As head of IRTA, Hervé Poncharal is at the heart of the political action carried out in MotoGP and as manager of the Tech3 team, he lives on a daily basis the economic and social imperatives inherent to his responsibilities. He is therefore on the front line in this fight against a Coronavirus whose effects could live up to the reputation of Attila, where the grass no longer grew back after his passage. This shows the task that falls to Generalissimo Carmelo Ezpeleta... The Frenchman, who joined the resistance, takes stock.
As for the new scourge of coronavirus, we are still far from the battle of the Catalan fields, where the horde of Huns was stopped, but the besieged paddock is holding up. And first of all thanks to its cohesion and solidarity. Hervé Poncharal recalls: “ I think MotoGP is the little mirror of the world. European nations are unable to cope economically with this situation and the ECB is helping them by giving them money. In our world countries are teams and the ECB is Dorna and Bridge Point. »
« If we can make the teams survive, we can start again as soon as possible. For this reason, we work together to help teams in the best possible way, so that they can keep their staff. Otherwise the recovery time would lengthen. Carmelo understood this from day one and is working on it. He is the first firefighter who tries to put out this fire and also the only one who has enough water to do so.. »And as a result, he keeps the flame alive.
The fact remains that we will have to adapt to a new situation which will be marked by seriously dented budgets and draconian health requirements. However, there is no question of doing anything: “ it is not possible to start again with only MotoGP. We must always understand and remember that the strength of our championship came from all three classes and Carmelo is the first to say that. Moto3, Moto2 and MotoGP will participate in every race of the championship. This is my position and Carmelo absolutely agrees with me. »
We will therefore survive together in the Grand Prix. And to free ourselves from room for maneuver, we observe what is happening with the Formula 1 : " MotoGP and F1 have exactly the same job and their problems are identical. We are brothers in this sense Says Hervé Poncharal which makes an interesting clarification: “ it is very interesting for us that Formula 1 is considering racing a month before us in Austria, because if they manage to manage the situation, I don't see why we can't do it a month later »
He ends in a long interview given to the site GP One : " we want to guarantee the same show as before. We do not want races in degraded mode, we will not accept compromises, the organization can be compressed but the spectacle must remain the same. » In what format? “ If we can organize more than one race on the same track, for example two or even three, we will support this proposal. It might not be the ideal situation, but for now we have to be pragmatic: if we found 4 circuits where we could race, that would mean being able to organize 8 or 12 races »
