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Less than two months after winning Suzuki’s first MotoGP championship in 20 years, Davide Brivio has decided to leave his role as manager of the Suzuki Ecstar MotoGP team and move to lead the Alpine F1 team in four-wheel racing’s premier class.

The move was reported last night by Autosportand confirmed by a press release from Suzuki this morning.

The news comes as a massive shock to Suzuki and the MotoGP world. It is also a serious blow to Suzuki’s MotoGP project.

The world of MotoGP and WorldSBK has been relatively quiet for the last two weeks, as factories close and teams and riders take time off to celebrate their various holidays.

Very little has happened, with people off around the world, and only now returning to prepare for the 2020 season.

As we wait for the bikes to be back on track, and thus the news flowing again, here are the headlines that are tracking during the off-season.

It’s with great sadness today that we report the passing of John Surtees, a legend in both two-wheeled and four-wheeled motorsport. 

Surtees is best known for winning three 350cc Championship titles (1958, 1959, and 1960), four 500cc Grand Prix Championship titles (1956, 1958, 1959, and 1960), as well as the 1964 Formula One World Championship title.

This makes Surtees the only man to win a World Championship in both two-wheeled and four-wheeled racing categories. He was also the first person to will the Senior TT race at the Isle of Man TT, three times in a row.

In a report commissioned and released by the Circuit of the Americas (COTA), and prepared by the Greyhill Advisors, it would seem that hosting MotoGP and other events at the newly built track was a benefit to the local Austin economy this year, to the tune of $897 million.

The Greyhill’s analysis covers all of the events held at COTA, such as Formula One, MotoGP, and the ESPN X-Games, and it also includes all track rentals, concerts, and other events at the track as well.

Through these events, 1.1 million people attended COTA, whose operations directly account for $166 million of the $897 million brought to the area. The remaining $731 million comes from money spent by attendees outside of the track.

Watching freestyle trials riders is an exercise in understanding what most motorcyclists imagine they could do on two-wheels when they dream at night, but could never really hope to achieve in a million years during the waking hours.

Brimming with a skill set of patience, balance, and balls, riders like 12-time World Trials Champion Dougie Lampkin entertain us with their antics in confined spaces, on urban landscapes, and wiith gravity-defying front wheels.

So what happens when Lampkin visits the headquarters of Red Bull Racing? Well the obvious of course: wheelies, stoppies, burnouts…and that was just in the front courtyard.

Things start getting interesting though when Lampkin nips a bite to eat in the café, takes a look inside the F1 team’s giant kiln, and then later decides to jump a priceless Formula 1 race car. All in day’s work for a wanderlusting trials rider — we’ll just keep on dreaming.

The date of the German round of MotoGP at the Sachsenring is once again surrounded by uncertainty. A minor readjustment of the Formula One calendar means that the German F1 and MotoGP races are once again scheduled for the same date, July 7th, meaning that the Sachsenring race could well be forced to move to the following week, July 14th being an option, according to German-language website Speedweek.

Since the global financial crisis struck back in 2008, MotoGP’s primary focus has been on cutting costs. These efforts have met with varying success – sometimes reducing costs over the long-term, after a short-term increase, sometimes having no discernible impact whatsoever – and as a result, the grids in all three classes are filling up again.

Further changes are afoot – chiefly, the promise by Honda and Yamaha to supply cheaper machinery to private teams, either in the form of production racers, such as Honda’s RC213V clone, or Yamaha’s offer to lease engines to chassis builders – but there is a limit to how much can be achieved by cutting costs. What is really needed is for the series to raise its revenues, something which the series has signally failed to do.

In truth, the series has never really recovered from the loss of tobacco sponsorship, something for which it should have been prepared, given that it had had many years’ warning of the ruling finally being applied.

The underlying problem was that the raising of sponsorship had been outsourced and the marketing of the series had been outsourced to a large degree to the tobacco companies, and once they left – with the honorable, if confusing, exception of Philip Morris – those skills disappeared with them. There was nobody left to try to increase the amount of money coming into the sport.

With the MotoGP paddock assembled at the Motorland Aragon circuit, the press got their first chance to gauge rider reaction to the proposal of a spec ECU which Dorna is looking to introduce into MotoGP, most probably from 2014. The reaction was guardedly positive among the MotoGP regulars, though all five riders questioned in the pre-event press conference raised concerns over safety. Only Jonathan Rea, standing in for Casey Stoner in the Repsol Honda team for probably the last time, dissented, believing that MotoGP should be a pure prototype series.

“If everyone has the same electronics, this will be positive for everyone, more positive for the ones who do not have the best electronics,” Jorge Lorenzo told the press conference. He was the first to voice safety concerns. “I think we have to try it and to see if we still have the same security on the bike. Because now we avoid a lot of crashes, especially highsides, and maybe with the standard electronics the bike is a bit more dangerous. Because now, the bikes are more powerful, we have more than 250 horsepower, so we have to be careful of these things.”

The title of the post sort of implies what you are getting into here: slow-motion racing footage from Formula One, MotoGP, World Rally, 24 Hours of Le Mans, Isle of Man TT, and various GT Racing series. If you have watched any of the television coverage from MotoGP or the TT (and we’re sure you have), then you know how dramatic watching a motorcycle at 1,000+ frames per second can be, and apparently the same can be said about our four-wheeled compatriots.

What the title of this work doesn’t reveal is how with some masterful editing and a powerful soundtrack, 16 minutes of video footage about bikes and cars can feel more like poetry than racing. We bring you Racing in Slow Motion IV (as well as I-III ). Grab some kleenex before watching, and then share it with your buddies. If they don’t amid to getting a little bit emotional while viewing, they are probably lying. Group hug after the jump.

The longer I get to work in the MotoGP paddock, the more it strikes me how many talented people contribute to the show by working behind the curtain while a small percentage of personalities get most of the media attention. Rhys Edwards, whom you may recognize from his frequent position in Casey Stoner’s seat during shots of the Respol garage, is one of many people I’ve met who manage to perform roles of great responsibility while remaining friendly, approachable and warm individuals. When I learned something about his background in Formula One, I assumed he would have an interesting story to tell about his career and how he arrived at HRC, and he was generous enough to let me ask him some questions about his experience during the final GP weekend at Estoril.

Construction of the Circuit of the Americas outside of Austin, TX has resumed, after the track finally secured its contract with Formula One for a 2012 round. Work at the Circuit of the Americas had been suspended indefinitely after a contract between F1 and CotA was not signed by its appropriate deadline. However with Formula One Boss Bernie Ecclestone now getting his blood money, construction can once again resume in Texas.

Announcing that Formula One would race on a street course in New Jersey, along the shore of the Hudson, Eccelstone sent an all-too-clear message to the Texan venue that it was not the only option for F1 in the USA. While entirely an issue of posturing within Formula One’s circles, the spill-over affect of the Circuit of the Americas shutting down construction had obvious ramifications for MotoGP’s intention of running a Texan GP in 2013. From the looks of things, the Texan MotoGP round should not be affected by stoppage in work, and should proceed as planned.