“I’m very curious to see how the corner where I crashed at Balaton will be,” Bastianini told me during last month’s Spanish Grand Prix. “If it’s the same, what can we do? We can talk, talk, talk, but we need to resolve the problem, not talk.”
As Bastianini said these words, he rapped his knuckles on the table in front of him, to ward off bad luck at Balaton.
Presumably if the chicane wasn’t fixed for WSBK, eight months after the 2025 Hungarian MotoGP round, it won’t be fixed in time for next month.
Obviously, there are other corner sequences where a crash can take a fallen rider back onto the track, like COTA‘s Turns 4 and 5, where Marc Márquez crashed out of last year’s US Grand Prix. But Bastianini was the only faller at Balaton’s Turn 12 last summer and he came within centimetres of serious injury, so the corner has a 100% failure rate, so why hasn’t it been changed?
Could a revised Miami F1 circuit host a MotoGP race?
Not all corners can be made entirely safe, because sometimes the costs are prohibitive and other times the interests of other racing championships take precedence. But fixing Balaton’s Turns 12/13 wouldn’t be expensive and it wouldn’t cause issues for other series that use the venue.
Of course, let’s not pretend that motorcycle racing will ever be entirely safe. Bastianini, Binder and the rest know the dangers and are nevertheless happy to take the risks because they love racing bikes. But it’s bizarre that no one has taken the opportunity to make an easy fix that could avoid riders getting seriously hurt or worse.
This is why the riders need to get together, because no one seems to be looking after their interests.
“We have the safety commission but it’s very difficult to talk in the safety commission and be satisfied for the future, if I’m honest, because we talk a lot every time but things don’t always change. I’m a bit disappointed about this, so this year I’ve not been to any safety commissions,” Pecco Bagnaia said.
Something else happened last weekend that should make Bastianini and his fellow MotoGP riders think harder about protecting themselves.
During the Miami F1 GP, the respected Sports Business Journal website published a story suggesting that Liberty Media – owner of both F1 and MotoGP – are considering running a MotoGP race around the Miami street circuit.
“MotoGP has held discussions with F1 Miami organiser South Florida Motorsports about whether it would be possible to put on a motorbike race at the circuit, according to people familiar with the matter,” wrote SBJ‘s F1 correspondent Adam Stern. “MotoGP and SFM declined to comment on the topic of a race at the Miami venue when approached by SBJ.”
Rumours of a MotoGP race at the Miami International Autodrome have been around ever since Liberty acquired MotoGP last year, but the Sports Business Journal suggests there’s some truth in it.
The new Adelaide Park street circuit, proposed venue for next year’s Australian motorcycle Grand Prix
This revelation comes three months after MotoGP announced that the 2027 Australian motorcycle Grand Prix will take place at an all-new street circuit in Adelaide, the country’s F1 venue from 1985 to 1995.
Liberty has massively increased the popularity and profitability of F1 by, wherever possible, moving the racing into cities, allowing the company to transform motor racing into a new kind of entertainment that appeals to more people.
It makes perfect sense that Liberty wants to use the same template in MotoGP. After all, it has renamed Dorna, the MotoGP Sports and Entertainment Group.
The MGP Group understands that MotoGP cannot race around street circuits like Monaco, Las Vegas, Singapore and the current Miami, because those circuits would be lethal. The group has already published the layout it wants to create in Adelaide Park in the centre of the South Australian city. The circuit is less of a street circuit and more of a parkland circuit, with gravel traps and so on.
If MotoGP does race at Miami, the layout will certainly have to be revised, with run-off in place of trackside walls.
However, MotoGP has never seen a period of change like this, with a new promoter taking over the championship with such a transformative vision, so there’s never been a more necessary time for riders to get together and form an official union to ensure their voices are heard.
Dorna always insisted that the safety commission – a Friday evening get-together held at every round between riders and MotoGP officials – keeps the riders safe. But many riders, like Bastianini, have stopped attending these meetings because they say they achieve very little. That in itself should galvanise the riders into doing something.
It is astonishing that MotoGP riders have never managed to form their own union, although on several occasions they have united to make themselves heard.
Four-time MotoGP champion Geoff Duke led a strike at the 1955 Dutch TT, protesting the pathetic payments made to privateer riders. The Briton and others were punished by the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme for their behaviour – Duke was banned from racing for six months.
In 1974, the top riders went on strike at the West German GP at Nürburgring, which, against FIM rules, had organised a car race during the same weekend, so some sections of guardrail weren’t covered with the hay bales needed to soften the blow for fallen riders.
Kenny Roberts used rider power to make much needed changes to MotoGP in the late 1970s and early 1980s
Yamaha
In 1979, the stars walked out of the Belgian Grand Prix, because the asphalt laid around the revised Spa-Francorchamps circuit wasn’t up to standard. Later that year the same riders, led by ‘King’ Kenny Roberts, got very close to establishing their own breakaway championship – World Series – outside the auspices of the FIM.
World Series failed but Roberts and the riders proved that they had the power to make change happen if they were clever enough about it.
“The old promoters and the FIM treated us like shit,” Roberts told me a while back. “It was just wrong; they had everybody by the balls. We got close enough to making World Series happen to scare them. We turned it around from not being able to talk to the promoters about safety to being able to talk to them. I didn’t do it for money; I had more to lose than anyone else. I did it because I thought it was right, because the sport needed it.”
Formula 1 drivers formed their own union way back in 1961, the Grand Prix Drivers Association, which played a huge role in making F1 safer. The GPDA faded away in the 1980s, after many important safety improvements had been made.
However, it was brought back to life in 1994, when drivers were concerned about the safety of the latest generation of F1 cars.
Ironically, three-time F1 champion Ayrton Senna proposed the GPDA’s return shortly before the 1994 Imola GP, where the Brazilian and Roland Ratzenberger lost their lives in separate accidents.
