OFFICIAL PROGRAMME
there were only Superbike and the bLU cRU riders in town Yamaha ’ s chefs still went through 150kg of pasta , 150 kg of chicken , 50kg beef , etc . On Saturday Yamaha ’ s hospitality cooked 150 hamburgers alone ! A very different way of creating a hospitality unit is seen in the KRT hospitality unit , brand new this year . Similar in design to the other one , their Marketing and PR Manager Biel Roda explained why theirs is very different from anybody else ’ s . It was originally inspired by seeing a similar unit that ‘ folded in ’ on itself . It is basically a kind of ‘ transformers ’ restaurant , that folds completely out and in to become an HGV trailer , in an automated fashion . The top floor is actually much bigger then the bottom floor , and it is twostoreys high for a reason . “ I saw that having two floors was very good for the championship organisers , and we take up half the space of a standard one from our competitors ,” said Roda . But for KRT , with relatively few guests but a bigger team than ever in 2021 , their new unit is still all about space , money and time saving . “ From being a trailer arriving in the paddock the hospitality unit is completely ‘ open ’ in one and a half hours , using hydraulics . That means less labour costs and fewer hotel nights for the staff . To make it a complete and ready to go hospitality unit takes six hours in its entirety , using only four or five people . To put the empty unit back down again takes an hour when it is empty , but to remove and stow all the tables , etc , it is still only four hours in all .” The ultimate pop-up restaurant , of course .
“ We put the team downstairs and the guests upstairs ,” explained Roda . “ The kitchen itself was inside of the last unit but now it is on a separate truck , so the cooks have more space and we can get more people seated downstairs . Before we had to rotate the staff , when they ate as the previous team was 24 people . Now we are 40 people .” Not everyone is playing the same game in terms of their hospitality , of course . The new Puccetti Racing Kawasaki hospitality unit is designed for a very different purpose than KRT ’ s for example , as Puccetti ( Covid-19 allowing ) brings along for more guests and so on than the factory KRT squad . For a private team it is simply huge , and take a long time to build and disassemble . For KRT , the same philosophy does not apply . “ For us the hospitality is an extension of the team , and that is important because we spend a lot of hours together . That is also why we do not outsource it , which would be very easy . We did consider that idea - there are many good professionals doing that so it is one more option - but we wanted to have it ‘ inside ’.” The cost of the all-new KRT unit , we estimate , complete with the new truck that holds the entire kitchen area right next door to the serving area , would be around 6-700,000 Euros . Other more traditional units will have cost more to buy or build , and probably also more to run given how long they take to build . As we can see there are many ways to get what you need from a hospitality unit in big-time WorldSBK fashion
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