MotoGP's manufacturers are revolting, so why aren't the riders?

Last July, the Liberty Media Corporation bought MotoGP for £3.6 billion, about half the amount it paid for the Formula 1 car world championship in 2017.

Liberty has big plans to grow MotoGP like it’s grown F1, but before it can even think about any of that, it had to engage with the manufacturers to negotiate an F1-style concord agreement with them. However, the deal has yet to be signed, because the manufacturers are revolting.

MotoGP operates over a five-year cycle. Every five years, the championship’s owners get together with all the main players – the manufacturers, teams and so on – to lay out the terms of their relationship, financial and otherwise. This time, they are negotiating the contract that will run from the start of 2027 to the end of 2031.

The five manufacturers – Aprilia, Ducati, Honda, KTM and Yamaha – are represented by the MSMA (Motorcycle Sports Manufacturers’ Association), formed soon after Dorna became the commercial owner of MotoGP in 1992.

The championship is now owned by Liberty’s MotoGP Sports and Entertainment Group, which is part of the Formula 1 Group, which is one half of Liberty’s £40 billion motor sport and music empire.

The MSMA is led by its president Massimo Rivola, CEO of Aprilia Racing. The MotoGP Sports and Entertainment Group is led by F1 Group CEO Stefano Domenicali, alongside former Dorna executives Carmelo and Carlos Ezpeleta.

Usually, these concord negotiations go smoothly and a deal is signed without too much fuss. Not this time.

Liberty vs the manufacturers

Liberty and the MSMA are currently arguing over the new contract, specifically about how much Liberty will pay the manufacturers that build the motorcycles that fill the grid.

This argument has been going on since last year. At Valencia last November, I went knocking on the door of Lin Jarvis, former Yamaha MotoGP boss, who is now a freelance gun for hire, negotiating for the MSMA.

When I asked him how the talks were going, I got a four-word answer. “There is no war,” he said.

That’s odd, I thought, because I had never even used the W word.

It seems Jarvis was indeed playing things down, because right now, both sides are digging trenches.

Last month, Liberty president Derek Chang and Domenicali flew into the Spanish Grand Prix for another round of talks with the MSMA.

The talks were preceded by a Friday night dinner in the city of Jerez, organised so that Liberty management could get to know all the manufacturers and their MotoGP management, plus other paddock players, including the teams’ association IRTA, which represents MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 teams. In other words, a big deal.

Instead, more than half the manufacturers decided to use the dinner to lob a grenade in Liberty’s direction. No one from Aprilia, KTM or Yamaha turned up. No warning, no nothing, they just didn’t show. Cue a panicked rearranging of tables and chairs in an effort to disguise the fact that three manufacturers are so angry with Liberty that they’re willing to boycott was supposed to be a friendly social gathering.

During the first four decades of MotoGP – from the 1950s to the 1980s – the manufacturers weren’t paid to go racing. They justified the expense to market their motorcycles and prove their engineering prowess (or otherwise).

During this era, F1 established a system of recognising the massive contribution made by the constructors by paying them to race, because without cars, there’s no racing.

Today’s F1 payments are huge, with constructors receiving around half of F1’s annual profits on a sliding scale. The constructors’ champion receives around £110 million, while the 11th (and last) team gets around £35 million.

MotoGP’s payments to manufacturers and teams are tiny by comparison. Factory teams get around £1.75 million, plus contributions to freight and other costs, while independent teams receive more than twice that, because Dorna recognises the fact that indie outfits need more support, because they don’t have manufacturers providing their budgets.

No surprise that the MSMA wants a big pay rise from next year, recognising their vital contribution to the championship. They want Liberty to use the F1 profit-sharing system in MotoGP, with the 11 teams receiving around half of the championship’s annual profits.

Currently, MotoGP makes around £210 million in profit, so the teams are chasing around £9.5 million per team.

These numbers are the main battleground between the MSMA and Liberty, which wants to pay all teams (from next year, there will be no distinction between factory and indie outfits) a set annual fee of around £7 million each.

How nasty will this battle become and who will win?

Liberty is a huge operation, worth roughly 10 times the market value of Ducati. And Liberty management is happy to play rough. After all, Liberty exists to make money for its executives and shareholders, not to keep stakeholders happy. This is proven by the conglomerate’s operations in the music industry, through its subsidiaries Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

Last month, a federal jury in New York found that Live Nation had illegally monopolised the USA’s live music industry, violating anti-monopoly laws and overcharging consumers

MotoGP’s manufacturers know they need to win this battle, because if they don’t get Liberty bosses to agree to profit-sharing now, when will they?

The MSMA has lots of power in this confrontation, because without the manufacturers, there is no racing.

In fact, while that’s true in theory, it’s not strictly true. The last time the championship’s owner fought with the manufacturers was a little over a decade ago, when Dorna wanted to introduce spec electronics software, ending the manufacturers’ ability to create their own software, an important part of research and development.

Honda was so against spec software that it threatened to withdraw its machines from MotoGP. Dorna’s answer was to threaten replacing prototype machinery with lower-cost CRT bikes, which had been introduced to help fill the grid following the global financial crisis of 2008. CRT bikes use tuned street engines taken from superbikes, so they are much, much cheaper than prototype engines developed specifically for MotoGP.

I think it’s good that the manufacturers are fighting for their rights to a fair share of MotoGP profits. But what about the riders and their rights?

Why safety can’t wait

The manufacturers have the MSMA to represent their interests, the teams (especially those in Moto2 and Moto3) have IRTA to represent them, but the riders (incredibly!) have no one looking after them, even though they are the ones in the real firing line.

Riders do get to air their grievances during safety commission meetings held at each Grand Prix, but they’ve not managed to organise themselves into a union that can fight for their rights.

This is despite plenty of unease in recent years, from the number of races to the introduction of sprint races to safety concerns at various circuits and dangerous technical realities, like the air-stop issue, which has riders struggling to stop when they’re behind another bike, due to aero wake.

Sprint races were introduced in 2023, when, for the first time in history, not one grand prix race started with a full grid, because so many riders were getting injured due to the sprint format.

The major risk points of a race weekend are qualifying and the first corner. Before sprints were introduced, riders faced two big risk points per weekend: qualifying on Saturday and the race start on Sunday. Now they have twice as many: pre-qualifying on Friday afternoon, once or twice in qualifying (Q1 and maybe Q1), the sprint start and the Grand Prix start.

Over the decades, Dorna has done a mostly great job on safety, but there is always room for improvement. Last year, several riders raised their concerns over Balaton Park, the new Hungarian venue, which features several iffy corners.

During the first lap of the Sunday race at Balaton, Enea Bastianini crashed entering the Turn 12/13 chicane, which riders had already complained about, because they knew that if they fell at the Turn 12 left-hander, they would most likely slide back onto the track at Turn 13.

This is exactly what happened. Bastianini fell at Turn 12 and knew where he was going – straight into the path of the oncoming pack at 13. It was a terrifying moment, the Italian desperately looking over his shoulder, fully aware he was in the lap of the gods.

Finally, Pedro Acosta and Luca Marini missed him by centimetres, but make no mistake, this is how riders can die. Indeed, this is the cause of most recent deaths – the racing is so close nowadays that when a rider falls, he can be hit by the chasing pack.

Most riders don’t want to talk to the media about safety – it’s almost like they’ve been muzzled by the championship’s owners.

Last year, following the entirely avoidable death of Borja Gomez during testing for a Dorna/FIM JuniorGP round, I asked several MotoGP riders if they would put pressure on Dorna to improve safety provisions at JuniorGP events. I was stunned by their response.

“That’s not my job,” one told me. “It’s important that we stay united… with Dorna, to ensure the growth of MotoGP.”

If this isn’t a rider that’s been told not to rock the bolt, then I’m ‘King’ Keny Roberts.

At the end of the recent Brazilian GP at Goiania, where the circuit had fallen apart in two places, causing a long delay to the sprint and a last-minute reduction in the length of the grand prix, none of the riders wanted to criticise the circuit, which seemed mighty odd.

Bastianini did say something – he told the media that the riders do have meetings about their concerns but nothing ever comes of them. Because they don’t have someone to unite their voice.

During the Spanish GP I asked Bastianini to expand on his thoughts, especially considering the Liberty takeover, the arrival of street circuits and so on.

“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,” he said. “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.

“I’m very curious to see how the corner where I crashed at Balaton will be. If it’s the same, what can we do? We can talk, talk, talk, but we need to resolve the problem, not talk.

“We need to do something different. Three years ago we started talking about making something new (a representative body) for the riders, because there’s IRTA for the teams and nothing for the riders. For safety and for many other things I hope we will have something because for us it will be a different world.”

Massive respect to Bastianini for speaking out, while others won’t.

Time to stop bending over

Formula 1 drivers have had their own trade union – the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association – since the early 1960s. MotoGP riders need their own, now more than ever, because Liberty’s arrival will only increase the demands made on them. Sometimes this may affect their safety, other times it will affect their other interests.