Michael Scott | March 13, 2024
Cycle News In The Paddock
COLUMN
How to Grow the Sport the F1 Way
So, the motorbike season begins. A week later than F1 and lagging in other respects. A poor relation, literally.
But while our championship may have only half the number of wheels and not a quarter of the fan base, it is one year older than the attention-grabbing cars. F1 is a mere 75-year-old stripling, MotoGP its senior, at 76.
With action already underway in Qatar, this column will let the racing speak for itself. And leave aside the burning questions (Will Marc Marquez smash it on his new Ducati? Will Acosta be a contender in his first year? Is Bagnaia deep enough to do three in a row? And so on) to be resolved in due course.
But how can the older world championship cast off the junior-partner, dirty-fingernail image that still dogs the sport despite all of today’s high science, abstruse electronics, and slick marketing? Plus, the much more sophisticated dynamic equations of vehicles with a movable center of gravity are seldom exactly vertical, compared with a car prosaically plonked on four corners like a kitchen table.
And never mind the humanity when all you can see of an F1 driver is the top of his helmet, whereas the athletic prowess of a MotoGP rider is a major part of the enterprise.
Not to mention the danger. F1 drivers spin off and might end up slightly giddy; MotoGP riders hit the deck and are lucky to escape merely bruised.
Simply being more exciting, dangerous, athletic, and technically far more interesting hasn’t been enough.
And never mind the humanity when all you can see of an F1 driver is the top of his helmet, whereas the athletic prowess of a MotoGP rider is a major part of the enterprise.
F1’s latest attention-grabbing trick is a prime example: prominent team boss Christian Horner, already well-known as a canny attention-grabber, is mired in scandal. Allegations of sexual impropriety with a female member of the Red Bull team and attendant shenanigans of white-wash investigations and lurid counterclaims commanded newspaper headlines and continued to do so for weeks.
That the opening round in glitz-ghastly Bahrain was an incredibly dull race didn’t matter. F1 hogged all the clickbait anyway.
How does MotoGP compete?
Well, a pit-lane sex scandal is long overdue. No misplaced dick pics or bullying of junior female staff, please. Too tacky. Rather, something luridly amusing.
Genderfluidity can generate headlines galore, though one must tread very carefully. It is a sensitive area, and this paragraph is not meant to be either mischievous or frivolous.
Simply being more exciting, dangerous, athletic, and technically far more interesting hasn’t been enough.
Physical punch-ups between deadly rivals would be good value. Rossi and Max Biaggi squared up once, but the PR machine swung into action to minimize the fall-out. Similarly, a serious verbal spat between Lorenzo and Pedrosa was defused by no less than the (erstwhile) King of Spain. Bad mistake. Jorge Martin generally looks ready to start something at the drop of a hat. He shouldn’t be stopped.
Drug smuggling has already been tried (former 500 champ Marco Lucchinelli was jailed for a spell. Likewise, Juan Garriga and the Paul Bird MotoGP team didn’t last much past a gun-and-drugs border bust of one of their truckies. But no one not directly involved really cared.
Likewise, money laundering. Don’t even ask.
Of course, a giant ego personality can make all the difference. But the likes of Barry Sheene and Valentino Rossi come along but seldom, and there don’t seem to be any more on the horizon at present. Not even the genius of Marc Marquez has captured the imagination, and to be fair, he is an entirely personable entity.
Then there’s the video-binging factor. Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” was a massive boost in attracting new fans to F1. Amazon’s “MotoGP Unlimited” failed dismally to achieve the same, not because it was intrinsically less interesting but at least partly because over-enthusiastic quick-clip editing overcame the essential subtitles required because of a predominance of Spanish dialogue in the pit boxes.
Maybe a lift is coming by hanging on to F1’s skirts. There are already rumors that F1 owners Liberty Media are sniffing around to buy a controlling interest in Dorna, although anti-monopoly regulations might get in the way. But was it coincidental that Pramac Ducati chose to hold their team launch at Bahrain on the eve of the opening F1 race, with support from connections inside the car series?
Then again, cozying up to FI simply reinforces the poor-relation status.
Here’s a better idea. Let’s keep MotoGP as it is, with a core of fans who don’t need big Netflix series to keep them interested, because the racing is so darned good anyway.
It may be just a niche. But it’s our niche. CN
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