What MotoGP needs now is Ride to Survive

Motorcycle racing has two main pillars: entertainment and technology. Both are equally important, nearly. Nowadays, entertainment has to lead the way.

Motorcycle racing’s biggest advantage in the motor sport world is that it’s more exciting to watch than car racing. Therefore it’s essential that the rules are written to keep it that way, rather than to keep the engineers happy.

This doesn’t mean there will be no more engineering and technology. It means the opposite, because if there’s no show there will be fewer fans and if there are fewer fans there will be less money for tech. All that needs to change is that those in charge can control the engineering to keep the racing exciting.

That’s what needs to change in 2027: first, the governance of the tech rules and, second, the tech rules themselves. Ideally, a major reduction in downforce aero, a ban on ground-effect-type aero and a ban on ride-height and holeshot devices.

Fans want to see riders wrestling with their machines, not riding bikes that stick to the road like F1 cars. And they want to see overtaking, which means riders using each other’s slipstreams to help set up overtakes, rather than having to avoid the huge aero wakes created by current machines, which so often prevent overtaking.

MotoGP is still very close, with most races won by less than a second, but there are many fewer battles than there used to be. In the last GP race in Portugal there wasn’t a single overtake among the top three after the first lap and the season-opening Qatar GP was led by the same rider from the fourth corner of the first lap all the way to the chequered flag.

Sadly, nothing can be done about this until 2027, unless Liberty really starts throwing its weight around. In the meantime, the company needs to start working on something less complicated but equally as important.

A year after Liberty bought F1 it did a deal with Netflix to shoot the first season of Drive to Survive, which covered the 2018 F1 season and was released in early 2019.

Drive to Survive attracted new audiences to F1, because it is superbly conceived and directed to create human stories around the racing. Each episode is a self-contained story. This is in contrast to MotoGP’s efforts to replicate DTS – MotoGP Unlimited and There Can Only Be One – which are more like highlight programmes. This is fine for existing fans, who are delighted to watch anything about MotoGP, but it’s not going to attract new fans, who need stories and characters to suck them in.

Therefore, this should be Liberty’s first job – to get the DTS team working on a Ride to Survive series. RTS will be better than DTS. Why? Because while F1 races don’t duplicate the drama of DTS, MotoGP races certainly would duplicate the drama of RTS, so this kind of show should boost MotoGP even more than it boosted F1.

Of course, the Liberty deal is not 100% done and dusted. It will have to be reviewed by monopoly commissions. When CVC Capital Partners bought F1 in 2005 to add to its existing property MotoGP it was told that owning the world’s two biggest motor sport championships was monopolistic, so it had to sell one or the other. It sold MotoGP to Bridgepoint, who have now sold to Liberty.

Liberty says it is “very confident” of passing these regulatory hurdles, because “the media landscape has changed over the past 20 years”.