The Last Hurrah at Phillip Island

Welcome to the world of modern day TT racing. Starting to feel like more chance of a race been cancelled than of having a race. Conditions may be iffy, and some riders are always willing to give it a go, but issues with providing medical cover, the organisers worrying about insurance claims and the verdicts of coroner’s courts are going to outweigh any view of the riders or punters. Sad reflection of modern life and it’s a darn shame the end of GP bike racing at PI was such a damp squib. It’s also a shame the injury to Jorge has potentially robbed fans of an exciting end to the season.
 
Tippie said:
I follow it on Motomatters.com, which I support with a subscription. Excellent write up and analysis there. I rarely watch sport on screen, not savvy enough to find it free and baulk at paying for a hundred soccer matches of zero interest just to get GP and SBK. Also with all the talk of processional races and people saying they fell asleep or fast forwarded it due to the way the bikes and tracks have become that very few races are actually exciting.
Losing P.I. mainly because of refusing to hold it early in the year to not clash with the car race doesn´t make sense. The long and expensive travel to Oz, or even within Oz, for most enthusiasts is rarely worth it for one long weekend event, but if they were consecutive weekends it would entice many more to endure the travel.
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It's logistics. Oz is a long way from everywhere, but the bottom line is, "It's all about the Benjamin$$$$ !" While riders want to race, promoters and sponsors want a return on their 'front money' and not years in court for losse$.
Adelaide ? If it is going to be anything like the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, it's going to be a 'snooze festival'. Street circuits are no place for MotoGP bikes/riders.
Adelaide is a long ride from the east or west.
 
78jotadave said:
It's logistics. Oz is a long way from everywhere, but the bottom line is, "It's all about the Benjamin$$$$ !" While riders want to race, promoters and sponsors want a return on their 'front money' and not years in court for losse$.
Adelaide ? If it is going to be anything like the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, it's going to be a 'snooze festival'. Street circuits are no place for MotoGP bikes/riders.
Adelaide is a long ride from the east or west.
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'The Alice' might drive/ride down for it. If it's not 'wet'
 
I also question the chopper line they spouted - surely professional choppers (cops, ambos, rescue) fly in low vis??? I thought there was a rider's meeting and the majority didn't want to race due to standing water (was that a post by you, Pat?) ... rumour?
 
redax5 said:
reporting on live TV zeroed in on the Medi Vac chopper being unable to fly to Melbourne due to visibility issues hence to dangerous to race
Track side "Experts" were reporting track itself was okay to race on

I worked on Heli transported Oil and Gas rigs for a number of years in PNG, Brazil and Siberia
Those Aussie pilots would never get a start in those countries flying choppers, what a fucking joke

In PNG, Kiwi pilots, we used to take the doors off of the Choppers so we had better visibility to try and find the Drilling rig, find the Water pumps at the lower level and then follow the Water line to the rig 2,500 feet up, could not see shit majority of the time

Brazil, flying to site or back in treacheous torrential downpours, Siberia, flying Irkutsk to site or back in a busted arse ex Miltarily Soviet chopper in blizzards
Let alone the rigs out in the North Sea where they face horendous conditions to do rig crew changes and medi vacs by Chopper
Bunch of soft cocks, totally disgusted in the outcome, absolute joke

Only advantage Adelaide will have in this set of circumstances is medical transport will be by Ambulance to the nearest Hospital as opposed to Choppers because of distance
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I have an Uncle in Gympie who is ex RAAF Wing Commander. He later spent many years flying helicopters for oil companies in the Persian Gulf, ferrying oil execs to and from rigs and a time flying in and out of Bougainville mining sites when he had to be armed. He has some awesome stories of (possibly embellished!) derring-do. Pretty sure on what his take on it all would be.
 
Here I go, over-thinking stuff again ...

I'm beginning to wonder if the story about the inability to fly the emergency helicopter was a crock of shit.

All airports have an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code for identification. For example, Melbourne is MEL, London Heathrow is LHR. The Alfred Hospital Helipad is YAFD. Phillip Island helipad is YPID.

If you look up YAFD on the Flight Aware website, it says the hospital helipad was open and active all day yesterday (Sunday of the PI MotoGP) with several arrivals and departures. So any claim that they were unable to fly to the hospital seems to be unsubstantiated.

Perhaps it was the visibility at Phillip Island that was the issue, but it didn't look too bad on TV. Just a bit wet and overcast. There appeared to be good visibility below cloud level.

They're required to have a medical helicopter on standby at the island during the racing. So assuming the helicopter was already there, then landing at the island wouldn't have been an issue in the event of a medivac. They only have to take off. I'm not a pilot, but it seems reasonable that visibility is less of a problem taking off than it is for landing. They only need to see their attitude indicator to know which way is up. As long as they keep going up until clear of the low cloud, they'd be OK.

Anyway, I'm just speculating. What do I know about flight logistics? I'll probably get shouted at by someone who knows about this stuff.
I suppose if they needed more than one helicopter it could have been problematic.

Even if flight logistics was an issue, I suspect there are several factors that go into making a decision to cancel. Maybe the organisers were scared of any claim against them if they ran the race in questionable conditions and someone got maimed or killed. Or maybe a majority of riders were unwilling to race in the conditions. I can't blame them for that. I wouldn't wanna go out in those conditions. I think it was Quentin who said doing 300+ kph in a cloud of spray from bikes in front wouldn't be a whole lot of fun.

Whatever the reason(s) for cancellation, it's over and done with. Phillip Island is now MotoGP history. But the Adelaide circuit is not yet fully approved, and remains subject to official FIM circuit homologation. I have my doubts that they'll get that sorted by next year so I wouldn't be surprised if the next Aussie GP ends up not being Adelaide at all. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
 
Next MotoGP it’ll be too humid to race …. then not enough Portuguese Chicken on the menu…… far too many Millennial softcocks twisting throttles in this world these days.
 
My last hurrah on the last hurrah .........


This is the sort of thing I remember after setting the alarm clock to get up in time ........ Edwards r v seagull gets a mention , although I`m sure it was Corser .......... Maybe everyone`s hit one at some time or other ...........
 
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Dellortoman said:
If you look up YAFD on the Flight Aware website, it says the hospital helipad was open and active all day yesterday (Sunday of the PI MotoGP) with several arrivals and departures. So any claim that they were unable to fly to the hospital seems to be unsubstantiated.
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Cam,
Can you share the number and times of arrivals / departures from YAFD that Sunday? I tried to sign up for flight aware but it just gives me errors. The world has moved on but it is interesting for me with various pointless arguments. :) Sadly all the MotoGP media have just accepted the poor visibility in Melbourne line without bothering to check and are parroting it out and about. It's certainly very much to the benefit of MotoGP's new hardline management that the race was abandoned, reinforcing that PI is not a suitable place to race anymore.

In spite of the race abandonment we had a great time, magic conditions for the two-day ride down, perfect campsite setup on Thursday and walked a lap on Friday, enjoying for the last time (for now...) how magic a place Phillip Island can be. We even bombed into the middle of the multi-thousand bike Barry Sheene ride from San Remo onto the Island, with the road lined with cheering crowds from schoolkids to oldies both sides all the way till when we peeled off to go to the track. It was brilliant.

Great to catch up with some of the Victorian Laverda contingent on Saturday, lots of happy memories of hi-jinks gotten up to with those and others over the years. Also magic to hear Jimmy Barnes still belting out some great tunes that night, a real nostalgic feeling of an end of an era, most of my adult life spent riding to PI at least once every couple of years.

Sunday was weird, it really did not rain much after 10am and a lot of the time stopped altogether (inside Turn1 at least). We were holed up in our big communal tent, with 20 guys, the pot belly stove roaring and the beers and food still flowing freely. So although it was disappointing not to see a Sunday race all in all a great time even without it. Visibility, meh, could certainly see several km horizontally most of the time. Vertically yes it would have been low.

Late on Sunday the temperature really dropped, and there was some continued rain overnight and even a little during the epic task of packing up our vast communal camp. We were away by 8:30am and split off from our big group as we were again making it a two-day ride home. Cool and damp but still made for nice riding through the South Gippsland, navigating by feel and finding a few new roads and ending up at Korumburra for brekky and a hot coffee. It warmed up and dried out as we made our way East to our eventual overnighter at the marvellous pub in the tiny little town of Marlo. Next day an uneventful trundle North, great roads all the way although blighted by the cancerous silent spread of 100 zones being arbitrarily marked down to 80. Will certainly miss that pilgrimage, the Hay plains it is not!

As for Phillip Island, well it left for 5 years a long while ago, perhaps it can come back again. A more stable time of year, new pit complex and some work on access and egress, public transport and so on. The main problem is that assuming the Adelaide track actually happens, the government there is going to do a way better job of promoting and running the event, and if it pulls a decent crowd it's going to be declared a success regardless of whether the racing is any good or not. So PI has a double hill to climb to get it back.

PI 1.JPG
 
breganzane said:
Cam,
Can you share the number and times of arrivals / departures from YAFD that Sunday? I tried to sign up for flight aware but it just gives me errors.
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Hmm ... I never signed up for Flightaware, but when I checked the site on the day of the race, it showed a table of arrivals and departures for YAFD for that day only. I think it showed 2 flights at the time I checked (after the race was cancelled so I guess around 6pm). If it had occurred to me at the time that the info might be useful to someone, I'd have taken a screen shot.

Out of curiosity, I just checked Flight Aware a few minutes ago for YAFD, and again it only shows the current day. There's been only one arrival from St Leonards and the subsequent departure of that aircraft back to Essendon so far today. According to Google's AI overview, you have to buy a subscription to Flightaware to get historical data. I dunno how much that costs, but I'm not keen to buy a subscription to something I'll probably never look at again.

If you're trying to build a case for an argument. Maybe you could contact the Alfred helipad directly and ask for their record of flights for 25/10/2026. According to Google, the phone number for the YAFD helipad is 03 9525 2001
 
My one and only attendance at a community protest showed how the pros do it. They called for a show of hands at the end of the night, and the count was done by one side of the argument, and they, funnily enough, had the most votes, and that's how it was recorded and published, and they made a big deal of that, and that's how professional politicians get things past concerned locals. Only that didnt look correct, but before anyone could check, it was over. Absolutely check if arrivals happened at the Hospital helipad. Facts get FLUBBED all the time when wool gets pulled over eyes.
 
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