Pitch the Prix of MotoGP

I was at Sepang last year, where the pit lane reverberates to the sounds of two dozen MotoGP bikes warming up for the preseason test for the year.

Despite the criticism and the global economics going down into the drain, MotoGP isn’t in the bad shape. There are more bikes on the grid than at any time since the 90s, when tobacco companies was the major sponsors for almost all the events and to individual racers.

Behind every MotoGP there is something I believe to be called “Two Wheels Good”.

A car has big wings to help it through the corners, but they slow it down on the straights. Bikes don't have any wings so they don't have anything like the grip in the corners. The snag with the acceleration of a motorbike is that it has a tremendous desire to wheelie and flip backwards.

They are flying on the ground. They are like light aircraft, they row into corners, the front dives down under braking, and the back dives down under acceleration.The brakes on a MotoGP bike are excellent with a braking force at 1.1 and 1.2g, but nothing like as good as a track car which obviously has four wheels and four brake discs.

Now we know that a bike has its own pros and cons but why the coverage and publicity for Superbike coverage is not as great as F1 and other tiny mini track races?

Good weather is a proven draw for any outdoors sporting event, and motorcycle racing is no different. Great racing, great riders, home talent to cheer for, and yet the stands are only sparsely filled. How come WSBK is in the doldrums?

The ugly truth, one which the racing classicists do not like to face, is that professional motorcycle racing, just like every other form of professional sport, is an entertainment product. As boxing promoter Barry Hearn puts it, "Sport is soap opera for men." It is unscripted drama based on a competitive activity, with the drama consisting of the outcome of the contest being unknown. It is a freeform narrative, the story being told second by second, lap by lap as the race unfolds. We only find out how the story ends once the checkered flag falls, though with some races the plot can seem pretty much set in stone as soon as the lights go out. And the best thing about racing is that two weeks later, they repeat the whole thing all over again. Each individual story is part of a larger tale, which leads to the championship, which in turn becomes a much bigger collection of stories, concerning titles, rivalries and legacies.

To be interesting, though, stories need characters. Without someone to root for, or, more importantly, to root against, there is no reason to take an interest in who wins and who loses. A classicist will say that choosing a rider to support should be based on a belief in their talent. That, of course, is nonsense. Judging the talent of a rider is something which is incredibly hard. Look at how many riders have been written off after a bad season, or riders who have gone unnoticed until they turned up in a better team and on a better bike. For the most part, motorcycle racing has fallen into the latter camp, with star riders who understood their own role, and how to create and manage their own stardom.

The trouble with WSBK is that these characters have nothing to contrast themselves to. Almost every rider on the grid is likable in one way or another. There are no antiheroes, no riders for the fans to hate, no one to serve as a communal focus for the fans of other riders. 

What World Superbikes needs is not a hero, but an antihero. The fans need someone to root against, someone fast enough that the others, potential heroes, need to stretch themselves to beat. Creating an antihero may be easier than creating a hero, but it is still not an easy job. They need to be capable of rubbing people up the wrong way, of saying the wrong thing, of antagonizing the fans and the other riders. Fans should automatically interpret their words and actions in the worst possible way, however they were meant when delivered. That requires a certain type of personality.

Can you create characters from professional sportsmen and women? Of course you can, if managed properly, without questioning the extreme skill they have in their chosen art, the hysteria which surrounds them was created almost out of thin air, and created by design.

It is, of course, much easier to control the cast of characters in a sport when you control all of the championship. When individual competitors do not require millions of dollars of equipment and support staff just to make it to the start of the contest. The corporate interests involved make it much harder to create controversy, to generate talking points. Sponsors with a few honorable exceptions, such as Monster want riders who are famous, rather than notorious. They want someone they can present to their business partners without fear of them saying something unpalatable.

There is no need to intervene in the actual racing, other than to ensure it is seen to be scrupulously fair. What matters is off the track: in the media, among the fans, via social media.With some thought, and a bit of ingenuity, one could grow World Superbikes again by telling a better story, creating brighter characters than what we see today. 

Doing so would not impact MotoGP, but would help bolster it, perhaps even boost it. The very rivalry between the two series could be leveraged to generate interest there have always been WSBK fans and MotoGP fans, so why not pit those fans against each other, via some proxy contest between the riders?