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The MotoGP calendar continues to expand. Today, Dorna announced in an unusually brief press release that the Sokol International Racetrack, 50 kilometers north  east of Almaty in Kazakhstan, is to be added to the MotoGP calendar for 2023 for a five-year period.

The Kazakh track is still in the process of being built, and so will face homologation and safety checks before the race will be confirmed as happening in 2023.

The race in Kazakhstan will take the slot vacated by the now defunct Kymiring in Finland, which failed due to its business case collapsing when Russia invaded Ukraine.

MotoGP is set to follow the World Superbike Championship with the addition of a sprint race on Saturday, after qualifying.

The move is aimed at providing more on-track action during on Saturday’s, and adding a bit more spectacle to MotoGP’s racing format.

Sprint races have been a success already with the MotoE World Cup, where the electric bikes feature hard bar-to-bar racing in their limited racing distance.

The Saturday sprint race format in WorldSBK has also been a strong move for Dorna in the production series, so it doesn’t come as a surprise to see the powers are be implementing it in MotoGP.

Suzuki and Dorna have finally agreed terms for the Japanese factory’s withdrawal from MotoGP.

In a press release issued today, Suzuki made official that it would be pulling out of the MotoGP championship at the end of the 2022 season, and ending the participation of the Suzuki Ecstar MotoGP team.

At the same time, they announced they would be withdrawing from official participation in the EWC Endurance World Championship, where they race under the Yoshimura SERT Motul banner.

There is a MotoGP race at Le Mans this weekend, but to be honest, it is hard to concentrate on the race. A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks, which has shaken up MotoGP to a degree we hadn’t expected even as late as two weeks ago.

Suzuki’s withdrawal blows the MotoGP silly season right open, with not just rider seats up in the air, but grid slots and bikes too.

Then there’s the controversy over tire pressures being routinely under the minimum allowed, and whether that is even an issue or not, given the MSMA have agreed not to do anything about it.

It has been a busy day for everyone involved in MotoGP. A large section of the paddock was sat either behind a computer or staring at a mobile device frantically refreshing their flight tracker app of choice, watching the exploits of Aerostan aircraft EX-47001, as it finally made its way from Mombasa in Kenya to Lagos in Nigeria to Salvador in Brazil.

As I write this, it has taken off from Salvador and is winging its way to Tucuman, where it is due to land some time after 9pm. At Salvador, the flight number changed from BSC4042 to BSC4043.

A sign? I leave it up to the reader to decipher the letters BSC in the flight number.

A broken down cargo freighter has thrown the schedule for the Argentina Grand Prix at Termas de Rio Hondo into chaos.

One of the aircraft carrying some of the freight from Indonesia to Argentina suffered problems, causing the freight to get stuck in Mombasa, Kenya, and delaying its arrival at the Termas de Rio Hondo circuit.

With bikes from a number of teams missing – including the Gresini Ducati of MotoGP championship leader Enea Bastianini – it was decided to cancel practice for all three classes on Friday, and to begin the weekend on Saturday instead.

There has been much debate over the past two months over the use of front ride-height devices, hydraulic-mechanical systems which lower the front of a MotoGP bike on corner exit.

Ever since Ducati turned up with the device at the Sepang test, the other motorcycle manufacturers have complained about it as a waste of money, an expensive way of finding small performance gains.

That prompted an internal discussion inside the MSMA, the association of motorcycle manufacturers racing in MotoGP.

On the coattails of the success seen by Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” series, which follows the car world’s Formula One World Championship, MotoGP has finally decide to allow a series of its own.

Titled “MotoGP Unlimited” and produced by The Mediapro Studio, the eight-episode docuseries will be streamed on the Amazon Prime service (and also available on MotoGP.com for its subscribers).

This premiere series will follow the 2021 MotoGP World Championship, and aims to cover the stories behind the races.