It's all about Suzuki & Rins https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/...e=emailCampaign&dm_i=4DIP,JMTZ,3796UZ,2A2YH,1
Someone that knows more than me please feel free to correct me if it’s wrong, but I’ve always gotten the feeling that it’s just not financially viable to fix the track every time cars ripple it. F1, indycars, Le Mans cars, and anything else running a lot of downforce can rough up a track pretty good in just one weekend and it costs a boatload of money to repair. So doing it every year right before the gp wouldn’t really be sustainable. I seem to remember one of the tracks recently where they tried to repair ripples without repaving and actually made it worse (silverstone, maybe?). And then of course there’s the Phillip island incident from a couple years ago where the repave resulted in a mandatory pit stop during the race. Not sure that’s any better. Not saying it’s not time for some track maintenance at COTA. Too hard to tell from my couch. But this type of thing doesn’t strike me as unusual. Just one of the downsides of bikes sharing tracks with cars.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the Zooks. They’re definitely front runners for the championship but I suspect races like yesterday won’t be the norm. They both just happen to have a good day and a good strategy. But thats one race. The Yamahas are still very fast and JD and Scholtz could ruin their party on any given weekend. I still expect some great races these season.
As always expensive to chase the series in the premier class. Tough for any grid filler types or Stock 1k machines to make this back to back with Road Atlanta and with the next round being VIR just simpler to leave everything on the East coast if you're not chasing points. Also not sure but I'd bet the expenses are pretty high for this round too.
These bump weren't "bus knuckle" types bumps in the braking zones. From what I understand they were more related to shifting foundation and base the track was laid on. Not exactly sure what they can do about it now other than rip it all up, and haul in an enormous amount of suitable material to build a new track on. That's not going to happen..... Everything else is essentially a bandaid solution with varying success rate. Pretty sad that the track surface at a "new" world class facility was in that bad of shape. But it was the same for everybody..... I wish they'd go back to Indy (it's closer to me and I want to go).
My first thought/comment was oh shit, Josh is going to be in big trouble for grabbing a spectator with no helmet or even long pants until Evelyne told me who it is - at which point I changed to MA had better use that footage in any and every place they possibly can
All the talk about the poor track surface had people asking where else the US GP could be held. Call me crazy, and I've never actually been there, but could Miller in Utah be suitable for MotoGP?
No. Too far from any viable metropolitan areas. Quite simple the best venue was/is Indy and I still don't understand why they aren't back there.
Isn't SLC really close? SLC must be a similar scale city as Austin, with much prettier scenery. Just a thought.... I was wondering more about the actual track size, layout, and pit accomodations.
salt lake is close but the next city of any size is 500 miles away. we’re a mid sized city in the middle of no where. also, googles is telling me austin metro is about double the population of slc metro.
SLC is close, and probably similar to Austin. However there is no DFW (2.5 hours) or Houston (2.5 hours), or San Antonio (1.25 hours), or OKC (5.5), or even New Orleans at 7.75.... WHat you have close to Miller is Denver at 8.5, even Vegas and Reno are both 7-7.5 hours away. There is just nothing close enough to Miller to get any driving spectators, they'd all have to fly and that adds more expense than it's worth. Same general reason we can't justify racing there at the full track rental cost.
Overall the facility is probably viable but I'd expect the FIM to want some track changes as well as bring in a bunch of tents/buildings to house the entire GP paddock. They'd also have to totally change their setup in the paddock to somehow restrict people from wandering just anywhere, that end of things is a really really bad setup for racing with wide open access to anyone renting a garage or going to the kart track or the like. Yet another issue we always had there was losing a big chunk of income on gate fees.
I believe it's about the money. The first few races at Indy had a great crowd, the last few years had around 60k on race day, just not enough to show a profit. Now that Nicky is gone, it will be tougher to get MotoGP back there, he was a great ambassador for Indy. When COTA's contract runs out, Indy will have a better shot at hosting another race.