OFFICIAL PROGRAMME · THE LONGEST HAUL
After the end of the final European-based race of the season in Portimao on October 9 an intense logistical operation started . The planning for it commenced many months before that . All the necessary equipment for the series organisers Dorna and all the WorldSBK and WorldSSP teams to take on the season-ending longhaul rounds got packed away into their special strong-but-light travel boxes and trick customised flight cases .
From Portimao , in the extreme south west corner of Europe , the flight cases were driven up to Zaragoza airport in Northern Spain . From there two crammed-full Being 777 air freighters , chartered by Dorna from a specialist freight company , took off to land in Tucuman in Argentina . All the cases were then transported by road to the San Juan Villicum circuit in western Argentina . Not quite in the Andes mountain range shared with Chile , but not far off .
It is not only the unusually short period between those three long haul races this year that is unique . It is the general situation in the world , with armed conflicts , many ongoing supply chain issues and current fuel and transport costs rising to record levels .
In some cases ( pardon the pun ) the transportation costs have not just doubled , but trebled since the last time . Time is money and so is weight , in this instance . The teams ’ cases are of various sizes and weights , but some special pallets are built up to fit snugly inside the curves of the airplane . The long-planned , but still busy , Sunday night packing operation up and down the vast Portimao paddock was as immense as it was intense , as WorldSBK and SSP teams ( no 300s , of course ) collected , packed , weighed and handed over the hardware of their working lives for the next month to DWO ( Dorna World Organization ) and its specialised logistical staff .
After the San Juan weekend it was back to Tucuman by road , then - to my mild surprise - they flew back east . In some ways it may be easier to keep on heading west-ish , but freight companies do not like to fly across the Pacific . What is really new this year is the quick-step from Indonesia to Australia , right at the end .
After the culmination of that penultimate WorldSBK weekend there was another quick yet highly planned scramble to get all the kit back into boxes , onto the trucks , to Lombok airport and then directly to Avalon Airport in Melbourne . For all the road stages of the operation , it takes around 14 semi-trailers to get from airport to trackside and back again .
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