After the premature interruption of the Moto2 World Championship race in Australia, there was some uncertainty about whether the MotoGP sprint race would take place. The decision was to cancel it due to the strong wind.
Mike Webb, the race director of MotoGP, explained that the riders were consulted before making the decision, as were the team principals: ‘We had a meeting with all the the team principals shortly before we made the decision, with all the team principals. Loris [Capirossi, safety advisor] and Carlos [Ezpeleta, Dorna Sports chief sporting officer] have been talking to the riders, and Tomé [Alfonso, FIM safety office] talking to the MotoGP riders in their boxes to get their firsthand opinions. There is, as you can imagine, a big range of opinions of the riders, depending on who they are, their own circunstances, whatever… so, a huge range’.
According to the British rider, attempting to start the race with worse conditions than those at the time of the interruption of the Moto2 race was not under consideration: ‘Therefore, we spoke to the teams to say: «These are our options, this is the situation as it is at the moment». But to even start again, to even do a sighting lap and try to run a race when the weather condition is measurably worse than it was when we showed the red flag… Sorry, that’s not an option, we couldn’t do it’.