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…