Re: It's on...

pablo wrote:
"sturd" wrote
I've only been there once but it seemed at least half the crowd
was Spanish. The car parks had mostly spanish cars/bikes.
I think Portugese must have all come on public transportation.

Doesn't make it Spanish. Every GP in Europe will have a healthy amount of international visitors, many of them travelling by motorcycle. It doesn't take MotoGP - go to the Isle of Man TT and check the crowd mix. All British? I don't think so.

While true, that's all a dodge regarding the matter at hand - just what is the Portuguese GP? Portugal has just over 10M people, and the only countries with a GP that are in that size range are the Czech Republic (also 10M), the Netherlands (just under 17M), and of course Qatar (under 1M). Assen has been on the calendar for ages, the Dutch TT a true event, and has always drawn from various other countries, I believe, centrally located between France, Germany and the UK. Brno was added back in 1987 after having been on the calendar until a decade earlier, and had huge attendance in the iron curtain days, and mostly from East Germany; today it and the Sachsenring are the only races in that part of Europe. Qatar is some bizarre abomination that relates to lining various peoples' pockets more than anything and shows GP can be run in a television studio.

So where does that leave Estoril? The GP history of the Portuguese GP consists of races run in 87-88, and those races took place at Jarama and Jerez, in Spain. The legacy of that is that established the precedent of running multiple races a year in Spain, and that has happened every year since '91 (when Spain was finally establishing a presence in the premier class). Then Estoril was added to the calendar in 2000, the year after Valencia was added as a third Spanish GP, the year after Criville won Spain's first (and only) premier class championship, when Spanish companies were the main sponsors of two of the three Japanese factory teams, at the point at which Spain had fully established itself as the dominant country in GP in terms of political and economic power, if not otherwise. So Estoril sits a relatively short distance from the population center of Andalucia around Seville, and the race is run at the end of the season, as opposed to the other race in that region, Jerez, which is at the start of the season. As Mike says, everything I've read says that likely a majority of those attending that race come from Spain, or very close to that.

So would Portugal have a GP if it was in, say, Scandinavia, as opposed to next door to Spain? I have my doubts, as in, no way...

Europe is the motorcycle racing Mecca of the world,

Wow. And yet somehow GP and WSB aren't "European" series? With a heavy European focus, and inevitably European favoritism and European biases? Hmm...
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