Race against time | Can Adelaide deliver?

The clock is ticking loudly on South Australia’s bold attempt to bring MotoGP to the streets of Adelaide.

Organisers have just 19 months to deliver from scratch a 4.195km, 18-corner circuit in the city centre.

Major issues to overcome quickly are the final design approval by racing authorities and a state government budget to pay for it, followed by the awarding of construction contracts. Then comes the crucial process of laying a surface fit for purpose and getting the whole project signed off on by MotoGP’s governing authority, the FIM.

State Premier Peter Malinauskas is confident that the circuit will meet  Federation Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM) standards and be completed within the timeline set by the contract he signed on 19 February with MotoGP sporting director Carlos Ezpeleta.

“I’m not the engineer, I’m not the track designer,” he told a local radio talkshow host. “I think there is a lot of would-be experts out there on social media already. What you’ve got to do is put your faith in the experts and the regulators.”

While the Malinauskas Labor Government was returned with a thumping majority on 21 March, nearly a month of decision-making was lost due to it being in election caretaker mode.

However, the team that brought the Supercars back to Adelaide in just six months in 2022 will be largely responsible for delivering the MotoGP circuit by late 2027.

The Malinauskas Labor Government spent $35m to revive Supercars on part of the original F1 circuit. A significant part of the budget was spent buying back temporary grandstands, barriers and track equipment. The government claimed the 2022 event delivered $51.85m in economic benefits.

While it is too early to speculate on what the greenfield MotoGP project will cost,  Mandalika’s similar ‘street circuit’ cost Indonesia $A112m just to lay the 4.3km racing surface. Local authorities say this is equal to the cost of building 10km of a multi-lane toll road in Indonesia. By comparison Aussie costs are around $5m per lane per kilometre, according to a NSW Government report.

The cost of a circuit sky-rockets when you factor in associated infrastructure. Hungary’s Balaton Park, claimed to be the first new international motorsport facility in Europe for 15 years, cost $A300m all-up.

The current SA Government is spending big on both sport and road infrastructure.

On the other side of Adelaide’s Parklands from the MotoGP circuit it has allocated $45m to a Greg Norman-designed redevelopment of the North Adelaide Golf Course for the popular LIV golf circus.

As well it pays as much as $20m to host the annual AFL Gather Round, which this year set records for both attendance and money poured by fans into the local economy.

These figures pale into insignificance when compared to the River Torrens to Darlington Project, the final section of Adelaide’s North-South transport corridor.

This massive infrastructure project has a $15.4 billion budget, jointly funded by the South Australian and Federal Governments.

Involving 10.5km of freeway, which includes three-lane tunnels and lowering South Road to bypass 21 traffic lights, won’t be finished until 2031.

However, it means there is plenty of road tarmac construction knowledge already in the state.

South Australia’s ability to fast-track motorsport dates back to Adelaide’s F1 era, when the contract was signed in October 1984 and the first race held in November 1985.

Bob Barnard, the main architect of the project, says the initial budget blew out from $3m to $5m (around $15m in today’s terms) with another $1.5m for installation and removal plus a further $750,000 to actually run the race.

His team thought laterally to solve many problems. For example the block-and-wire-fence safety barriers were developed in SA in a way that didn’t ruin the street view on international television. Since then they have become a motorsport industry standard for street circuits. To show off Adelaide on global television Barnard also moved the barriers as far back from the circuit as possible.

The introduction of an SA Grand Prix Act helped fast-track the circuit’s construction, which was a pet project of the John Bannon Labor Government.

Now another Labor government faces similar challenges.

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