OFFICIAL PROGRAMME
EXCITING CONTENT hotel catering or rental fees made sense for them , and allowed them to keep their team together in one cohesive unit . And , of course , eat the things they wanted rather than have what was available . Not all teams are , of course , full on factory WorldSBK efforts . You can be leading the WorldSSP championship like the Ten Kate Yamaha team but still do things on a much smaller scale . “ We have nine crew and two riders ,” said Ten Kate Team Co-ordinator Monique Trip , about who is going to Argentina . Not the 32 of KRT in WorldSBK , clearly . Ten Kate have had to do things differently this year given the global situation . This year Ten Kate will not be their own usual carrier , KLM . Like most of the paddock will be flying what will probably feel like the ‘ WorldSBK Express ’ from Madrid to Argentina . “ Pretty much everybody is going via Madrid ,” said Monique . “ It would have been possible to fly from Amsterdam to Argentina directly , but it would have been twice as expensive as it was two years ago . It is only a short stop in Madrid and then we take the charter from Ezeiza that is kind of an advantage because the times before we had to take the transfer from Ezeiza to the other airport in Buenos Aires , and then fly from a different airport to San Juan .” So much for the people . What about the flight cases ? Once packed up on Sunday at Portimao , Ten Kate handed everything over to Dorna and then it was up to the organisers . “ We leave the crates in the garage for Dorna to pick up ,” said Monique . “ Then when we get to Villicum it will be inside our garage on Wednesday . We will not see the crates after Argentina ( and Indonesia of course ) until they will all arrive back at our workshops . We are taking two races worth of material to Argentina with us and in fact we brought everything with us that we thought we would need for the three back-to-back rounds in Europe - Catalunya , Jerez and Portimao , plus the two rounds in Argentina and Indonesia . The trucks were fully loaded on the way here to Portimao !” Multiply these kinds of experiences across the whole WorldSBK and WorldSSP paddock and you can see the gargantuan efforts put in by all , just to get the 2021 WorldSBK season up and running in its first long haul races since Australia at the very start of 2020
27