MotoGP Wants to Be the Biggest Sport in the World

It was at the Grand Prix of Japan in September when Marc Marquez, arguably the greatest motorcycle racer ever, completed the greatest comeback in MotoGP history, winning a record-equaling seventh championship after dark years of injuries, poor results, and slow bikes. You’d be forgiven for not knowing, since MotoGP, despite being the most prestigious motorcycle racing series in the world, is still a niche sport. But with its new majority owner being Liberty Media, the same company that owns Formula 1, MotoGP has big plans to change that.

After all, MotoGP is already your favorite Formula 1 driver’s favorite sport (as MotoGP people like to say), which is a way of emphasizing that it’s a competition for true motorsports enthusiasts. But the race series wants to be more. Marquez, Fabio Quartararo, Francesco Bagnaia, Pedro Acosta, and Jorge Martín are its star riders, and if they were F1 drivers, they’d be world famous, but, instead, only Marquez has managed to break through to the mainstream, and that only by virtue of his sheer Michael Schumacher–esque dominance. That suited MotoGP for decades, but with new owners come new ambitions, and those ambitions have a blueprint: Formula 1, which was in a similar position a decade ago.

“We’ve built the teams, the bikes, everything to a very good level,” says Carlos Ezpeleta, MotoGP’s chief sporting officer. “Now we have a bigger target to continue growing outside of, and transcend, the motorbike-rider culture.”

Taking Over America

The first target is America, and everyone in MotoGP talks about the importance of breaking through stateside, where the sport is followed by a handful of extremely passionate fans, but not on the radar of anyone else. Part of this has been simple access: until recently, it was hard to watch MotoGP races in the U.S. without paying for a subscription. Now, though, MotoGP has a deal with Fox Sports to broadcast more races, which are shown on FS1 and FS2 this year, and perhaps the main Fox channel in the future.

A mandate to break into the American market is in some part why they hired Dan Rossomondo, a veteran of the NBA, as their Chief Commercial Officer in 2023.

“I think the challenges that we have with the U.S are not about necessarily the sport,” Rossomondo says, “but more about just the landscape there. It’s very hard for new sports to get discovered.”

Rossomondo worries about consistency, too, in that he’d prefer if races happened at the same time every weekend, in the same way that the majority of NFL games are played at 1 p.m. every week. For a sport that crisscrosses the globe, that probably isn’t possible, but it speaks to MotoGP’s aspiration, which is to be appointment viewing.

Marc Marquez and the Next Generation

Marquez was, and will remain, a big part of those aspirations. As mentioned, he won his seventh title this year, matching Valentino Rossi’s record, but hadn’t won the title since 2019, after which a series of crashes, injuries, and incompatibilities with his motorcycles left him in the middle of the pack for a few seasons. That also gave room for relative newcomers like Quartararo, known for donning an unzipped suit in press conferences, and Martín, the first rider from an independent team to win a title, to capture championships. MotoGP has to balance creating new stars while keeping the old ones happy, too—all while ensuring that the fans stay engaged.

“I think Marc’s got a long, long trajectory,” Ezpeleta said. “Of course, injuries play a huge role in the sport. That’s always sort of a pending question. You don’t know when something’s going to happen, with these guys right on the limit every second out there on track. At the end, it’ll be hard to argue that Marc’s not the best ever.”

At the race in Barcelona, which is Marquez’s home grand prix, it was his younger brother, Alex Marquez, who rode to victory, with Marc finishing second and the talented Italian rider Enea Bastianini finishing third. For Alex Marquez, it was his second grand prix win and certainly his most memorable to date, beating his brother on home turf. At the press conference afterward, the two said they would ask their girlfriends to allow them some time to celebrate and play video games for an hour. Then it was on to the next race, in San Marino, where Marc Marquez resumed his inevitable march to the title by finishing first.

The Crews Behind the Scenes

Inside the team boxes, crews study data from the track, and the motorcycles are often in some state of disassembly, with mechanics tweaking and fine-tuning parts while riders give feedback as soon as they jump off their bikes from a hot lap or two. For qualifying, the motorcycles are filled with just enough fuel to power the qualifying laps, with some drops leftover for testing by stewards.

The tire supplier for MotoGP is currently the French brand Michelin, but, in 2027, it will change to Pirelli, which also supplies Formula 1 with its tires. As with Formula 1, tires are treated like newborns, swaddled in blankets to be kept warm and stored in glassed boxes that resemble incubators. Tires are different for virtually every race, with compounds in the left, right, and center of the tire varying to maximize grip, depending on how many left turns, right turns, and straightaways there are on a given track.

Race stewards are in the garages and also in a room filled with video screens to monitor the proceedings. In a separate room, not far away, official timekeepers work at computers using various technological aids. Technology is at work on other parts of the racetrack too, including high-speed cameras that can capture up to 2,500 frames per second in sunshine, and around 700 frames per second in cloudy weather. (TVs generally show 30 frames per second by comparison.) The results of all those frames are beguiling slow-motion shots that show just how close riders’ body parts are to touching the pavement while leaning during turns. Often they are touching, sometimes up to the rider’s shoulder.

Why TV Is the Key

Riders typically take corners at more than 45 degrees, and sometimes much more. Audio picked up by microphones on riders automatically turns on if it is detected that they are leaning at an angle of 64 degrees or more, which could indicate that the rider has crashed. That audio is often a clue on broadcasts that something is happening elsewhere on a part of the track that isn’t necessarily being shown on screen. Riders have been recorded taking turns at angles greater than 64 degrees without crashing, with the current record held by Marc Marquez, who took a corner at 70.8 degrees in 2019.

The first rider-mounted camera was used during a race in 1985, when a slow rider was selected for the experiment, with the expectation that he’d be at the back of the field and able to capture images of the riders up front, where the camera was pointed. The problem was that it rained heavily that day, and that particular rider was exceptional in the wet; he ended up winning the race, and the images from the camera only got blank pavement ahead of him. The camera was only capable of recording two laps, anyway.

Nowadays, there are four cameras and two microphones on every rider, with the equipment weighing a little under four pounds in total. There are 24 cameras on every track, each aimed at a specific segment, and dozens of other cameras elsewhere. There are around 160 cameras at any given MotoGP race, and the series saves around 15 terabytes of footage after every race, cataloged and organized by a crew that’s also assisted by AI. The whole operation travels the world by airplane, with MotoGP continually investing vast sums of money into TV production, because that is also where it makes the most revenue.

Whether riders need audio is debated among the powers that be at MotoGP, and among fans. It is presumed that rider audio will enhance the TV product, much like it does in Formula 1, but, currently, they get no audio, and messages are conveyed on boards on the pit wall, in addition to a screen on each motorcycle. MotoGP has been experimenting with adding audio to riders’ gear, and, with it, the ability for teams to communicate with riders during a race. Such audio might improve the TV product, as it does in Formula 1, where the world’s most famous drivers can be heard cursing and strategizing with their teams throughout the race. In MotoGP, there is a bit more concern, since a rider taking a turn at a steep angle requires complete concentration, and an ill-timed chirp in their ear from the rider’s team could cause a crash.

Ever-Present Danger

Crashes, indeed, are one of MotoGP’s problems in attracting new fans, because, to the uninitiated, a grand prix motorcycle race can look like a 45-minute dance with death, on a biweekly basis. In reality, the sport is safer than it’s ever been, with helmets, racing suits, air bags, and gloves, all customized for each rider. Gravel run-off areas are also essential to stop tumbling and promote sliding. Still, like on the road, a highsider remains every rider’s biggest nightmare.

MotoGP isn’t trying to eliminate crashes from the sport, which would be impossible anyway, but it’s trying to reduce harm. Stories are legion of riders battling various ailments to stay in the competition, often against their own better judgment.

“Marc Marquez raced [at the German Grand Prix at Sachsenring in 2023] with a second-degree sprained ankle, two cracked ribs, and a fractured finger,” Rossomondo mentions. “That would put an NBA player on the shelf for the entire year.”

Learning From Formula 1

MotoGP executives talk about Formula 1 with respect, as both a sport and a business, but also as a peer, since they share the same majority owners. Formula 1 is the most prestigious four-wheel racing on the planet, and MotoGP is the most prestigious two-wheel racing. It’s been like that for decades, and likely will for decades to come. Still, MotoGP would probably even be happy with just a fraction of Formula 1’s recent success.

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“I think, of course, the demographic from Formula 1 to MotoGP is very different,” says Ezpeleta, adding that the “pattern recognition” is still largely the same, in terms of the product, racing, and business. “I think people can’t really overestimate how good of a job it’s been in Formula 1. It’s uncomparable to any growth in any sport in any business ever. It hasn’t happened before. It’s important to manage our expectations, but we feel the potential is huge.”

MotoGP got a little of Formula 1’s magic at the Grand Prix of Catalunya in the form of Guenther Steiner, who was announced there as the new co-owner of the Red Bull KTM Tech3 team, which has never won a MotoGP title. Steiner emerged as perhaps the biggest star of Formula 1’s Drive to Survive, doesn’t have any MotoGP experience, and, at his introductory press conference, did his best to come off humble. He said he was here, at first, to absorb information. He said he’d been talking with the Ezpeletas for several months.

“They said, ‘If we let you into our world, don’t [mess] it up,’” Steiner noted, adding. “I think my biggest challenge is to learn as quick as possible what is going on here.”

Hervé Poncharal, who founded the Tech3 team in 1990 and is handing over the reins to Steiner, seemed a little ambivalent, at best, to be doing so. Poncharal is the kind of owner one would never see in modern Formula 1: a true independent who fought his way up from lower classes of racing into the big show, building his team along with it. There is still room for owners like Poncharal in MotoGP, but, as he said at the press conference, “Nothing lasts forever.”

“This is a strong addiction,” Poncharal said, “and I think everyone in this room has this addiction.”

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