MotoGP at an F1 street circuit? Are they insane?

But surely, it would be impossible to race MotoGP bikes around Albert Park? Certainly not impossible. F1 onboard laps show the circuit sweeping through a tunnel of barriers, but these are temporary, erected for F1. It’s a park, so it’s open land, devoid of buildings.

Then why is Albert Park MotoGP no longer a thing? The Victoria government say they can’t impose further on the people of Melbourne, because F1 already takes over parts of the city for several months.

The Adelaide Parkland circuit looks more complicated, because the current layout is bordered by numerous buildings. Of course, the layout could be moved away from the buildings, but there’s not a lot of room, perhaps a third of what’s available in Albert Park.

The current Adelaide sports car circuit is only 2 miles (3.3km), while the no-longer-used F1 circuit is 2.3 miles (3.7km), so MotoGP may end up with a streets version of Balaton Park, the dead-slow Hungarian circuit that joined MotoGP calendar last summer.

Would the riders go for it?

Last year, following the 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.”

I won’t name the rider because I don’t want him engulfed in a storm, especially when his words matched those of the others with whom I spoke.

You were being naïve if you thought that big business would never come for MotoGP

Thus it seems that today’s MotoGP riders aren’t up for a fight with the circus masters, because they’ve been told that conflict is bad for business.

What does all this tell us about where is MotoGP is going?

It’s going exactly where most other sports have already gone.

Sport is big business. This process really began in the 1980s when TV technology allowed live sport to be beamed into homes around the world and giant TVs improved the onsite experience. Football, Formula 1 and the Olympics went first and everything else followed, while Nike set the template for high-end brand involvement and F1 mogul Bernie Ecclestone proved you could get away with all kinds of rogue behaviour that wouldn’t be tolerated in many other businesses.

The money that can be made from any global sport is huge, so you were being naïve if you thought that big business would never come for MotoGP.

“The reality is the sports market has an addressable market of just shy of eight billion people – it touches every corner of world,” says Elis Jones, head of sports advisory investment banking at Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s biggest investment banks.

Sports business is currently experiencing rapid growth, due to further developments in broadcasting and streaming, which are helping more fans engage either live, delayed or in short clips via social media. This increased interest allows sports to boost their revenue from other areas – commercial partnerships, hospitality, merchandise, betting and so on.

Take India’s Premier League cricket championship as an example. In 2009 the league was worth $50 million. Now it’s valued at £750 million, an increase of 1400% in 17 years. Investors would struggle to find that growth in any other sector.

Liberty have already almost quadrupled the value of F1 since they bought the championship in 2017, from £6 billion to £22 billion.

They did this largely by increasing fan interest via social media and the Netflix Drive to Survive documentary series. And when demand increases you get heightened commercial interest and you can raise ticket prices, which is why the price of a British F1 GP ticket rose by roughly 120% between 2019 and 2024, five times the rate of UK inflation.

There’s no doubt MotoGP needs to grow. Apart from the factory teams, pretty much every team in MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 struggles to survive. The championship needs more money and the only way it will get that money is through increased interest from fans. Relying solely on purist fans is not enough, so Liberty and MSEG are chasing tourist fans, who bring more money with them.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that Liberty and MSEG will find a new crowd of MotoGP fans that will transform the championship from niche interest to mainstream phenomenon. And even if they do succeed, will they be able to do so without pissing off or pricing out the purists?

When Liberty and MSEG look at ways to catch the tourists they should consider what happened when Ecclestone muscled his way into MotoGP in the early 1990s. At that time the German GP at Hockenheim was a huge success, so Ecclestone jacked up ticket prices to leverage that demand and within two years the event was dead. The only way is not always up.

Even if Liberty and MSEG don’t frighten off the purists with high ticket prices, they’ll need to be careful about what they do with the show. There’s a lot of disillusionment with the championship focusing more and more on its premier class to the detriment of the Moto2 and Moto3 categories. And some fans wail and gnash their teeth whenever someone mentions the new Harley Bagger championship, which is a bit like F1 adding caravan racing to the schedule.

Liberty’s mantra is bums on seats, by any means necessary.

A few days ago I watched Breakdown: 1975, a Netflix documentary about Hollywood in the 1970s, which examines how moviemaking changed in the decade, from a peak in artistic moviemaking to chasing blockbusters.

“Once you change an art form into a product of capitalism it loses something,” said Hollywood director Joan Tewkesbury.

MotoGP isn’t strictly art (though I could make a good case for that) but the same philosophy applies: if you make moneymaking the prime objective of anything, every other aspect usually suffers.

Sad, perhaps, but if you think MotoGP can somehow escape this reality, you are living in fantasy land. Corporate giants rule the modern world and they are greedy for profits. Rightly or wrongly, this is how the world works and we can only blame ourselves for allowing it to happen.