Qatar MotoGP: the £2 billion rebellion

Very occasionally, the background ground noise is loud enough to drown out the ground-shaking roar of the MotoGP grid.

As Marc Márquez left the rest of the grid way behind at Sepang on Sunday to record his 80th MotoGP victory and put one hand on his 10th world championship, Yamaha was preparing to announce the withdrawal of both its teams from this weekend’s Qatar Grand Prix, due to multiple credible signs of renewed military conflict in the region.

By that time, all but three of MotoGP’s 22 riders had announced they do not want race in Qatar, for the same reasons. No one knows how many riders will line up under the Lusail floodlights this weekend, but most likely the grid will be at least half full, as teams and manufacturers (it is they who are contracted to Liberty Media, not the riders) pressure their riders to take part.

This has never happened before in eight decades of MotoGP – riders, teams and manufacturers rebelling against the championship’s owner.

Why now? Because MotoGP’s new owner Liberty Media, specifically its MotoGP Sports and Entertainment Group, has gone full dictator on its new property, which it acquired last year, to sit alongside Formula 1.

To understand why, always follow the money. Liberty and MotoGP Group obviously want the Qatar MotoGP round to happen, because it’s a very profitable event.

But ultimately this is more about Formula 1 than MotoGP, because Liberty’s F1 Group (which includes MotoGP) makes the vast majority of its money from F1. And whatever happens this week in MotoGP, will set the precedent for F1’s season-ending Middle Eastern rounds.

If a significant number of MotoGP riders don’t race in Qatar, F1 drivers will feel more confident telling Liberty they won’t show up for the Qatar and Abu Dhabi F1 rounds in a few weeks.

An F1 driver strike in Qatar and Abu Dhabi would be a disaster for Liberty. Four of this year’s F1’s 24 races were due to take place in the Middle East – Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi – and because those countries pay huge hosting fees (averaging around £40 million), they provide 25% of Liberty’s annual hosting fee income.

When the US and Israel attacked Iran in February, April’s Saudi F1 race was cancelled and the Bahrain round postponed. Those reactions, plus ongoing regional uncertainty, had a catastrophic effect on Liberty’s finances. Its second-quarter earnings were down 69% on 2025’s and the company’s market value dropped by almost £2 billion.

This is why Liberty and MotoGP Group are getting so heavy with riders, teams and manufacturers, threatening them with all kinds of punishments if they don’t race in Qatar: its share price will take an even bigger battering if these races don’t happen.

Are the riders overreacting to the current situation in the Middle East? MotoGP Group deputy CEO Carlos Ezpeleta certainly thinks so.

“It is definitely safe to race here,” he said during a brief visit to Qatar last week.

Pretty much everyone else says otherwise.

Liberty Media is an American company and the US Department of State says, “reconsider travel to Qatar due to risk of armed conflict”.

Qatar itself recently started Watan 2026, a massive military operation designed to test the country’s readiness for war. Last week its air force removed planes from the USA’s huge Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha, so they’re less likely to be targeted by Iranian forces responding to US/Israeli attacks. The Iranians last attacked Al Udeid in February.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is shutting down schools this week, in readiness for an increase in military action. And US oil executives have cancelled plans to attend the Middle East’s biggest oil-industry conference, which takes place in Abu Dhabi this week.

All these reactions follow threats by the USA to attack Iran following the USA’s mid-term elections, which take place tomorrow (Tuesday). There is still a chance that military escalation will be avoided – Iranian negotiators are currently locked in talks with Qatari mediators in Doha, looking for a path out of the conflict.

MotoGP management insisted during the Malaysian GP that it is prepared for all eventualities in Qatar.

“We have reviewed the latest information and assurances provided by the State of Qatar, Lusail International Circuit, relevant embassies and independent experts,” it stated.

“These internal and external assessments continue to inform our ongoing risk review and decision-making process. Following a review of the latest information, official assurances from the State of Qatar and ⁠independent assessments available to us at this moment, we have received no information that would warrant a change to the current plans for the event.”

Of course, what MotoGP Group doesn’t know are the USA’s military plans for the region. Therefore, taking several thousand people – not only MotoGP, Moto2 and Moto3 riders but also their team personnel – into Qatar in these circumstances is at best reckless.

If hostilities don’t recommence, MotoGP Group will claim that it was right all along. But this won’t be the case. That’s like driving the wrong way down a busy motorway at 100mph and, if you survive, claiming that doing what you did was perfectly safe. It wasn’t. You had no control of the situation. You were merely lucky.

Reigning champion and current points leader Marc Márquez is one of many who don’t want to race in Qatar. He will travel from Spain to Doha as late as possible, in case the war flares up in the meantime. If the race goes ahead, he has little option but to take part, because his only championship rivals, Marco Bezzecchi and the injured Jorge Martin, have signalled their intention to contest the race.

And there’s a second scandal to this affair: the MotoGP group is threatening the rebels with sporting penalties for non-sporting offences. Sporting penalties can include grid penalties, exclusion from races or practice sessions, docking of championship points and so on.

There are no specific rules in the MotoGP regulations that address geopolitical situations. All they do say is that riders are allowed to miss races due to force majeure, which would seem to include the potential of war.

Threatening riders with sporting penalties is 100% wrong. And this follows MotoGP Group’s recent announcement that riders will be given sporting penalties for missing promotional duties, even though MotoGP regulations don’t allow the championship’s commercial owners to apply sporting sanctions.

These new rules will make MotoGP unique in the sporting world. Sporting penalties for commercial offences are not allowed in Formula 1, IndyCar, NASCAR, football, golf, rugby, cycling, NBA, NFL or pretty much any other major sport or championship.

How can Liberty get away with such a massive overreach of its powers?

All sports rely on a separation of powers between commercial and sporting roles, so that businesspeople can’t interfere with the sport itself.

However, the powers within MotoGP are no longer fully separated. This goes way back to 1991 and 1992, when various factions and businesses were fighting to gain control of MotoGP’s television rights, which are the championship’s number one source of income.

These rights belonged to motorcycle racing’s governing body, the FIM (Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme), so the FIM was trying to sell them to the highest bidder. The FIM’s suitors included F1 mogul Bernie Ecclestone and a little-known Spanish sports marketing business, Dorna Promoción del Deporte.

The battle got ugly, with Ecclestone asking car racing’s governing body, the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile), to change its statutes to expand its remit to organising motorcycle races as well as car races. This was a real threat to the FIM’s very existence.

Besieged on all sides, the FIM’s power rapidly drained away, so when it finally signed with Dorna and teams’ organisation IRTA, it essentially gave away its powers. Nowadays, the FIM supplies MotoGP’s stewards and so on, but its power is more ceremonial than anything.

This is not the case in F1, where the FIA continues to exert considerable power. If the current MotoGP situation were happening in F1, the FIA would have a lot to say on the matter. However, we’ve heard nothing from the FIM in recent weeks, but we have had MotoGP Group threatening to use the FIM to sanction Yamaha for missing Qatar.

The three main bodies within MotoGP are still MotoGP Group (née Dorna), IRTA and the FIM. But since power comes from money and since MotoGP Group funds both IRTA and the FIM, these bodies have become somewhat homogeneous, so the MotoGP championship is now an autocracy, with its owners ruling with absolute power.

This has been the case since the 1990s but until very recently, MotoGP management ruled with soft power. CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta found compromises whenever possible, with the full understanding that keeping the riders, teams and management on side is the best way to manage the championship.

His son, Carlos Ezpeleta, prefers a more muscular management style. The first major sign of this approach was the decision to introduce sprint races in 2023. When teams met with Ezpeleta junior during the 2022 Austrian GP, they expected to discuss how many sprints per season and so on. Instead, they were told that sprints would be introduced and they would feature at every race. No discussion.

Recent weeks have brought Ezpeleta into escalating conflict with riders, teams and manufacturers. Although four of MotoGP’s five manufacturers will race in Qatar, the majority of team staff up and down pitlane would rather not be there.