JAKARTA - The third series of MotoGP 2022 has been postponed. All free practice at the Termas de Rio Hondo Circuit which was supposed to be held on Friday, April 1, was canceled.
The cancellation and postponement of the Argentina 2022 MotoGP schedule is because not all of the cargo belonging to the MotoGP, Moto2, and Moto3 teams have arrived at the location. Dorna Motorsport CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta said the delay was due to the effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Indeed, the MotoGP team's cargo was flown on Wednesday, March 30 from Indonesia to Argentina as the next country to host the 2022 MotoGP. However, on the way, the cargo was stuck in Mombasa, Kenya.
Ezpeleta said Dorna has been trying to find additional cargo planes to carry the team's cargo stuck in Mombasa so that it can arrive on time. But Dorna was in trouble, because there were no available cargo planes.
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Furthermore, Ezpeleta said that Dorna's difficulty in finding spare cargo planes was because 20 percent of the world's cargo companies came from Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is currently being punished for their invasion of Ukraine.
"We have learned a lot in the last 30 years of running MotoGP regarding cargo flights. This problem arose because of the Russia vs Ukraine war. Many flights for cargo came from Russian companies and all these flights are banned at this time," said Ezpeleta quoted from Motorsport.com.
"We lost almost 20 percent of the available flights in the world, and the biggest problem right now is that there are no other flights available, because we think we have enough time from last Wednesday to now to solve the problem," Ezpeleta added.
Ezpeleta revealed that this is the first time this has happened during the MotoGP event, which is clearly surprising and makes the organizers have to rack their brains. In the future, Ezpeleta admits that he will be more careful in considering and making estimates of cargo delivery scheduling, including thinking about possible delays.
"We've had 499 Grands Prix that we've held and luckily this is the first time we've had this problem, and to be honest on the whole it's not good, but we are ready to accept these kinds of things," said Ezpeleta.
"This is the first case, maybe in the future we need to reconsider and make sure also when we have back-to-back races, but this time it's not a week's break in the middle of the race (between Indonesia and Argentina). Unfortunately, we couldn't resolve the situation to avoid problems this," he said.
Due to cargo delays, the third MotoGP series in Argentina has been confirmed to be back from the original schedule. To adjust the preparations, a new schedule starting with a new free practice session will be held on Saturday, April 2.
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