Jarvis gives his view on future MotoGP calendar

Dorna’s talks with the Indonesian government this week about the potential to host a MotoGP race in the South East Asian country are just the latest in a series of ventures trying to tap into one of the biggest markets in the world for motorcycle manufacturers.

The joint press conference earlier this week saw plenty of indications that Dorna will be adding to the Malaysian Grand Prix with more races in the region. In Qatar when Carmelo Ezpeleta was speaking with MCN he offered no firm indicators as to whether there would be additional races added to the calendar but the success of the Thailand WSBK round offered real hope that there would be a race added to the calendar.

Next year will see Austria return to the calendar for the first time since 1997 and Ezpeleta has said on numerous occasions that 20 races is the limit for the calendar. That leaves potential for one more race to be added. When Lin Jarvis spoke to MCN at the Spanish Grand Prix he gave his opinion on the future of the calendar and adding a race in the key markets of South East Asia.

“We know that there’s discussions to potentially increase the number of races,” said Jarvis. “We have to look at that very carefully because anyway we don’t want to end up with a season that is too long, too arduous for all the people that are involved in it. At the same time we have to certainly go to some of those other markets and Thailand would be very, very interesting for us. It would be interesting to go also to Indonesia if we had the chance to go there, if they build a new circuit.”

” We should put other races in other places. Austria, why not? It’s welcome. Brno seems to be in some negotiation difficulty with – as it has been for the last several years. So some movement is normal and logical. I just think we should be cautious to expand the calendar too much. We need to keep quality rather than quantity. We have to think also how arduous this is sometimes for the people that are involved to follow these long seasons.”

Jarvis went on to say that any such calendar is looking at “the maximum rather than the optimum number of races” and that ensuring a month long summer break was becoming more and more important for the teams.