After two years of absence from the MotoGP calendar due to the pandemic, the 2022 Argentine Grand Prix has been affected by logistical problems that have forced the suspension of Friday’s day, usually intended for the celebration of the first two free practices of each category.
The first alarm signal was launched by the official account of the Argentine Grand Prix on its social networks last Saturday, when it reported that four of the five cargo planes that were scheduled to land at the San Miguel de Tucumán airport, 91 kilometers from the circuit They had landed.
At first, it was thought of a delay without consequences for the fifth plane, when there were still five days left before the teams began to set up the pits for the grand prix.
However, that fifth plane, which was transporting material from various teams that were affected, such as Ducati, KTM, Suzuki, Yamaha, Tech 3, VR46, Gresini and the tire supplier, Michelin, never reached its destination. The problem was a breakdown on one of the stops on his trip to Lombok (Indonesia), which left him stranded in Mombasa (Kenya).
Faced with the impossibility of solving the problem immediately, the promoter of the World Cup, Dorna, rehired one of the planes that had arrived in Tucumán on Saturday to fly, again, to Lombok, site of the last Grand Prix two weeks ago, pick up the material and return, once again, to Argentina.
That’s where the incredible odyssey of flight EX-47001 began, which after a service that had nothing to do with MotoGP, traveled to Lombok on March 30, loaded the boxes and that same Wednesday undertook the long flight back to Argentina.
As bad luck would have it, the aircraft from the company AeroStan, based in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, arrived in Mombasa and suffered a technical problem in one of its valves. Informed of the situation, the Dorna logistics team, led by Carles Jorba, who immediately traveled to Kenya to direct the operation, ordered two replacement parts for the damaged parts, which finally arrived at Mombasa airport on Thursday night to proceed to the repair.
At dawn, flight EX-47001 took off from Mombasa to Lagos, the first stop on the trip, where it landed at 9:26 a.m. local time (10:26 CET) after a first journey of four hours and 45 minutes. After a long stopover to refuel, the plane took off again at 2:13 p.m. CET bound for Salvador de Bahia, in Brazil, where it was scheduled to land around 8:30 p.m. CET.
After the report and revision of the plane, a maneuver identical to the one that the Boeing 747-222B carried out last March 26 in two hours and 25 minutes, will face the last part of the trip, between Salvador de Bahía and the airport of San Miguel de Tucumán, in Argentina, an expected trip of about four hours.
With these approximate calculations, the most famous plane in MotoGP history will take off again from Salvador de Bahía at around 11pm CET, 6pm in Tucumán, where it is scheduled to land around 10 p.m. local time.
Once at the Tucumán Teniente Benjamín Matienzo International Airport, flight EX-47001 will go through an express customs control inside the same ship, to then unload the boxes to the paths that will be waiting at the foot of the runway and transfer them to the circuit, in Termas de Río Hondo, a little less than a hundred kilometers away, a trip that usually takes less than two hours, so that the material arrives at the paddock around midnight local time.
According to Fede Faturós from Termas de Río Hondo, once the material arrives, there will be ten trucks ready at the airport to transport it to the area. Seven teams of operators with forklifts will be waiting there to unload all the material and distribute it to the teams as appropriate.
From then on, after a journey of one and a half hours (90km), the affected teams will begin a race against the clock to set up the pits and the bikes so that on Saturday morning the action can begin on the track.
