After 30 Years MotoGP Is Leaving Phillip Island And Heading To Adelaide

• After 30 years, 2026 will be the final Australian MotoGP to be held at Victoria’s Philip Island race track.
• The new location for the race is confirmed to be Adelaide, with the first event to take place in November 2027.
• The final Philip Island MotoGP will be held between October 23 and 25 this year.

One of Australia’s great sporting events is about to disappear in its current form. After more than three decades of sea spray, crosswinds, and the occasional seagull dodging a Ducati at 300km/h, MotoGP is leaving Phillip Island.

This October’s race will be the last Victorian round, with South Australia confirmed to take over the event after negotiations between the Victorian Government, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation and rights holder Dorna Sports finally collapsed.

The sticking point was the race’s location. Victoria wanted to keep the race where it’s always been run, at a proper motorcycle circuit carved into the coastline, but Dorna Sports wanted proximity to a major city. Essentially, a more commercialisable event that’s closer to airports, hotels, and logistics managers.

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“We know that we could have kept [the race] in Victoria, had we sold out Phillip Island,” said Sport and Major Events Minister Steve Dimopoulos. “We were never willing to sell out Phillip Island.”

“We met every other request. We met the licence fee, we met everything else, in fact, went beyond it.”

Albert Park was floated as the alternative, but it wasn’t considered for long, given the size of the track and the extra runoff room that bikes need when things go wrong. To make this possible, Albert Park would likely need to be widened, and most of the trees that surround the lake would need to be chopped down, which obviously wouldn’t be popular with the locals.

So instead, the race is packing up and heading to Adelaide. The South Australian government has stated that the event “will mark the first time a MotoGP-era event has ever been held in a downtown street circuit with uncompromised modern-day safety measures,” as the track’s location has been confirmed to be just outside of Adelaide’s CBD.

The race track will be approximately 4.195km long with 18 turns, allowing riders to hit speeds of up to 340km/h along the straights. As far as when the inaugural 2027 edition will take place, Adelaide’s first Australian MotoGP will be staged across three days in November next year.

It’s a massive disappointment for Victorian motorsport fans, not just because they’ll now need to get on a plane to watch the event live, but also because Phillip Island isn’t just a track; it was the track.

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The place where Mick Doohan and Casey Stoner turned Sundays into national events, and where riders still call it one of the best circuits on the planet. Another element to the disappointment was that last year’s event pulled more than 91,000 spectators, in further proof that the magic hadn’t faded.

The final Victorian MotoGP weekend runs from October 23 to 25, and we’re expecting it to feel less like a race and more like a farewell tour. One last lap of that ridiculous ocean backdrop before the grid trades salt air for Adelaide’s city lights. It’s the end of an era, and honestly, it deserved better.