It's still early days into the new partnership of Formula 1 and MotoGP.
The two-wheeled series was recently purchased by Formula 1's Liberty Media earlier this year, much to both fanfare and chagrin by fans. That might be confusing, but the merger has just so many unknowns still left unresolved, fans are equally divided on whether this will be good for MotoGP or not.
Making matters worse, though representatives have commented on the merger, the two series' have been pretty dang quiet about concrete future plans since the announcement. We've essentially got, "We're excited to work together!" and that's about it.
Those vague comments aren't stopping, either, with Dorna's current CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta telling reporters that, while the two series' are more closely working together, one of the chief concerns for race fans, i.e. scheduling conflicts between F1 and MotoGP, will continue. At least for the time being.
"There has always been good cooperation [between MotoGP and F1], and there will be even more now that Liberty Media is taking over the Dorna, but we will not be able to do without scheduling conflicts," said Ezpeleta to AS. He added "Both F1 and MotoGP are currently taking each other's schedules into account when planning. We look at their calendar before we make ours, and now they look at ours before they make theirs. That wasn't always the case in the past.”
But, honestly, this was all to be expected, and for other publications to be calling into question whether the merger is good or bad this early on, well they're insane to hit "Publish."
Think about it this way. Formula 1 is a billion-plus-dollar empire. As is MotoGP, though to a somewhat lesser extent. The two series race a lot of the same tracks, have massive fanbases, and truly staggering operational mandates and personnel. Merging the two together so they don't overlap in their 22- and 24-race seasons in a manner of a few months was never going to happen. That's going to take years of figuring out how the two can best support each other, to determine good racing weather for each, to figure out if double-headers are possible, etc, etc.
Ezpeleta's comments, however, are encouraging, as because they're now under the same roof, they can better coordinate with one another to give fans the best experience possible. It could be a lot more expensive, but a double-header was out of the question when it was just Liberty Media and Dorna going it alone and, technically, competing.
That's no longer the case.
So for all the doomsayers, as well as folks praising the merger, we're going to have to wait and see how it all shakes out. I mean, Liberty purchased MotoGP in April. It's the beginning of October as I write this. We've got at least another year before we start seeing what Liberty Media likely has in store for MotoGP.
