Ownership overhaul: Guenther Steiner to ignite era of MotoGP change

It’s Saturday evening in a small, brightly lit private room of a well-to-do Catalan restaurant (think very white tablecloths, dark wood panelling and furniture). The fancy eatery is located a five-minute drive from the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, and Guenther Steiner is holding court.

The former Haas F1 team boss had already held a press conference 32 hours earlier to announce his MotoGP ‘debut’ as CEO of the Red Bull KTM Tech3 independent team, starting 2026. Steiner leads a consortium buyout from incumbent owner Herve Poncharal to become the first significant new team owner (from the 11 on the ringfenced MotoGP grid) since Justin Marks and the NASCAR Trackhouse Racing entity at the end of 2023.

Around the table is a smattering of media from Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK as well as Steiner’s personal crew and Tech3’s incoming team principal, Richard Coleman; the sole Briton in MotoGP to hold such a position. The affable Poncharal, one of MotoGP’s mainstay characters for four decades, a former International Racing Teams’ Association (IRTA) president and an outlier as one of the only French overseers in the sport is gently ribbing his Italian successor for his lack of grand prix motorcycling acumen. Steiner, humble and sometimes playing up to the sweary caricature familiar to F1 Drive to Survive viewers, goes along with the banter.

“I must remember to call them riders, not drivers,” he half-jokes.

Steiner has been gazing at MotoGP for over a year. “The growth potential is everywhere,” he said at the press conference, by means of justification for his venture. “We just need more people to watch it because it’s a very exciting sport: it’s man and machine and man against man. More people just need to be aware of it…and that will happen because a lot of people are already watching. A lot of opportunities.”

“Pre-Liberty closing, the sport was already growing with record attendances and TV figures up,” offered Coleman. “We see Liberty as an accelerator of that. The championship might be overweight in certain areas of the world and Liberty will help with that.”

Poncharal and Steiner during their press conference

Sport-wise, Steiner stated his aim was to leave the make-up of Tech3 untouched for 2026. His claim that he and Coleman will have a learning year next season was a little inaccurate. Steiner already needs to be having cursory talks with KTM (will the Austrians continue in MotoGP in 2027?), will have to make judgments on rider recruitment in the coming months and will have to review Tech3’s presence in the Moto3 class. So, strategic five-year decisions are already on the horizon, although his publicly unhurried intention not to rumble the status quo was a topic that seemed to pervade the vibe during Saturday’s dinner.

The official confirmation of his arrival on Friday afternoon was made partly to acknowledge 68-year-old Poncharal’s impact and presence on the sport but also as part of Dorna’s willingness to show that the Liberty Media MotoGP era is already bringing change. The last two F1 world champions, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, are just two names rumoured to be hovering with incoming capital.

MotoGP currently has five factory squads from Aprilia, Ducati, Honda, KTM and Yamaha and then another six independent teams, owned mostly by entrepreneurs that have signed contracts with manufacturers to lease machinery (these fees are paid by Dorna, who also ships the teams’ freight around the globe).

The factories benefit from the extra development resources and promotional presence and therefore embellish these associated teams with latest spec motorcycles (usually very close to the principal works bikes; perhaps only the arrival of updated parts is the only differentiator) and in some – but not all – cases take on the financial burden of the riders’ salaries; which also gives the manufacturers considerable say for recruitment across the entire entry list.

Since the mid-noughties, MotoGP passed through a phase of wavering interest and investment from manufacturers, a mismatched Claiming Rule Teams period (where the grid was fleshed out with patchwork engineering) and finally into a tighter spec rulebook 10 years ago that consolidated the main players, and made the proliferation of race motorcycles, new and old, possible and easier to distribute.

A system was in place, to Dorna’s immense credit. The sport even glided through the upheaval of Suzuki’s sudden and unexpected exit at the end of 2022 and the bump of the two Covid-affected seasons.

The increasing solidification and sustainability of the independent teams because of results and visibility brought the entire field onto a more even keel. There is a price for parity, and that value has undoubtedly ballooned across the last decade when the circle of annual grand prix winners began to reach almost double figures. The flowering capabilities of the teams scrambled the landscape, and Ducati was the shrewdest operators in terms of spreading its tech and using its in-house wizardry to school a sizeable element of the paddock’s racing minds.

Ducati’s gain was significant. It earned, won, and banked reams of development data compared to its rivals (some with only two bikes compared to their eight from 2022-2024). They soared in prestige. The knock-on effect of their prevalence allowed them to hook talent at a cheaper rate: the most obvious example being Marc Márquez, who prematurely severed an HRC contract worth more than 25m euros per annum to ride a year-old GP23 for free during the 2024 season. That same year Jorge Martín, another rider who decided to jump out of the KTM factory filter system because he wanted a Desmosedici, won the world championship as an independent team rider for Pramac but with a fully-loaded Ducati GP24.

Ironically, Dorna nourished these enterprises with funding and its support and business connections to the point where the teams now (understandably, after a 4.2-billion-dollar acquisition from Liberty Media) are eying a bigger share of the wider pie. Regardless of how the paddock power dynamics morph in the coming year – and MotoGP will undergo big changes with revamped technical guidelines and many contract cycles ending for teams and riders for 2027 – there is little doubt that a swell of curiosity is circling the championship.

“It’s remarkable and it’s very nice that in the last two years we are having a massive interest in buying MotoGP teams from different investment funds, company entrepreneurs, sports athletes; like we never experienced before,” admitted LCR Honda’s owner, former GP winner and Poncharal’s replacement as IRTA President Lucio Cecchinello in an interview during Saturday at the Catalan GP.

“This is due to the fact that everybody sees MotoGP as a platform that has tremendous potential growth in the next couple of years. The partnership with Liberty Media will definitely help MotoGP to boost media exposure, to boost the championship profile, to catch other fans’ profiles and as well massively increase the interest of MotoGP in the United States, which is an immensely important market, especially for sport entertainment and the related sponsorship that can eventually join the championship.”

MotoGP demographics and the fabric of the grid should be prepared for a raft of shape-shifting. Cecchinello now likens independent teams to “a start-up with incredible potential”. Bigger and better-equipped teams should raise standards.

“There are different investors’ profiles,” he explains. “Some linked only in speculation for pure financial interest. Some just want a share, some want to have control and others that want to buy the whole team, all 100%. Then there are other potential investors like, for example, Guenther Steiner, who has a motor sport management background. He has a sporting interest. He’s really willing to stay in the championship and to do something great on this sport platform.

“Honestly, I have in my book, I will say, a dozen serious offers right now,” he confides.

The Italian is swift to attribute this fecundity to the powers-that-be. “On behalf of all MotoGP independent teams, I expressed to Dorna and Mr Carmelo Ezpeleta [Dorna CEO] my great, great gratitude because a couple of years ago, a MotoGP team didn’t have a value, and some teams in extreme economic difficulties just left. But now, we are in a different story because the value of anything is made by demand. The sale of Tech3, for several, several million, is a very good benchmark.”

It may seem MotoGP is a meadow of succulent cash cows…but Cecchinello warned of the next steps. More wealth, more responsibility and more speculation mean these hardened race-focused and occasionally chaotic operations must quickly learn to deal with bigger remits that are not all about performance gains for the bikes. Then, you also have the cautionary tales like RNF and their crypto shareholders: the ashes of that team allowing Trackhouse to fire up their MotoGP adventure.

“Yes, an investor can just buy some shares in the team, can provide an ‘X’ amount of money that can be used to increase the number of collaborators, increase the facility, and, you know, have a bigger hospitality, bigger garage facility and so on. But this represents a fixed cost that we may also face in the following years. Having an investor that can help you to bring the team to the next level, where you do not have the guarantee that you are going to find suddenly new sponsors to finance the next stage of your team operation, is going to be a mess,” he says.

“The sponsorship market for MotoGP…it’s still quite weak, I would say,” Cecchinello adds, citing the ongoing presence of lubricant companies and energy drinks as the main brands on the sides of the fairings, while making a small nod to Ducati’s growing portfolio of tech and software firms.

Independent teams might have to tootle into the future with more abandon and with guidance from someone, somewhere. Steiner’s considerable F1 and NASCAR background means he has a roadmap for a fledgling boom project.