Can Liberty grow MotoGP like it’s grown F1?

The numbers don’t lie – Liberty Media has worked magic with Formula 1 since it acquired the world’s biggest motor sport property in 2017.

During the last decade, F1’s annual income has doubled, from £1.3 billion to £2.7 billion, which has doubled the championship’s value, from the £6.5 billion that Liberty paid for it to £12 billion now. Happy days.

At the same time, F1 teams have also rocketed in value, as other businesses rush to get a slice of the action. Reigning F1 driver and constructor champion McLaren is valued at £3.4 billion, a 600% increase on its 2017 value.

Is Liberty in this for anything more than the money? No. Liberty Media is a £40 billion US conglomerate that straddles the motor sport and live music industries. Like any big business, it exists primarily to make its executives and shareholders richer, but it does that by growing its properties, so in theory there’s a knock-on benefit for everyone involved and maybe, but not necessarily, for the fans.

That’s what’s happened in F1 – Liberty has grown the business largely through attracting new fans. Since Liberty acquired F1 the championship’s audience has grown by more than 60% to more than 800 million people. And more fans mean more interest from companies wanting to jump on the bandwagon.

Say what you like about F1 – the quality of racing, the glitz and the glamour – but these are the facts.

And this is what Liberty wants to do with MotoGP, run by the MotoGP Sports and Entertainment Group (formerly Dorna): make the championship more popular, in particular beyond its traditional motorcycling core.

That’s a straightforward business plan, but is the target achievable?

Liberty’s hand is already visible in MotoGP, which, let’s be honest, has never been promoted that well. During the three decades that Dorna owned the championship, the Spanish company relied on two factors to grow the business: the inherent thrills of motorcycle racing and the Pied Piper persona of Valentino Rossi, who brought new fans with him because he was bigger than the sport itself.

Liberty is already ramping up the razzmatazz in MotoGP. Wherever you look in paddock and pitlane, there’s a little more glitz, a little more glamour, all following the ways of F1, because most people love things that glitter.

And social media is on fire with MotoGP content. Wherever you look – Instagram, TikTok, X – is alive with video clips, perfectly tailored to our 21st-century attention spans. There’s real-world promo too, like showing the recent Dutch MotoGP round on giant video walls at the end of London’s Oxford Street.

At the same time, Liberty is leveraging its F1 property to shine a light on MotoGP: Drive to Survive’s breakout star Guenther Steiner takes over Tech 3 and F1 championship leader Kimi Antonelli visits the Mugello round, delivering the finest praise possible from a racer: “They are definitely more nuts than us.” In other words, MotoGP is even crazier than F1, so watch it!

There are a lot of new deals being signed that are part of all this.

Liberty recently signed up Los Angeles-based entertainment and sports giant Creative Artists Agency “to accelerate the evolution of its commercial programme and unlock new partnership opportunities worldwide”. CAA already works with F1, Chelsea football club and other big-money clients.

It’s also hired Two Circles, a global sports-marketing agency that works through social media and digital engagement to grow audiences. MotoGP wants Two Circles to focus specifically on US and UK markets.

And there’s been a refreshing and necessary move away from Dorna’s Spain-centric hiring policy, going after global management talent, like MotoGP’s new chief financial officer Vince Russell (formerly of Sky) and new director of global marketing Kelly Brittain (formerly of Red Bull F1).

Will all this work? Will it make MotoGP blow up like F1? Most people in the paddock seem sure that it will. There’s an assumption that Liberty knows how to press the right buttons, so that a gold rush is a given – finally, MotoGP will realise its potential and the paddock will be rolling in money.

Hmm, I’m not so sure. Car racing has always been rich and motorcycle racing has always poor. And I mean always.

When the world’s first purpose-built racetrack was constructed – Brooklands, which opened in 1907 – the car racers ate in the “very swish” circuit restaurant and the bike racers ate in the “rather tatty” cafeteria. Indeed, bike racers weren’t even allowed in the restaurant in their racing kit – too dirty, too smelly. No wonder even the earliest motorcyclists talked of their “despised social standing”. In many ways, not much has changed since then.

Motorcycle racing is popular where motorcycles are popular: Spain, Italy, Southeast Asia, India and Latin America. Sure, Liberty can grow MotoGP in those regions but where it really needs to put in the work is elsewhere.

And this is the greatest challenge: can Liberty make lots of people who have no interest in motorcycles somehow enjoy motorcycle racing? Because in a century and a quarter of bike racing, no one has been able to do that, except Rossi.

That means the USA, the UK, northern Europe, in fact, most of the First World, where motorcycle racing is at best a niche sport.

A lot of people in the States and Britain don’t like motorcycles. If you ride, you’ll already know that – ride a motorcycle in Britain and then cross the Channel and you notice immediately that you’re accepted as a fellow road user, rather than a second-class citizen and a pain in the arse.

Some of this motophobia (a word first used by those bikers of “despised social standing”) has its roots in bad behaviour, from Hells Angels in the States to Mods and Rockers in Britain. And some bikers still behave badly enough – too fast, too loud – so that we’re still viewed with suspicion and sometimes alarm and anger.

This is one of the barriers that Liberty must break through in its search for new fans.

Meanwhile, MotoGP’s traditional audience in the USA, the UK, northern Europe and so on is shrinking because the motorcycling demographic is ageing and fewer people are buying motorcycles in those regions. Same in Japan, where sales are a fifth of what they were at their 1980s peak.

The road forward in these markets is obvious because Rossi has already paved the way. Liberty is going heavy on personality, forget about the motorbikes, because, like it or not, this is how the world works. People are more attracted to people than machines. The motorcycles and the motorcycle fans can look after themselves.

Thus, Liberty is presenting Marc Márquez and the rest as daring 21st-century gladiators, who happily take the kind of risks that would make any normal human being weep with terror. That’s the angle Liberty hopes will drag in new fans, like Romans to amphitheatres.

Surely a Ride to Survive docuseries is on its way, because that’s the only way to fully reveal the stars to a new audience.

Liberty management isn’t stupid, so they already know that MotoGP is a totally different deal to F1: more rock and roll, more working class, less pretentious, less blingy.

Imagine transporting a Monaco F1 fan from a yacht in the principality’s harbour to the Mad Max vista of Le Mans’s MotoGP campsite, or the Gothic hellscape of the Sachsenring encampment. They’d have a heart attack, same as depositing Glyndebourne opera guest in a Motorhead mosh pit.

But both markets can make money; that’s the point.

What Liberty will surely do is use some of its music business know-how to go after new MotoGP audiences.

F1’s biggest growth area since Liberty took over is high-end hospitality, because there are plenty of rich and super-rich people who want to visit F1 races, even if it’s only to be seen.

Liberty divides race fans into two main groups: purists and tourists. The people paying £9000 for a three-day Luxepass at the Miami F1 Grand Prix and £12,000 for a Monaco yacht ticket are the tourists and no doubt they make more money for F1 than the purists.

Obviously, these are numbers that just won’t fly with the vast majority of MotoGP fans; just like F1’s big-spending deluxe sponsors like Louis Vuitton and Gucci most likely won’t be rushing into MotoGP.

There’s another reason why cars attract more sponsorship than motorcycles. All modern racing vehicles are effectively high-speed advertising hoardings, and cars make much bigger hoardings than bikes, which means bigger logos that are seen by more people, which means more money coming in. Simple as that.

In so many ways, cars are a different world.

Liberty has taken advantage of its successes in F1 to hike circuit hosting fees – the average is around £25 million – which has inevitably led to higher ticket prices. A weekend general admission ticket for the Silverstone F1 round now costs around £400, roughly twice what it did before Liberty arrived. Will Liberty do the same to MotoGP? Yes, but only if it can increase demand enough to sustain higher prices.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be interesting watching Liberty trying to monetise MotoGP like it’s never been monetised before. And Liberty is keen to get a move on with this, because there’s little doubt it paid way over the odds for MotoGP – £3.7 billion against £6.5 billion for F1. That number included World Superbike, which accounts for around 5% of MotoGP Sport and Entertainment’s income.

A big part of F1’s growth is an F1 boom in the USA, which previously cared very little for the world’s biggest car-race series, preferring its own IndyCar and NASCAR championships.

Liberty has taken advantage of that explosion in American fans by increasing the number of Stateside races from one (COTA) to three (COTA, Miami and Las Vegas). And it’s significant that the two new venues are both city races, because Liberty wants to travel down the same road in MotoGP.

There’s little doubt that it’s more exciting watching racers thread the eye of a needle around a street circuit – missing walls by millimetres and sometimes not missing them at all – than watching them race around a short circuit, surrounded by acres of gravel and asphalt run-off.

But while that’s acceptable in F1, it’s not acceptable in MotoGP. Nonetheless, Liberty wants to build a circuit in Adelaide to host next year’s Australian MotoGP round.

Liberty also wants MotoGP to go to Miami. This news – like the Adelaide news – has triggered howls of horror from purist fans, who, quite rightly, say that MotoGP can’t race around street circuits. But neither Adelaide nor Miami is a street circuit.

The Adelaide MotoGP venue – if it gets past furious local residents – will be a parkland circuit, with gravel run-off and all the usual MotoGP safety accoutrements.

The Miami International Autodrome is even less of a street circuit. The layout winds its way around the vast parking lot that surrounds the Hard Rock Stadium.

The forbidding walls that surround the F1 layout aren’t real walls; they’re concrete barriers installed for the race and removed after, so that 27,000 cars can park up for the next Miami Dolphins NFL game. The 3.3-mile F1 circuit uses seven miles of concrete barriers.

In other words, Liberty can draw out a Miami MotoGP circuit wherever it likes, installing run-off and grandstands where appropriate. The only question is whether it will be economically viable, because MotoGP will likely bring in a small fraction of the money coming from Miami F1. However, Liberty knows better than most that you have to speculate to accumulate.