Liberty finally takes control of MotoGP, so what comes next?

I never usually watch Formula 1. But on Sunday afternoon, I was down the pub, where they were showing the Silverstone F1 race on the telly. The race was entertaining, because there’d been a downpour and there was a narrow drying line, so there was plenty of chaos. Happy chaos, especially if you’re in the carbon-fibre business.

Some drivers were charging, others were struggling, so there were spins aplenty and a gloriously synchronised pirouette by the two Haas drivers, reminiscent of Mick Doohan and Pierfrancesco Chili‘s synchronised crashing at Nürburgring in 1990.

Once winner Lando Norris and the other podium finishers had received their trophies, the TV switched to tennis at Wimbledon, so I was reminded once again why I prefer motor games to ball games. As the great Ernest Hemingway wrote (allegedly), “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games”.

I can appreciate skill and talent in any sport, but for some reason, I only really enjoy watching people playing with fire, dancing on the precipice, using their skill and bravery to take apparently crazy risks and get away with it. The fact that they know – and we know – that they might pay the ultimate price for doing so gives the whole process a gravitas that those mere games will never have. To me, anyway.

There was another reason I watched Silverstone F1 with more interest than usual, because last Friday, F1’s owner Liberty Media completed its £3.6 billion acquisition of MotoGP rights-holder Dorna. So perhaps by watching Liberty’s £6 billion F1 playset racing around an airfield somewhere in Northamptonshire, I’d get a hint of what’s to come for MotoGP.

There were a couple of things I liked about the TV production: during long shots, they identified the cars on screen, so you knew who was who and, even better, when drivers were battling each other, they used GPS to show each driver’s cornering lines in real time. That would work really well in MotoGP.

And then the podium… Norris arrived to collect the huge, gold winner’s trophy, which was sat in a tailor-made Louis Vuitton travel case. And then all three podium finishers were presented with replica trophies made from Lego.

Brands, brands and more brands. Yes, it’s all about the money. And has been for half a century at least, since corporate sponsorship became a thing in the 1970s. Three decades ago, I was already writing about MotoGP bikes and F1 cars being 200mph billboards, selling us everything from cigarettes to, well, cigarettes.

And you’d be naïve to think that those in charge of racing have ever been interested in anything else but making money. Before Liberty, there was Dorna, and before Dorna, there were individual race promoters getting very fat on the proceeds of the grands prix they organised – taking bags of cash on the circuit gates and giving the racers and their crews as little as they could get away with.

In the 1950s, MotoGP privateer ‘Happy’ Jack Ahearn (the second Australian to win a MotoGP race, aboard a Norton Manx, at Imatra in 1964) had a disagreement with a race promoter.

“The bloody secretary wouldn’t give me the £100 first-class money [Ahearn was graded a first-class rider], he wanted to give me bloody half that for second class,” growled Ahearn. “I said no bloody way, but he wouldn’t pay, so I hung him out of the window. I think we were on the second floor…”

Ahearn got his cash.

In 1979, then reigning MotoGP world champion ‘King’ Kenny Roberts turned up at the Spanish Grand Prix to be told by the promoters that they were reducing the (already risible) prize money by half. Roberts was incandescent, but he knew the promoters had him by the balls, because if he didn’t ride, he might lose the championship.

Roberts won the race, then served up a morsel of revenge. When a Spanish dignitary handed him the winner’s trophy, he refused the silverware.

“No, you keep it,” he said. “Maybe you can sell it. I understand you need the money.”

So it’s the same as it ever was, except individual race promoters have been replaced by global rights holders, who get fat on the proceeds of entire championships. These people don’t show off their wealth driving around in Rolls-Royces, because you ain’t nothing in 2025 unless you travel by private jet. With a monogrammed Louis Vuitton luggage set in the back. And perhaps a Lego F1 set to fritter away the hours at 30,000 feet.

You might laugh at F1’s Lego deal, but whoever came up with that idea isn’t stupid. It’s about engaging kids and thereby building – brick by brick – the fans of the future.

Perhaps the Lego deal was the work of the same Liberty people who created F1’s Drive to Survive series and the recently released Formula 1 movie, all designed to make sure the racing reaches people it hasn’t reached before.

Liberty is obviously very engaged with what it does. It’s always searching out ways to get more people into the racing. And what’s wrong with that?

I’m more of a Lego guy than a Louis Vuitton guy, but I understand that money makes the racing world go around.

I’ve spent the last 50 years mesmerised by the sport of motorcycle racing. I take it seriously because I love it, while realising it’s not serious at all, in the grand scheme of things. Racers race to entertain themselves and in doing so, they entertain us, so those who say that sport isn’t about entertainment are probably taking themselves too seriously.

Sport is three things at once: it’s sport, it’s entertainment, and it’s business. And Liberty is very good at business. Since it bought F1 in 2016, the championship’s revenue has grown from around £1.3 billion to £2.3 billion.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the championship itself is richer, because Liberty is in the business of enriching itself, not the teams or drivers, but F1’s audience has also grown significantly, which does give teams and drivers the chance to attract more money.

And what about the fans? F1 ticket prices have risen since 2017, in part due to Liberty charging circuits more to host F1 races, in view of the championship’s increased popularity. But it was the same in the decade before Liberty arrived, when F1 ticket prices increased by more than 50%.

Liberty’s purchase of MotoGP gives us a rare chance to look at how much money MotoGP brings in, via an information pack published by the company to showcase its new property.

Over the last few years, the championship’s revenue has averaged around £350 million. Forty-five percent of that comes from TV/internet viewers, via fees paid by TV broadcasters around the world and from MotoGP’s own video pass. Twenty-nine percent comes from circuit promoters that pay to host MotoGP rounds. Eighteen percent comes from sponsorship, licensing deals and hospitality. Eight percent comes from Dorna’s other championships: World Superbike, MotoE and Road to MotoGP races.

Costs are substantial – around 50%, or £175 million. About half of MotoGP’s outgoings are freight costs for out-of-Europe races and payments to the teams’ association IRTA, which looks after the considerable payments to all MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 teams and manufacturers. Around 30% goes on organisation and the final 20% on miscellaneous, including the FIM’s fee.

Last year’s average MotoGP TV viewing figures were around 35 million per race. No doubt Liberty believes it can substantially increase that number.

Will Liberty increase MotoGP ticket prices? If it thinks the market can stand an increase, of course, prices will rise. But can the market stand it? Motorcycling isn’t a rich man’s sport like car racing. Some F1 hospitality tickets cost £15,000 per weekend, a figure that wouldn’t work in MotoGP. Liberty folk aren’t stupid, so they surely understand that.

Liberty’s other big interest is the music business, through its Live Nation Entertainment division, which promotes and produces concerts, festivals and tours, so if Liberty knows how to do rock and roll, it should know how to do motorcycle racing.

But… the USA’s Department of Justice and 30 state and district attorney generals are currently suing Live Nation for allegedly monopolising the live concert industry in the States; suggestions that are strongly refuted by Live Nation.

“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anti-competitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” says a DoJ statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services.”

This is big business, folks, and it’s not pretty.

Liberty is keen to get moving in MotoGP, because it paid a lot of money for the championship (much more than it’s worth, in my opinion), so they want to pump up its value as soon as they can.

That’s why Liberty management, including the elaborately moustachioed Chase Carey and former Ferrari F1 boss Stefano Domenicali, had their first board meeting with Dorna’s Carmelo and Carlos Ezpeleta in Madrid on Monday. The Ezpeletas and other Dorna managers will continue to be involved, because they now own 14% of Dorna, while Liberty own 86%.

We don’t know Liberty’s plans, but in recent months, many fans have voiced their opinions, suggesting that the American company will want more races in the USA and will soon have MotoGP racing around street circuits.

Street circuits won’t happen, I’m sure of that. It would be suicide for the championship and murder for the riders.

F1 now has races in Miami, Las Vegas and at COTA, all of them huge successes. I’m not so sure Liberty will want more races in the USA. It’d need to make the country much, much more aware of MotoGP before it even thinks about that.

Obviously, Liberty doesn’t care about where it makes money, so long as it makes money, so I’m pretty sure it will initially focus on increasing global awareness and on growing the championship in places like Southeast Asia, India and South America, where there’s already good momentum.

And what would I do with MotoGP if I were the big guy chomping a cigar behind Ray-Bans?

I would use F1 to bring MotoGP to a bigger audience. That would mean cross-promotion – using F1’s fame to make more people aware of MotoGP.

Take a few MotoGP riders and bikes to F1 races – wheelies and donuts on the start/finish, that kind of thing. And bring F1 stars to MotoGP races, ensuring their presence gets everywhere on TV, social media and print media. Maybe get Lewis Hamilton involved with an independent MotoGP team, again using his fame to make MotoGP more famous. Liberty is good at this sort of thing.

Create a Ride to Survive TV series. Drive to Survive may not be perfect, but it’s a great show, telling stories and introducing characters much better than MotoGP has ever done. Hell, even I watch it with my wife. We enjoy it so much that we occasionally have a look at last weekend’s F1 highlights, usually switching off after a minute or so, because DtS (in my opinion) is way better than the actual racing.

Liberty should also take control of MotoGP’s technical rules. It is the technical rules that decide the quality of racing, so what’s the point of owning the racing if you have no control over the quality of the racing?

F1 has a better regulatory system. If a constructor comes up with a new tech trick via a hole in the rules, it’s allowed to keep using that technology for that season. At the end of the season, F1 decides whether or not to ban the trick.

This is exactly what happened when Renault introduced tuned mass dampers two decades ago and when Mercedes introduced hydraulically controlled ride-height systems a few years ago. They were both banned at the end of their first seasons. Both technologies were later introduced to MotoGP by Ducati and they’re both still there, because new tech cannot be banned unless all the manufacturers want it banned.

I’d also work closely with each category’s tyre supplier to engineer tyres that help create better racing, rather than focusing on beating lap records, which can simultaneously hurt the racing, as is the case with MotoGP’s current rear slick, introduced last year.

I do have one piece of advice for Liberty’s F1 property. After watching Silverstone, I think they should install sprinklers around all F1 circuits, to be switched on at random moments by A-list celebrities in overblown grandstand ceremonies. A winner, surely?