Joan Mir critical of MotoGP decision-making on race cancellations
‘If they listen or not, there is not something that we can do'
Joan Mir says if the riders “are all more united” their opinion on the Valencia Grand Prix may be taken more seriously, but is critical of how race cancellations have been handled before.
Deadly flooding in the Valencia region of Spain this week has left more than 150 people dead and has resulted in the season finale being cancelled. A replacement circuit is being considered.
Before the official cancellation, world champion Francesco Bagnaia said on Friday at the Malaysian GP that he was “not prepared to race” in Valencia, while Marc Marquez says there is “no sense” in thinking about staging the grand prix.
Honda’s Joan Mir echoes the morality comments made by his peers and believes a race should only be staged if there is a guarantee that it will not negatively impact the local people.
“We don’t have any information,” said Mir on Friday at Sepang before Valencia was officially cancelled.
“The information that we have is it looks like we will go. This is what I heard. Personally I have my opinion about it.
“Every day the situation is getting worse, they [the local authorities] discover more chaos and, morally, to go there is not correct.
“But we have to know a bit all of the scenarios, we have to understand all. If we go there and the reality is we help the city, I agree completely to go.
“But if the reality is we go and we make some problems for the city and they stop doing things that are a lot more important than a racing weekend, then I’m not agree about going there.”
Mir believes a united front from the riders will allow them to help influence any Dorna decision-making.
However, he is also critical of the fact that in previous occasions when races were uncertain - such as Argentina and Kazakhstan this year - Dorna continued to insist that these events would go ahead when that proved not to be the case.
“We need to see if we will go, if the decision is that we will go, because of course if we all have the same opinion we can propose something to them,” Mir added.
“If they listen or not, is not something that we can do so much. But if are all more united, we are stronger, and we can probably do something.
“Probably the safety commission today is important to understand if they say something.
“But a lot of times it happens that if there is a problem in one country and it was a problem quite important, that was for example Argentina and the situation they have, in many things, in Kazakhstan, and a couple of races before you go there you speak and ‘for sure you’ll go’.
“And probably they know that we will not go. But they do it for some reason. We can imagine why…”
