully normally halfway through the summer you start to get a clear idea of what’s going to be on the calendar next year. I think it’s also interesting to explain that we have a limitation of 22 events in our current contract with IRTA and the teams. Not that we’d want to go over that, because it’s probably on the limit already.

So, that’s a new limitation to designing the calendar because before you could slot in something that wasn’t necessarily taking something out, and now that’s going to start to happen fairly soon where you bring something to the calendar and we’re probably going to have to take something out.

Q: That process of taking something out, how do you approach that? The obvious place to start is Spain and the Iberian Peninsula because there are so many races, but you have the audience there and the tracks there, so that makes it harder?

CE: The obvious question, well one is our legal and binding agreements of course. We do have that Joker card to play in the Iberian Peninsula because of the five circuits in Spain and Portugal. We have the right to rotate. So, contractually we must be at them three out of five each year for this five-year term, starting last year in 2022 all the way to 2026. So that’s where we do have some leverage, which we’re grateful for.

We talk to a lot of countries, but how fast those move, and then all of a sudden there’s an election and change in government and you have to start all over, and the circuit changes. So, these processes take a very long time. We raced in Indonesia last year for the first time, and that conversation started in 2018, maybe. So, the process does take quite a long time.

Q: Also in terms of funding, infrastructure, other problems or other issues, that has a real effect on whether a race can happen or not, because you need the infrastructure to be put in place and that needs political support from authorities. People have to want to host the race. It’s not just a question of a circuit decides, yes, let’s have a race.

CE: Yes, most of our events have some sort of government aid or funding. Some don’t. But that’s a big part of the business and MotoGP brings a huge economic impact to the region. Of course, our contracts normally stipulate some deadlines for all the infrastructure to be laid. There’s also part of things like logistics, airports, seaports overseas, customs, which the promoter must handle, hospitals.

Now also for us,it’s not just bringing events into the calendar now. It’s bringing events which are better than the existing ones. So we do look a lot for the destination, what does it bring to our industry, industry being the motorcycle manufacturers, the sport, making it more and more global. So there’s a lot of things that make us want to go to a place, and it’s quite a significant decision there.

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In the second part of this interview tomorrow, Carlos Ezpeleta explains the process of choosing which races go where, balancing transport and customs procedures against the proximity of different circuits, of how Dorna have changed their approach to airfreight to make it more efficient, and how they balance the needs of the teams against the requests of the circuits.

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