MotoGP legend issues plea over park lands
One of the MotoGP’s most distinguished chief and crew mechanics has issued his early judgement on the world-renowned event making its move to Adelaide.
Former MotoGP chief and crew mechanic Jeremy Burgess is optimistic about the event’s move to Adelaide but hopes organisers will respect the picturesque city park lands, saying a permanent grandstand for the race was not necessary.
“I want to make it clear that I am very, very pro-park lands and the protection of the park lands,” he told InDaily, but added that he would withhold judgement over the track until a final plan was released.
“I don’t think that there would be a necessity to build a permanent grandstand – I don’t think that would rest very well with the friends of the park lands.”
Originally a motorcycle road racer in the 1970s, Adelaide-based Burgess switched to working as a MotoGP mechanic in 1980. He worked with some of the all-time greats, including Australian racers Wayne Gardner and Mick Doohan, as well as nine-time world champion Valentino Rossi.
“In a simple word, when it comes to writing the history of the world, motorcycling won’t get a paragraph. But if you were to have a paragraph about MotoGP in the history of the world, you’d have to mention Valentino Rossi,” he said.
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But Burgess wants to be clear that the MotoGP moving to Adelaide should not impact the park lands.
He said the park lands would be of renewed importance as the number of high-rise apartments increases and hoped they would still be there in three to 500 years – “as long as we don’t encroach on the park lands in a way that destroys them in any way in the long-term to put a piece of bitumen 12 metres wide through the park lands”.
“We’ve done it with Formula 1 without too much destruction … So, hopefully we can achieve the same thing with MotoGP,” he said.
Asked if The Bend Motorsport Park at Tailem Bend was a more suitable location for the race, Burgess said that site did not have the capacity to house the thousands of people needed to run the event.
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“Tailem Bend is an internationally recognised circuit and certainly has the capability to hold the event, but there’s more to holding the event than just the circuit itself,” he said.
Now retired, Burgess said motorcycle racing has changed “vastly” during the 34 years that he was an engineer at MotoGP, saying: “It’s like the change from black and white television to coloured telly”.
As the mechanic overseeing engineering in the MotoGP garage, it was his role to make sure all the suspension, tyre and data engineers were on the same page, saying that apart from having two wheels, the vehicles were very different to your average motorcycle.
“My job was to make sure that we explored all the ways of achieving the best outcome for the motorcycle and the rider correctly,” he said.
“They’re (the motorcycles) as sophisticated as you can possibly get because, of course, they produce far more horsepower than the rear tyre can physically control.”
Burgess said that among international events with worldwide appeal, MotoGP was “a very important event” watched by seven to 800 million people globally, but whether it’s important to Adelaide was “yet to be determined”.
Part of MotoGP owner Liberty Media’s strategy was “to bring the racing to the people, not take the people to the racing”, he said, adding that the safety would be of paramount importance, with racers routinely accelerating to in excess of 320 kilometres an hour.
“So, this may be the first of a whole new concept or design or plan of what they try to achieve, and Adelaide might just possibly be the first to have a race like this in the city,” Burgess said.
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