MotoAmerica’s return to Brainerd International Raceway in 2021 was treated as something close to a homecoming.
Four seasons later the Minnesota circuit was gone from the schedule, and the series has not been back since. It is one of the quieter calendar changes of recent years, and the reason behind it turns out to be more mundane than most fans assumed.
A return two decades in the making
When MotoAmerica confirmed the Brainerd round for 2021, it filled a gap left by Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which had committed to a car-racing-only schedule that year after hosting the series in 2020. MotoAmerica’s own announcement framed the timing as fortunate for both parties.
Series president Wayne Rainey, who raced at the circuit himself, described the old event as one of the best on the calendar and noted that the track had changed considerably since his era. Circuit owner Kristi Copham was blunter about the demand, calling a national Superbike return the single most common request she had fielded across fourteen years of ownership.
Minnesota’s odd gap
Here is the contrast worth noting. Brainerd draws well over 100,000 people across its biggest weekend of the year and bills itself as the largest racetrack in the Upper Midwest, yet Minnesota is one of the few American states where licensed sportsbooks still do not operate at all. Anyone comparing Minnesota sportsbooks against what is available a short drive away runs into that gap immediately, because Iowa has offered both retail and mobile wagering for years and Wisconsin added mobile betting in April 2026.
The legislative picture explains why. The most recent framework put to Minnesota lawmakers centred on tribal operators, a twenty percent tax rate and projected annual revenue of around eighty million dollars, but the session closed in May 2026 without an agreement. For a state with this much motorsport, ball-sport and college athletics infrastructure, the sports wagering market remains conspicuously undeveloped.
The appetite for racing itself has never been the problem. Brainerd ran AMA Superbike rounds from 1983 to 1987 and again through the 1990s and early 2000s, and it hosted the World Superbike Championship in three consecutive seasons from 1989 to 1991. For a facility in rural Crow Wing County, roughly 130 miles north of Minneapolis, that is an unusually international CV.
The track adapted for the bikes
Brainerd did not simply host the series and leave it at that. Ahead of the 2022 round, then the seventh stop on a ten-round Superbike championship, the circuit reworked sections of its 2.5-mile Competition Road Course at MotoAmerica’s request, acting on direct feedback from riders.
The changes centred on two areas: a chicane at Turn 9 and the removal of extra pavement outside Turn 10, the latter specifically to eliminate a white line of demarcation that had caused confusion the previous season. MotoAmerica publicly thanked the Brainerd staff for the cooperation and framed the work as a rider-safety matter. That is not a small commitment for a track whose primary business lies elsewhere.
Then a straight swap
The end came without much drama. When the 2025 calendar was published in September 2024, Virginia International Raceway had returned to the schedule and Brainerd was the round it displaced. There was no protracted dispute, no safety concern, no financial collapse. One venue came back and another made way.
Brainerd’s last MotoAmerica weekend was round four of the 2024 season, held on 14 to 16 June with six classes in action including Superbike, Supersport, Stock 1000, Twins Cup, Junior Cup and Mission King of the Baggers. The circuit had previously held round six in 2023 and round seven in 2022, its date drifting earlier each year.
VIR has since become one of the anchors of the calendar. The 2026 season features nine rounds and twenty Superbike races, opening at Road Atlanta in April and closing at New Jersey Motorsports Park in late September, with VIR handed one of the two tripleheader weekends, running on 14 to 16 August. Brainerd appears nowhere on the schedule.
Life after the Superbikes
None of this has left the Minnesota circuit short of work. Its calendar is arguably the most varied of any American track, combining a world-class drag strip with two road course layouts — the 2.5-mile Competition course and the original 3.1-mile Donnybrooke configuration that dates to the venue’s 1968 opening.
The centrepiece remains the NHRA Brainerd Nationals, running 20 to 23 August this year in its 44th edition and described by the track as the biggest annual sporting event in the Upper Midwest. Drag racing, endurance events, drifting and autocross fill out the rest.
MotoAmerica, meanwhile, still shares a weekend with the world championship at Circuit of The Americas, a fixture familiar to anyone following our MotoGP coverage. Whether the series eventually finds its way back north is an open question. The appetite was clearly there in 2021, and calendar swaps have a habit of reversing themselves.
