What do MotoGP fans really, really want?

Nothing particularly wrong with that, except that Dorna’s real desire is to expand MotoGP to new audiences – and super-fans aren’t the right people to suggest how that should be done.

In fact the way forward is surely fairly obvious: better racing in the premier class, more engagement with people via the social-media platforms used by youngsters and more creative management of MotoGP rounds to turn them into festivals, not just race meetings.

How to make the racing better? Rewrite MotoGP’s technical regulations to reduce the extreme aerodynamics that make drafting mostly pointless and overtaking difficult. This, however, wouldn’t be popular with current MotoGP dominators Ducati, whose engineers worked so hard to create downforce aero that helped transform its Desmosedici into a winner.

Does it matter that Ducati wouldn’t agree? Yes, because the Bologna company’s bikes fill more than a third of the MotoGP and the entire MotoE grid, so Ducati has Dorna by the balls. And congratulations to its management for working hard to put themselves in that position.

Social media? Easy – hire a few social-media geniuses with a proven track record. Formula 1 has done it, why not MotoGP?

Building MotoGP events into three-day festivals? Easy – hire a rock promoter or a music-festival promoter who knows how to make this kind of thing happen.

It’s no coincidence that three of the best-attended MotoGP events – Assen, Le Mans and Sachsenring – are as much festivals of music and Bacchanalia as they are race meetings, even though they don’t happen in countries where MotoGP is huge.

Which is one reason I was somewhat surprised at Misano to see the rider who may well be crowned 2022 MotoGP king wearing a helmet livery that pays homage to a sportsman notorious for his violence towards women.

Is this a good way to make women like MotoGP more? To identify with its riders more?

Therefore I had to ask Pecco Bagnaia about his choice. I was hoping he wouldn’t qualify on the front row, so I could question him during his Saturday media debrief in Ducati’s hospitality unit, away from the glare of the TV cameras. But of course he qualified on the front row, which put him in the televised QP conference.

Bagnaia explained to me that he’s always been a fan of Dennis Rodman’s basketball playing, so his helmet celebrated that, not his life outside the basketball court. But Rodman, like Bagnaia and everyone else, is a human first and a sportsperson second. You cannot separate the two; you cannot separate Oscar Pistorius the successful Paralympian from the man who murdered his girlfriend in cold blood.

I have no problems with Bagnaia being a Rodman fan, but his decision to glorify him to hundreds of millions of fans was foolish. However, the real failures in this sorry saga are the people around him. Ducati has a huge PR team, aimed at selling the brand to people around the world, including women. Why didn’t they step in and tell him that wearing the helmet was neither in his or their interests?

Any of them could’ve spent a few minutes researching Rodman’s life. This is what they would’ve found out… Rodman has been convicted of spousal battery, has been accused of domestic violence by all three of his wives (Annie Bakes, Carmen Electra and Michelle Moyer) and twice arrested for this offence. He has settled out of court in several sexual assault cases and been charged for a hit-and-run accident.

He’s also twice been arrested twice for drunken driving, which you would’ve thought might have pricked up the ears of the Ducati PR team, because Ducati runs its own don’t drink and ride PR campaign, already sightly compromised by Bagnaia’s recent Ibiza faux pas.

This takes us onto yesterday’s announcement that MotoGP will soon follow other sports by staging events in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is punishable by death and where a young woman was recently sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account that followed and retweeted dissidents and activists.

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has a £400-billion sovereign wealth fund that splurges money at all kinds of sports, hoping to distract attention from its human-rights abuses. So far the country has welcomed F1, golf, boxing and WWE (wrestling), with MotoGP next and no doubt a football World Cup coming soon.

Does Dorna’s Saudi announcement make the case of Bagnaia’s Misano helmet irrelevant? Absolutely not. Perhaps it places a great onus on riders to open their minds to the wider world and find their own moral compasses.

And what of Dorna’s decision to go to Saudi? Because I certainly saw no mention of this in the fan survey. Where was the question, “Which nations do you want to host a MotoGP race? 1) Saudi Arabia, 2) North Korea, 3) Russia?”

In my opinion, racing in Saudi is wrong. However, I do see the other side of the argument (which doesn’t mean I agree with the decision taken according to that argument).

Much of the world is in financial crisis and I’m sure Dorna isn’t exempt. Massive increases of costs and loss of revenues due to the global pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rampant inflation have battered Dorna like everyone else.

A colleague who works in the electric single-seater Formula E championship tells me that the 11-nation series makes more than half its money from its Saudi round. So it’s not hard to see why other sports are bedazzled by the country’s sovereign wealth fund.

Three to four thousand staff work in the MotoGP paddock, a number dwarfed by those further down the line (working in factory race departments, manufacturing motorcycle components, cooking tyres, sewing leathers, moulding helmets, building race trucks and so on). The total? Who knows, but let’s take a wild guess at 25,000, which makes 25,000 families needing feeding, clothing and housing.

However keen the bosses at Dorna are about buying their own golf courses I suspect they do feel some responsibility for these people. At least I hope they do.