MotoGP has some of the tightest, best racing around. You've got 300 horsepower monsters being straddled and sent flying by true superhumans each weekend all around the world. Wheelies are had, crashes are mind-meltingly insane, and they sound bananas flying down any track straight. Championship fights are close all the way down to the final race, something that's not always the case with top-tier series.
Yet, despite all that, MotoGP holds a fraction of the viewership of Formula 1.
Part of that is, obviously, fewer people ride motorcycles versus drive cars. But Formula 1 cars aren't actually cars. They're rocket ships. They have about as much to do with your on-road Mercedes or McLaren as I have with Tony Stark. So while the audience is more niche comparatively, I don't think that has as much to do with MotoGP's smaller fandom than people may think.
No, where I find issue with acquiring new, and maintaining old, fans is in the folks who run the series: Dorna. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that Dorna is the sport's own worst enemy, as the governing body has routinely made decisions that make it harder for fans to watch the sport, harder for journalists like myself to cover, and just hard on the whole to catch the truly fantastic wheel-to-wheel racing going on. They've made MotoGP worse, despite the racing being god-tier.
It doesn't have to be that way, though.
Firstly, Dorna's distribution rights have been all over the place, and to varying degrees of success. Last year, the series partnered with HBO's Max for streaming. But that came with a buggy interface, lackluster replays, and you couldn't search for the most recent races. It got better as the season progressed, but it still sucked. That left room for improvement this year, right? Wrong.
In all its wisdom and big-business brainiology, Dorna scrapped its partnership with HBO and didn't tell anyone until two days before the first race. Brilliant!
Now, obviously, you could pay Dorna directly with MotoGP's Videopass just like Formula 1's own channel. But first, the series didn't lay this out ahead of time, rather waiting until the last moment, and second, it's not that great of a subscription. All the bells and whistles just aren't there, as you get in other channels. It doesn't seem worth it. Likewise, the executives are cracking down on login sharing among families, which is just shitty.
As of today, Fox Sports will now host both the Sprint and Grand Prix races, though according to the press release, even that's sort of confusing to figure out. The release states, "MotoGP officially announced that its races will be broadcast on Fox Sports in the U.S. beginning with the start of the 2025 season this weekend. The multiyear deal will see Tissot Sprints and Grand Prix races broadcast live on FS1 or FS2." Emphasis mine, as Fox Sports and Dorna don't even know which channel it'll be on. It could be on FS1 OR FS2.
Apparently, it'll depend on the day, the weather, and the whims of Fox's executives at any given moment. It's stupid, is what I mean. But wait, it gets worse!
Usually, executives want to grow viewership and fandoms of race series'. More fans mean more money, more money means more yachts, and more yachts means more self-worth or something. But Dorna seemingly doesn't want to grow the sport. Instead, its actions seem intended to curtail those attempting to cover the races through means including insane press contracts, limiting social media posts on what you can and can't take, as well as not letting journalists embed the series' YouTube videos. [Who doesn't understand the power of an embed that goes DIRECTLY TO THE ORIGINAL CONTENT and isn't a repost in 2025?! Dorna, apparently. jj]
No, seriously, if I wanted to cover some piece of the action from last weekend's kick-off race in Thailand with a video of Marc Marquez winning from MotoGP's channel, it wouldn't let me throw it in here. I'd have to tell you about it and then just send you a YouTube URL. I couldn't embed it, because Dorna won't let you.
And that's not even to mention how woeful the actual race recaps actually are on the series' channel. I mean, they're short, they offer no context of the race as a whole, and they don't capture why folks who may or may not be on the fence of watching a full race should even care about the series. It's as if they were done by a high-school editing class, and not by a billion-dollar racing empire.
Compare it to Formula 1's, or even WRC's, recaps and it's night and day. There's personality, voiceover, gripping clips highlighting what happened, and a reason why to click play. That's just not in MotoGP's videos, which is stupid because the races are amazing. [For heaven's sake, longtime F1 broadcaster Will Buxton is moving to another series this year, but folks know his face so well on Drive to Survive that there's been a need to explain what will happen now that Buxton is moving away from the series. That would never happen the way MotoGP broadcasts are currently handled! jj]
Dorna also has some insane rules for media covering the races.
I attended the Circuit of the Americas round last year with Red Bull and had an absolutely blast. I took pictures, did a couple stories, talked with Jack Miller and Pedro Acosta, and more. I also took a few videos to share on social media to get everyone hyped, one of which was of the start of the race. It was, by no means, anything more than the launch of the bikes. It didn't show who won the race, nor were there any start-line shenanigans like other races. The motorcycles and racers just launched off the line and sped toward turn 1. And that was where the video cut.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Fast forward to a few hours later and I get told that Dorna wants it down and wants it down now. Apparently, I wasn't authorized to "broadcast" the start of the race. I wasn't authorized to promote the race, nor the series, on RideApart's social channels.
I get that we're not the biggest outlet, but we do have a loyal following and there are those that might not be exposed to MotoGP if we didn't cover it. And again, the clip showed nothing more than the start. Who was this hurting? How was this damaging the brand? How was this cutting into Dorna's profits? It wasn't. It really seems that Dorna doesn't want people watching or new people coming to the sport.
I have other issues with the series, too.
There's the will-they, won't-they of new race venues and subsequent press releases that contradict each other. The proverbial on-again, off-again races in India and Kazakhstan. How Dorna handled the season finale last year, as well as its response to the terribly damaging floods in Spain. The KTM issue both in the main series, as well as in Moto2 and Moto3. How they treat companies that want to enter the series and make the racing more competitive (though, to be fair, Formula 1 has the same problem). The rising costs of running a team, as highlighted by Aprilia last year. And countless other issues.
It all smacks of an organization that doesn't know what the hell it's doing, nor how to manage a race that's so awesome once the racers finally line up on the grid. And that's a shame as I want to see more people watch the sport. I want to talk about MotoGP with my friends the same way as I do about Formula 1. I want fans invigorated and sharing videos of the epic battles that've been waged in recent years. To shit-talk the dominance of Ducati, just as they've shit-talked Red Bull's. More than that, I want MotoGP influencing folks to maybe get back onto a motorcycle or start motorcycling for the first time ever.
Here's hoping Liberty's purchase finally goes through and they clean house. Because if Liberty does, and they employ a plan similar to that of what they did with Formula 1 when they came in, get ready for the golden age of MotoGP.
I truly believe that's a possibility. Will we get a Drive to Survive-style Netflix show? Doubtful, but we could see a lot of the unforced errors above remedied, and that'd go a long way in getting new and old fans excited again.
So long as you oust Dorna's current executives.
