Valencia, Spain

The stunning new Motorland Aragon track - scene of the 13th round of this year's MotoGP championship - is to get a full time spot on the World Championship calendar. According to reports from Spain, the Aragon track is due to sign a contract to host the World Superbike series from 2011 through 2013 on Wednesday.

The deal does not mean that there will be two rounds of World Superbikes in Spain. Instead, the reports (such as the one in leading Spanish magazine Motociclismo.es) state that the Spanish round will switch from Valencia to Motorland Aragon. WSBK's departure from Valencia is believed to come after pressure from some of the parties involved in MotoGP put pressure on the Ricardo Tormo circuit not to stage World Superbikes. The Communitat Valenciana (the regional government) has very close ties to MotoGP and Dorna, and may have elected to put its support behind the MotoGP series, rather than splitting resources over both MotoGP and World Superbikes.

The cloud of volcanic ash which hangs invisibly over Northern Europe has claimed its first victim in the shape of a major sporting event. The disruption and cancellation of 80% of flights around Europe has caused the Motegi round of MotoGP, due to take place next Sunday, April 25th, to be canceled and rescheduled for October 3rd.

Reports of problems started to emerge earlier this weekend, as MotoMatters.com reported yesterday. Teams - most of whom are based in Europe, and were therefore caught up in the air travel chaos - reported they were monitoring the situation closely, hoping for improvement, and trying to reschedule flights as soon as possible. Dorna had even gone so far as to charter two wide body jets, capable of flying 600 people to Japan directly, to avoid teams getting caught up in the snarl of international air traffic.

One of the things that the Fiat On The Web team do when the attend MotoGP races - apart from supplying coverage of the weekend on Twitter and on their blog and Facebook pages - is to shoot interviews with the protagonists of the weekend. Restrictions imposed on them prevent them from doing video interviews with Jorge Lorenzo and Valentino Rossi, and while this is a shame for them, in a strange way, it is good for the hardcore MotoGP fans, as it means they interview the riders' team managers instead. So instead of the same interviews you see on TV and on MotoGP.com with the riders, instead, you get a perspective from the pit garage, and some background on how the team viewed the race, rather than just the riders. So here's Valentino Rossi's team boss Davide Brivio and Jorge Lorenzo's team boss Wilco Zeelenberg talking about the first MotoGP race of the season at Qatar.

Davide Brivio:

As ever, the World Superbike series has once again provided video highlights of the races from last weekend's WSBK round at Valencia on their Youtube channel. So for those of you who, for one reason or another, missed the World Superbike or World Supersport races, here's your chance to get the executive summary.

WSBK Race 1:

WSBK Race 2:

After this weekend's double-header of races, with both World Superbikes in Valencia and MotoGP in Qatar, OnTheThrottleTV put on their usual excellent live video show, featuring interviews and news. The interview subject for the World Superbike series was Roger Lee Hayden, who talks to Dave Williams about the Valencia weekend and living in Ben Spies mountain hideaway in Como, Italy. Here's what Hayden had to say: