Anybody can fly to Bangkok and get a bus to the circuit. The better version is two thousand seven hundred kilometres of Thailand’s best roads with a Grand Prix in the middle of it, and in 2027 that Grand Prix opens a completely new era.
Why 2027 is the one to go to
Thailand’s Grand Prix at Buriram runs from the fifth to the seventh of March 2027, and it is the season opener for the third consecutive year. That alone makes it a good weekend: the first race of a championship has an atmosphere the twelfth one never has, because nobody knows anything yet and everybody thinks they might win.
What makes 2027 different is that it is the debut of the new eight hundred and fifty cc regulations. The premier class has been running to a thousand cc for well over a decade, and the rule change resets aerodynamics, capacity and a great deal of what the manufacturers had figured out. Everything anybody thinks they know about the pecking order goes out of the window, and the first competitive session of the new formula happens at Buriram.
If you were ever going to build a riding holiday around a race weekend, that is the one.
The circuit, and the town that built it
Chang International Circuit is a modern facility on the edge of Buriram, in Isaan, the northeastern region of Thailand. It opened in 2014, it runs to a little over four and a half kilometres with twelve corners, and it was built to a specification that got it a MotoGP contract quickly.
The town around it is genuinely unusual and worth understanding, because it explains why a world championship round happens in a provincial Thai city most tourists have never heard of. Buriram was a fairly ordinary Isaan town until one local political family decided to turn it into a sports city. They built a football stadium, took the local club to the top of the Thai league, then built the circuit next to it. The result is a place whose entire modern identity is constructed around motorsport and football, and which on a race weekend behaves accordingly.
What that means for a visiting rider is that the town knows exactly what to do with you. The whole place turns out. There is a street party. Local riders come in from across the region and the parking areas around the circuit fill up with everything from restored two-strokes to brand new litre bikes. It is a very long way from the polite European Grand Prix experience.
Isaan, which nobody rides and everybody should
The northeast is the least visited third of Thailand and it is a completely different country from Chiang Mai or Phuket.
It is flat, dry and agricultural, it is culturally closer to Laos than to Bangkok, the language spoken at home is Isaan rather than central Thai, and it has the best food in the country by a comfortable margin. Som tam, grilled chicken, sticky rice, larb. The whole region eats better than it has any economic right to.
For riding it offers something the north does not: distance. Long roads across open country, minimal traffic once you are off the main arteries, and the ability to cover four hundred kilometres in a day without fighting for it. After a week of second-gear mountain hairpins, an Isaan day is a completely different pleasure.
Almost no foreign motorcycle tour goes there, which is the other reason to.
The route out, which is the mountains
The twelve-day version starts in Chiang Mai and gets the technical riding out of the way first.
Day one runs up Doi Inthanon, Thailand’s highest mountain, and across to Mae Sariang, which is two hundred and seventy kilometres of exactly the sort of road northern Thailand is famous for. Day two continues south down the Myanmar border to Mae Sot, on a road that follows the Salween valley and which is one of the quietest good roads in the country.
Then the terrain opens out. Mae Sot to Sukhothai puts you in the old capital, with a UNESCO-listed historical park full of thirteenth-century Buddha figures that you can ride around at seven in the morning before anybody else is up. Sukhothai to Khao Yai is a long day, three hundred and ninety kilometres, and it takes you into national park country on the edge of the northeastern plateau.
And then Khao Yai to Buriram, and the pace of the trip changes completely.
Race weekend
Two days at the circuit. Saturday is qualifying and the sprint, which is a short race at full commitment and which many people now prefer to the main event. Sunday is race day, with the support classes in the morning building toward the premier class in the afternoon.
A few things worth knowing about watching MotoGP in Thailand specifically. It is hot, in March, in the middle of a large flat plain, and the grandstands that have shade are worth paying for. Hydration is not optional. The noise level in the general admission areas is high and enthusiastic in a way that European circuits are not, because the crowd is largely local and treats it as a festival.
And the traffic getting in and out is the traffic of a small city hosting an event ten times its size. This is the single strongest practical argument for arriving on a motorcycle: while everybody else sits in a queue for ninety minutes, you filter to the front and park.
The way back, which is the best part
Here is where the long way round earns its name. Most people leave Buriram on Sunday evening or Monday morning and go straight back to an airport. The route we run goes the other way.
Buriram to Khon Kaen, then up to Chiang Khan on the Mekong, which is a small riverside town with wooden shophouses looking across at Laos and one of the more atmospheric places to spend a night in Thailand. Then Chiang Khan to Nan, three hundred and sixty kilometres, which puts you back into the mountains at the northern end.
Then day eleven, Nan to Bo Kluea to Phayao, which is the one everybody remembers. This is Route 1148 country, the road that gets named in lists of the world’s great motorcycling roads and largely deserves it: a ridge road running along the Laos border, almost empty, with a rhythm of curves that goes on for hours and a surface good enough to trust.
Finishing a race-weekend trip on that road rather than in an airport queue is the difference between a holiday and a transfer.
The burning season problem, honestly
March in northern Thailand is the worst month of the year for air quality. The Chiang Mai basin fills with smoke from agricultural and forest burning, and in March 2026 the city ranked among the most polluted in the world on multiple days.
A tour that starts and finishes in Chiang Mai in early March is riding into that, and it would be dishonest not to say so. What mitigates it is the shape of the route: the trip spends most of its time heading south and east, away from the basin and away from the worst of the smoke, and Isaan and the central plains are meaningfully cleaner than the northern valleys at that time of year.
The practical implication is that the first and last days are the exposed ones, and that a rider with asthma or any significant respiratory condition should think carefully about early March in the north regardless of what else is on the calendar. Everybody else should bring a proper respirator for the two days at each end and not worry about the middle.
Getting tickets and beds
Both sell out, and the beds sell out harder than the tickets.
Buriram is a provincial city with a normal amount of accommodation and an abnormal number of visitors on that weekend. Hotels within striking distance book up months ahead, prices multiply, and the people who leave it late end up staying an hour away and commuting. Anybody planning to do this independently should be booking accommodation the day the calendar is confirmed rather than the month before the race.
Tickets go on sale well ahead and the shaded grandstands go first. General admission is cheap, plentiful and hot.
This is the least interesting reason to do a race weekend as part of an organised trip and it is probably the most practical one: the beds are already booked and somebody else did the queueing.
What the bike does to the experience
There is a specific thing that happens when you arrive at a Grand Prix on a motorcycle after a week of riding, and it is hard to explain to somebody who has flown in.
You have spent six days working on your own riding. Line, throttle, brake, the whole apparatus. Your hands know what the front end feels like at the limit of what you are willing to do. And then you sit at turn three and watch somebody take the same physical objects and do something with them that is not related to what you did all week except by species.
People who ride to a race weekend consistently say they watch it differently. Not better, differently. You stop looking at the whole bike and start looking at the specific inputs, because you have been making versions of those inputs since Monday.
The Thai racing scene, which is bigger than you think
Thailand has an enormous domestic motorcycling culture and a serious racing one underneath it. Small-capacity classes are fiercely contested, the country produces Grand Prix riders, and the level of interest at a national level would surprise anybody who assumes MotoGP is a European sport with overseas rounds.
What you see at Buriram is that culture turning up in force. It is a lot of very young Thai fans, a lot of clubs who have ridden in from other provinces, and a level of noise and enthusiasm that European circuits gave up on decades ago. If you have been to Grands Prix in Europe and found the atmosphere a bit sedate, this will fix it.
Practicalities for the race days
Sun protection, because the plain has no shade and March in Isaan is hot. Ear protection, which sounds absurd at a motorcycle race until you have spent six hours next to it. Cash, because the food and drink stalls around the circuit are the good option and they are not taking cards.
A small backpack rather than luggage, since you will be walking between grandstands and the paddock area. And a plan for where you left the bike, because a field with four thousand motorcycles in it looks very different at six in the evening than it did at eight in the morning.
Sukhothai at seven in the morning
Day three of the route puts you in Sukhothai, and it is worth pulling out of the itinerary because it is the stop people underrate before they arrive and remember afterwards.
Sukhothai was the capital of the first major Thai kingdom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and what survives is a historical park covering several square kilometres: brick and laterite temple platforms, seated and walking Buddha figures, lotus-bud stupas, and reflecting ponds. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and it is considerably less visited than Ayutthaya because it is further from Bangkok.
The reason it belongs on a motorbike tour rather than a coach tour is the scale. The site is spread out, the roads between the zones are quiet, and riding slowly between eight-hundred-year-old temple compounds in the first light before the heat arrives is a strange and lovely thing to do on a motorcycle. Bicycles are the standard way visitors get round; a bike lets you take in the outlying northern and western zones that most people skip entirely.
Get up early. By ten it is thirty-four degrees and full of tour groups. At seven it is empty, the light is coming in sideways through the trees and you will have a thirteenth-century city to yourself.
Khao Yai, and the elephant problem
Day four ends at Khao Yai, Thailand’s first national park and another World Heritage site, sitting on the edge of the northeastern plateau about three hours from Bangkok.
It is a genuine forest: two thousand square kilometres of it, with wild elephant, gibbon, hornbill and a decent tiger population that nobody sees. The roads through the park are good, twisty and quiet, and they climb enough to give you a real temperature drop after the plains.
The elephants are the thing to take seriously. Wild herds cross and occasionally stand on the park roads, and encounters are common enough that the park publishes guidance. Keep a very long distance, do not switch the engine off, never get between an adult and a calf, and do not stop for a photograph. People are killed most years across Thailand in elephant encounters and it is almost always somebody who got closer than they should have.
Handled properly it is one of the highlights of any guided tour through central Thailand, and the transition from Khao Yai’s forest into the flat open country of Isaan the following morning is one of the more dramatic landscape changes on the route.
Khao Yai, the day before the noise
The stop between Sukhothai and Buriram deserves more than a line, because it is the last quiet night before the weekend and it is one of the better places in Thailand to spend one.
Khao Yai is the country’s oldest national park and a UNESCO World Heritage site, sitting on the edge of the northeastern plateau about two and a half hours from Bangkok. It is genuine forest rather than managed woodland: two thousand square kilometres of it, with wild elephant, gibbon, hornbill and a resident population of macaques who have worked out exactly what a pannier is.
The riding inside the park is excellent and slow. The road climbs through dense canopy with the temperature dropping several degrees as you go, there are viewpoints out over the plain, and the speed limits exist for the elephants rather than for you. Sound your horn on the blind bends and give any animal on the tarmac an enormous amount of room, particularly anything with a calf.
Outside the park boundary the area has quietly become Thailand’s wine country, which sounds like a joke and produces some drinkable stuff, along with a strip of slightly surreal European-themed resorts. It is a strange, pleasant place to eat dinner the night before you ride into a Grand Prix.
Why a race weekend suits a motorbike tour better than a flight
There is a structural argument here that goes beyond convenience.
A Grand Prix is two days long and the rest of the week around it is dead time. People fly in on Friday, spend Saturday and Sunday at the circuit, and fly out on Monday having seen a car park, a grandstand and an airport. The event is excellent and the trip around it is nothing.
Building it into a twelve-day motorbike tour inverts that. The race becomes the middle of something rather than the whole of it, and the days either side stop being logistics and become the reason you came. You arrive at the circuit having ridden two thousand kilometres, which changes how you watch, and you leave it with four days of mountain roads still ahead rather than a departure gate.
It also solves the problem that a race weekend is expensive time. Flights, a hotel at surge pricing and two days of tickets is not a cheap way to spend a long weekend. Spread across a proper trip, the marginal cost of the racing is small and the trip justifies itself either way.
The riders who get the most out of a big biking tour built around a Grand Prix are, in our experience, the ones who would have booked the riding anyway and treated the race as a bonus, rather than the ones who booked a race and bolted riding onto it.
Doing it independently, if you would rather
Entirely possible and plenty of people do. Fly into Bangkok, rent a bike, ride to Buriram in a day and a half on decent roads, see the race, ride back.
What you need to sort yourself is accommodation booked absurdly early, tickets, a rental agreement that permits the mileage and the region, insurance that actually covers a large-capacity motorcycle, and a plan for the ride if the bike develops a problem in Isaan on a Sunday. None of that is difficult. All of it is work, and it is work done at exactly the time you would rather be thinking about the racing.
Riding to the Grand Prix for real
Our twelve-day Long Way Round runs Chiang Mai to Buriram and back, taking in Doi Inthanon, the Salween border road to Mae Sot, the ruins at Sukhothai, Khao Yai, two full days at the Grand Prix, then the Mekong at Chiang Khan and Route 1148 through Bo Kluea on the way home. Two thousand seven hundred kilometres, small group, road captain, mechanic and support vehicle, hotels booked long before the town fills up, and the race weekend built into the middle of it.
The 2027 Thai Grand Prix is on the fifth to the seventh of March and it opens a new technical era, which means the beds in Buriram will go earlier than usual. Have a look at the 12-day Long Way Round MotoGP tour or the tour dates page, and if you want to know what is left for that weekend, message us on WhatsApp rather than waiting.
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