The MotoGP World Championship, whose start is just around the corner, will mean the most significant change for the World Championship since the turn of the 4T bikes at the turn of the century. A change that the organizers of the World Cup decided to carry out to revitalize a format that was showing signs of exhaustion.
And it was a series of chained factors that led MotoGP to relinquish the leadership in interest and viewership it enjoyed in motor sports. The slowdown caused by the two years conditioned by COVID for everyone is not ‘melted’ by MotoGP, or perhaps it is fairer to say that other motor specialties have emerged from difficult years with greater loss -moves and maybe with new techniques.
Add to this the retirement of Valentino Rossi, the planetary icon of MotoGP, and the absence from the scene due to a serious injury of his successor at all levels, Marc Márquez. The technical and results crisis at Honda didn’t help either, dragged down by the loss of its reference pilot. In other words, one of those events developed where a series of situations took place that severely damaged the MotoGP show.
To stop this indentation and reverse the situation, . At the competition level, it introduced a second weekend race in the main class, MotoGP. A race with half the number of laps will take place on Saturday afternoon, and that will mean going from 21 races in 2022 to 42.
These changes were shown to the public during last year’s Austrian GP festival, due to the fact that none of the pilots were notified about the massive changes that would be introduced. A fact that most of the protagonists of the MotoGP show did not like.
The question of whether it is a good idea to run these short races at all GGPPs instead of experimenting with them first at some is a general feeling among drivers and managers. In fact, even the president of the International Federation himself admitted that perhaps it should have been tried first. But the organizer of the championship decided to make the format universal, so the 2023 World Cup will have 42 races.
The idea, the approach, is undoubtedly more attractive to fans. There will be more races, more starts and the strategy for the new GP concept is yet to be discovered by the team, engineers and drivers. The 2023 World Cup will therefore be more interesting, without a doubt.
But at the same time, the new format generated a shock wave with effects that the organizer of the World Cup did not seem to expect. It seems that the rush to get going has left a series of fringes appearing. Some are immediate, others during the winter, and some where a solution was sought only a few weeks ago.
The MotoE World Championship was affected
The new Moto E World Championship is one of those affected. The newly created ‘Electric World Championship’ suddenly found itself with no space to celebrate on Sunday, the big day of a GP, at least one of its races. Until last season, electric motorcycles closed the GP on the Sunday after the MotoGP race. This year, with the novelty of letting the fans present at the circuits invade the track, he disappeared from the ‘slot’.
And that’s where the ‘drama’ comes in, because the new GP Sunday schedule is so tight that Moto E doesn’t have a place yet. Both of his races will be held on Saturday. A ‘rare’ start in a category that gets World Championship status, a reason for the anger of the sponsors present in this category, and it must be assumed that Ducati was not happy either, making a huge effort to track the first real electric competition motorcycles.
We know that many sponsors have asked their sponsors for an ‘explanation’, in the sense that they were not sold the format. The teams also did not like the request of those responsible for Moto E to stay on the circuit on Sunday to comply with sponsorship and marketing events… No for some things, yes for others. It seems that when the new MotoGP was designed, Moto E forgot something, and when they realized that the new Sunday schedule was made public.
Bonuses for pilots
Another side effect of two races per weekend is how bonuses for results drivers have in their contracts. Short races, officially called Sprint Races, are not contemplated in signed contracts, but as races must, or must, be paid according to the contract. The teams, for their part, say that the new MotoGP has made public that the contracts with their sponsors are closed, and that the doubling of bonuses is not feasible for their budgets… Habemus mess.
In recent weeks, meetings have been held to reach a consensus on the matter, but so far the issue is still open. The management of the situation at the college failed, so the drivers were divided. There are those who are more demanding, there are those who throw the ball -because they clearly negotiated with each other-. The organizer for his part, so authoritarian in other situations, in this case washes his hands of it saying it is a contractual problem between the team and the pilots.
Moto2 and Moto3 have lost weight
The third victim of the shock wave of the new MotoGP is the lower categories, Moto 2 and Moto3. In theory, due to a lack of space in Sunday’s schedule, the pre-race morning warm-up was suppressed. That is, they force them out of the race without having had a chance to roll out the new components that they should have included in a race. A check that MotoGP riders have instead.
The surprising thing is to see how the same people who were denied 10 minutes on Sunday morning before the MotoGP warm-up -which starts at 9:45-, are ‘thrown’ on the track on Saturday at 8:40 am . The question cannot be avoided: why is one day possible and not the second?
Continuing with Moto 2 and Moto 3, the accumulation of Saturday’s protagonists -the top 3 of qualifying plus the first three of the short race- led the organizer to exclude the Moto polemen from the collective press conferences 2 and Moto 3 , as it happened. has become common in recent decades. The previously low visibility and popularity of the intermediate categories was further undermined; every day the teams find it harder to complete their budgets.
As can be seen, the urgency with which the organizer of the World Cup publicized the new format that it decided to give to its championship opened a series of important issues that, on the one hand, caused discomfort for the sponsors and hurt the head for the sponsored, on the other hand a ‘making’ conflict and sent two thirds of its ‘actors’ to the coldest shadows
Source: La Verdad
I’m Rose Herman and I work as an author for Today Times Live. My expertise lies in writing about sports, a passion of mine that has been with me since childhood. As part of my job, I provide comprehensive coverage on everything from football to tennis to golf.
