The Liberty Show

Motopod, proudly supported by Road Skin, a UK label specializing in protective outerwear for motorcyclists. Modern biker clothing that you can wear all day long, and engineered to save your skin. For the road, for life, visit roadskin.co.uk Hello and welcome to Motopod, the internet radio show all about motorcycle road racing. Episode 825, the Liberty Show is finally here folks. This is going to be a good one because not only am I here hosting, I've got with me Richard Jallock from across the pond in England.

Rich, good day. Good evening everybody, yes, 9 o'clock in the evening for me, so I'm a little later than you guys on the other side, but yeah, good to see you all. And also now to also help along with this, former host Skyler Vicroy from the left coast of America. Skyler, good to see you, good to chat bro, I love it. Yeah, it's good to be back, good to see some other guys here that I've actually never talked to before on the podcast, so that's great.

And just finished up lunch in my side of the world, so Rich is a bit in the future. Yes, and finally, one more person to help us out with this Liberty Show. He is now the new Moto America host for MotoPod. Everybody please welcome Jake Rohrer. Thanks you Jake for one, being Moto America host, and two, jumping into this Liberty Show, which I think everyone's looking forward to.

But first of all, Jake, let's get to know you just a little bit. Tell everybody just kind of a little bit about yourself. Well, hello and thank you for having me on the show. I'm very excited to be joining you guys. I live out in Seattle now, I grew up in New England and started riding dirt bikes when I was a kid.

And got back into riding motorcycles as an adult and did some road racing for about 10 years out here in Washington and Oregon and California. And still ride dirt bikes in the mountains out here in Washington and also have a little bit of adventure riding that we do down in Death Valley sometimes, which is fun. Sorry, I'm just focusing on motorcycles here because that's what we're doing. So yeah, been to a couple of the Ridge events over the last couple of years for Moto America and it's been a really good, really fun, really well run event. I'm excited to go back and actually pretend to cover it as a new journalist or whatever this is.

So yeah, that's me in a nutshell. Welcome on board. Thank you. All right. So this is the Liberty show.

Unless you've been under a rock, Liberty Media, which owns the commercial rights to Formula and successfully now has gotten through all of the EU regulations. They now are owners of Moto GP. Now the question that we have before us all here is what exactly is going to happen with Liberty running the show and what can we exactly expect? So to start us off, I'll come out with the first question and it's the big one. I think that everybody's thinking about and that is can Liberty do for Moto GP what it has done for F1?

F1 has now, at least here in the States, become super popular among everybody here for what? For a variety of reasons. We went from essentially no races to the one race at Cota to now races at Cota, Miami and also there's Miami, Vegas. Thank you. It's in the West Coast.

Thank you, Rich. So I'll start us all off with this. Rich, what can Liberty do for Moto GP? Right. So this is, as you said, Jim, this is the big one, isn't it?

I mean, I think it's worth pointing out Formula was already much bigger than Moto GP was when Liberty got their hands on it. And as you've often pointed out, Jim, I don't say they lucked in because obviously the whole thing around Covid and the pandemic was kind of a very unfortunate thing. But the timing of Drive to Survive season one coming out just in the hot spot of when everybody was stuck at home, I think may have skewed things somewhat. I mean, I'm not going to ramble on too much because obviously we've got a few people that are going to contribute to this. My main concern in this is that they don't just try and roll out a formulaic approach a la Formula One to Moto GP because I think they're fundamentally different.

I think the audiences are fundamentally different as well. So can they do it? Yes, I believe they can because obviously they got a lot of resources and they haven't paid top dollar for Moto GP. I think they've had it at quite a good price, but they're going to want to see a decent return on that. So they're going to put their best minds onto the sort of the marketing approach, the publicity approach, social media, the rest of it.

But I would be concerned if they just think that they can just replicate what they did before with Moto GP. So let's see what everybody else says. Skylar, your thoughts? You know, since, you know, like kind of echoing some of the stuff that Richard brought up there where F1 is a much bigger sport prior to the acquisition. So you have a more niche sport in the world where we see here like the United States that motorcycle riding overall is kind of dwindling down a bit, right?

Because it feels like it's more of a... Cars tend to be a necessity whereas motorcycles a lot of times get to be like your second or third vehicle it can be. So you don't maybe have that same push that everyone can relate to. But what it does do is it brings in new ideas and they can tap into new resources that weren't quite there because we've all been watching Moto GP for a long time. And while it's a good production, it's kind of been the same production for a bit, right?

So we probably need some new ideas and maybe even leverage some of those tools they already have with, you know, F1 and it's, you know, Netflix deals and everything else being like, okay, how do we spin off this into Moto GP? Can we have some crossover talk? Can we start having events where Moto GP and F1... I'm not gonna say that happened at the same time. That would just be a crazy weekend.

But it's not out of the question because here in the States we're having NASCAR and IndyCar events tied together now just to help keep that growth alive in both series because in the end you're tapping from the same resources for a lot of it. So it would be interesting to see how they can use their resources to grow it. But if they're expecting the same rate that Formula One did, that would be concerning because I don't think that's possible at this time. And to the new guy, Jake, your thoughts? Well, I'm going to focus on the Netflix connection because I think right now Netflix has an amazing sports documentary team production house, if you will.

They've got me interested in sports I never cared about at all because of their ability to focus on the humanity and the narratives behind these athletes, which is always extremely compelling. So I think if they can do a series like Drive to Survive with MotoGP, I think it's gonna be huge. And then to bring some humor into it, now that they've got a World Bagger series included in MotoGP for 2026, I think that's gonna solve everything. Yeah. For me, I think that Liberty there gives us hopefully some different avenues to bring other people into the sport that weren't aware of it.

Rich, you mentioned this and I'm gonna take a snippet of it. The storytelling, like Jake was at, right? Jake's interested in sports they never saw before because of what's behind it. Okay, if you can make that entertaining, more people want to see that or watch it on their Sunday afternoon while they're sitting on the couch, then hopefully maybe that motivates them to come look at MotoGP. The thing that I hope that they do is that they step back for a minute and look at a total revamp of how things are presented to us.

Now there are things that I like about the F1 broadcast. There's things that I hate about the F1 broadcast. But one of the things about MotoGP that drives me crazy is you don't know where they are on the track. Especially if it's a new track that we've never been to. We went to Hungary, right?

If I'm watching it, I don't know that they're in turn four or turn six or turn ten. But in Formula One, they got a little icon on the bottom that tells you, hey, this is the turn that that group of cars is in, roughly. That's there. So something like that I think would be better. I think if they could put the graphic of the track and have all the dots running around where you could kind of see where things are.

Now I think that would be very helpful in the flag to flag rain races where people are switching bikes in MotoGP to keep it a little more clear because the average fan is going to sort of miss out on that. If they start small with those things and actually take a look at what people enjoy or think about it and then work on it that way and just sort of, you know, kind of sharpen up the edges of things, round off the edges of things to begin with. I think it could be successful. We could get a lot of people there. But if they come in, they clean house and they want to go their own way, I think that's going to really annoy a lot of people who would be watching.

So my take on there. Yes, sir. You know, I always have thoughts as I go along. Oh, yes. And I'm always writing notes down.

So I don't know, obviously. I mean, like you and I guess probably like Jake and Skyler as well. I started watching. I mean, we're probably older, but I started watching Formula One, as I've said many times in the kind of early to mid 80s. But I still don't really have a good feel, particularly if we fast forward to 2026, what the demographics of the Formula One audience looks like now.

There's this idea that because people drive cars, Formula One kind of makes sense to them. But a Formula One car bears no relation to a vehicle that you and I and anybody else gets into. So the question, I think the challenge for Liberty in a way is to try and make people interested in and Jake obviously hit this on the head, is the characters and stories of the sport. Because you're not going to suddenly get people going out and buy motorbikes just because they're watching MotoGP races. Some people will go out and buy motorbikes, I expect.

But they've got to try and find this sweet spot, I think, where the spectacle, which is amazing and should get better, I believe, in 2027 with the new regs, that that is enough to draw people in. I mean, I would like to see them, for example, just as a little trial running some demo laps at some of the F1 races. Now I appreciate that F1 tracks are not suitable for, but they're not suitable for MotoGP races. But you could certainly send some bikes out on demos doing wheelies and you know, they're very loud, they're very spectacular to look at. They could do stuff like that.

But I'm always reminded when I'm interviewed a couple of times, Stuart Pringle, who's the MD of Silverstone, and his number one gripe has always been that just people don't know about it enough. So the challenge for Liberty is to get eyes on the sport. And then I think the sport itself and the spectacle of the sport and definitely some of the characters that will help to then draw that crowd in. And if they can hit it with a great Netflix series, as Jake has pointed out, and obviously they've got strength there that I'm not aware of because I tend to sort of just focus on motorsport. But if they can do that, then I think that's a very hopeful point.

So I'll add into that a little bit, Rich. So the challenge then is, what do they do to put more eyes on to the sport? How are they going to look at it that way? So again, I think a demo of bikes at F1 races and stuff like that would be a good way to go. How else do they get to that?

How else do they drive eyes and stuff to that? And I put that question out to everybody. Like, anybody, if you can pretend to be Liberty Media and they hire you as their PR guy, what do you do to try to make people aware of motorcycle racing? Because I think one of the things that people are dissatisfied with, okay, wait a minute, let me back up. One of the things I think that the hardcore fans of the 80s and the 90s of Formula One don't like about Formula One today is it's too quiet.

So that sound. So if you can get a bike running around and somebody hears that thing wailing, that's going to bring them to the event, I think. But then also, what else can you do? Yeah. So one of the things, I think having that question and kind of the points that Richard and Jake made is that the shift included the Netflix, it included this.

And you mentioned a lot of people who are following since the 80s. Well, you were a lot younger in the 80s and you've been following it since. So you've got to get the new generation. The reason F1 has boomed a lot is because they've had a great expansion in the under 35 and with women. I mean, it's up like 40% in some of the categories.

So it's driving not only new people that never were interested in sport, but it's getting younger again. And when you get younger, that's fans for life kind of thing. You're starting that over. They've cycled that back because I think there was a bit of that dip with F1 is that you had this great thing. And then once Michael Schumacher was gone, everyone's like, I don't know who these guys are anymore.

You lost some of that. And then what happened is that Bernie Ecclestone left and the control went away and everyone said, well, we can all be like Lewis and be on social media all the time. And then F1 just starts getting attention because it's the great thing about social media. And if you're not interested in it, it'll throw it across your table once in a while and go, hey, is this pretty cool to you? And so if you have these short bursts of something that's interesting, people go, okay, I'll hang out.

I'll follow. I'll check out a few things and you've got to make the short content to get people to watch the long content. It's just kind of how it is now. And so I think they will push a lot of that moving forward. They're going to have more of that presence and encourage their writers to say, hey, get out there, engage the crowd, have a bigger presence online.

Of course, with the safety barriers in there because you're representing the company. But I think that's where a lot of that's going. So I think that's how they're going to approach that, Jim, is being able to make sure they can start reaching a new demographic that has money to spend while their aging demographic is going to hang around. But I don't know about you guys. I've been to a few races and every time they're like, okay, tickets are not $600.

I've seen F1. I don't need to go back now. I'll go do something else. So they've got to get people in who want to spend that first time money. And that's all they've known.

They've got to make those kind of changes. Yeah, I agree with you, Skyler. The price of a Formula One race is kind of outrageous. I mean, it's not bad to other than if we take the cost of me getting the RV to Kota, the price to get in and be there for four days is relatively reasonable. It's like 100 bucks for a general admission ticket for those three days.

If those three days and you're in, right. It's 400 to put the RV on the property and I can five minutes. I'm wherever I want to be at the track. But I think I like the social media aspect of it. But the one thing that I think about this is that motorcycle racing is a lot like ice hockey.

It does not translate well for some reason to television. If you can convince someone to go with you to a hockey game, they're like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing because there's something about the smell of the ice. There's something about the sound of the boards. There's something about the sound of a puck ringing off of the pipe on the post of the goal. I've taken guys to Kota who've never seen a motorcycle race, didn't know anything about it.

But from the moment they were able to smell the fuel, hear the bike and watch how fast these guys are and how close these guys are to the ground, they're now hooked and they want to come back every year and want to watch it. So I'm I'm wondering how do you, if you were Liberty, take that and somehow move that remove that barrier, remove the barrier of them having to be there or as you correctly pointed out, Skyler, get people just interested enough to put down the money to come to see it. That's the trick. Yeah. Again, for me, the biggest thing that they can try to do is to get people to understand that it's a great thing to watch.

It doesn't matter if you ride a motorcycle, if you've ever swung a leg over a bike, it doesn't matter because most people don't go out and play competitive soccer or ice hockey or any of these other sports. They're just interested in the characters and spectacle and just not enough people know about MotoGP. I mean, minute for minute is way better than Formula One, I believe, in terms of the racing. And that's with the bloody bikes we've got at the minute. And that should get much better next year, hopefully.

So I think it's a bit of an open goal, really. But what they cannot afford to do and I'm sorry, I'm conscious that Jake needs to sort of follow in here as well. But I'm very worried that I'm hope. No, I'm not worried. I'm hopeful that Liberty will do what Dorna have not done and that they will open it up as well to allow people like us and others to help to publicise the sport as well.

Because Dorna, as I've said many times on the show, have kind of taken the Bernie Ecclestone approach of wanting to protect the IP too much. And that's fine if you've got like billions of people watching it. Fair enough. But they haven't, you know, they just haven't got enough people watching the sport. And I know they have good attendance at Le Mans and various other races.

But I mean, literally, Kocha, I think, is the same Silverstone's like walking around a ghost town. So to be told, as I was, that no, you can't come along this year because, you know, you're just a podcast and you're a small one. Therefore, you're not welcome. Well, I just think that's bonkers because if the place was sold out, yeah, I'll accept that. But there's nobody there.

So anything that they can do to help get eyes on the sport is what they need. And Liberty have to take advantage of every single thing that's going for them at the minute. So that's my hope. It's not necessarily my expectation, but it is my hope. Jake, you have anything that you'd like to add to that?

Yeah, I mean, I think I'd like to put it in a historical context a little bit because and we all are aware of how popular AMA Superbike was sort of in the mid to late 90s and coming into the early 2000s and how well attended the events were. And it was just, you know, a lot of people were buying sport bikes. And I don't really know what's changed. I mean, obviously, you know, the big economic crisis of 2007, eight, nine had a huge effect on the motorcycle sales in this country. And apparently we still haven't come back to that level of sales even now, from what I've read.

But specifically, the sporting versions are just it's kind of amazing to me that they can still justify MotoGP and, you know, the World Superbike Series and series like that, because I just don't see sport bikes on the road when I do see them. It warms my heart. And but usually there are older bikes. I don't really see new super bikes on the road. So maybe it's now just purely a marketing exercise and nothing more.

I don't really know what this what these strategies are at the factories. But I do. I will. I will push back on the fact that it doesn't matter if you've ever ridden a motorcycle. I think it does.

I think people, even if it's a Formula One car, they see that it has four wheels and a seat and a steering wheel. And they can envision themselves getting in that thing and driving it. People that don't ride motorcycles are scared of them. And if they've never ridden one, they, you know, I hear this all the time. Oh, if I rode one of those, I'd kill myself.

Like, that's that's the trope that you hear. Oh, I could never get a bike. I'd just kill myself. So anyway, I think I think there will always be a barrier to fans for motorcycles because it is it is niche simply because at least in the US and the UK and Western Europe, everybody drives a car. Not everybody rides a motorcycle.

So that's my that's my negative take. Yeah, that's a fair point. Yeah, I think the other thing, too, is that the brand loyalty for car helps out as well, right? Like you may not have an F1 Mercedes, but you're like, oh, I'm getting a sport. I have a Mercedes.

That's a Mercedes. Oh, I'll root for them. Now, it doesn't really work for a lot of us for Ferrari. I don't know how you guys are rolling economically, but that's not something for me. But I think that can help out as well.

And I think that's when we get on to this. I mean, on order of questions, we've kind of been picking and choosing our questions to be going through. But the Netflix thing. So instead about making it about brands, make it about the people that race the motorcycles, because that's who a lot of people now like to follow. They like to follow the personality.

When MotorGP was at his boom, who was the personality that brought in people from all over the world, from different sports and different arenas, it was Rossi. He was their social media baby. And when he left, that was what we feel that come down. So we got to build up them through the avenues of the media to make these new Rossi's, these new people that they want to follow that person. They don't really care about the bike or who makes it.

They're like, I want to see this person do good because I want to be on the bandwagon. This is the next Rossi. This is the next Schumacher. This is the next Jordan. I want to see if they can be that right.

And I think that's what they do really well because drive to survive. I had a lot of people come on. Oh, man, Lando is this really cool kid or do Danny Rick is great. It's like, who is your race for? I guess Red Bull.

I'm like, we haven't raised Red Bull like three years. Where's Danny Rick now? I don't know. That's exactly they're following that person. And I think that's something that we can or voter GP can do greatly is to get people engaged because I think we have a bit of a robotic writer problem and the writers kind of come from the same place, look the same, talk the same.

And unless you start separating their personalities outside of motorcycle racing, because once the helmet comes on, nobody knows who they are if they're from the outside of the sport being so niche. Yeah, you're right. There's got you dovetailed into the question, which was the next question, which was, you know, drive to drive to survive is sort of like a one hit wonder. Maybe, you know, we talked about that ad nauseam rich that it happened during the pandemic and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But Moto GP tried to create their own series.

It was broadcast on Amazon. Amazon's got money. I mean, they got a ton of money, right? They're rolling in the Ferrari case. You're wondering, Skyler, but the they they were all speaking Spanish.

And I understand why, because that is what 80% of the grid is writers that are from Spain. And they had a production company from Spain that did it for Amazon. So it was logical to be in that. But I think one of the things that they would have to do if they were to try to rebrand or create that series again, is they've got to commit to the English. And then we have to commit to, as you correctly said, the people, the guys on the bikes, who is the next big thing, right?

So that is what you need, because I think the writers matter more than teams, no matter where you are, even former the one is that way. People recognize the person, not necessarily the car or the motorcycle that they're winning things on. What would you say about that, Jake? I totally agree. I think it's really all about the one personality.

I mean, I will say that the drive to survive. I mean, honestly, the way I watch Formula One now is I whenever the new season of drive to survive comes out, that's what I watch because I can't I just don't have the time to watch the racing. And the series is amazing. And I just think that production team and the way they approach it is they have a great formula and it works for every sport. I mean, they've got the Unchained series about Tour de France.

They've got the match point or whatever it is about tennis. That's just incredible. And I think for the US market that if they can do a good version of let's call it ride to survive, it will I mean, it'll be amazing. I really think that's that is the key to it. And I think the drive to survive did come at a good time.

But I also think I'm a good example. I started watching it whenever that was 2020. And then I've been hooked ever since because it's it's really good. And I hadn't watched really F1 much ever. And it kind of got me back into that.

I enjoyed a little bit as a kid, but really didn't spend much of my adult life following it. And it really got me back in. So, yeah. So I'll say one thing, Jake, I like the idea of a ride to survive, but can we change the title to ride to feel alive? Sure.

I think that's what most of us do with a motorcycle, right? Absolutely. You feel like you're alive because you're not in a cocoon. There the wind is in your face. You feel everything.

You feel the vibration off the motorcycle. All of that makes you feel alive. And I'll admit it, racing bikes made me feel amazing because I felt like each time that I was done, I cheated death. Yeah. And I'm not not that that's like a thrill seeking part of me, but there's something to it.

I don't know exactly what that is, but there's. I can't think of a better integration of human and machine than somebody racing a motorcycle. It is hard to see the line between the two. One does not work without the other. You can't.

You could you could remote control a car and it would work just fine. You cannot remote control a motorcycle. Yeah. Yeah. Next question up here.

This one's maybe a little off or whatever, but how many races are too many races? As Liberty has taken over Formula One, the number of races that have been created is almost exponential. I think there was maybe somewhere between 18 to 20 races that's now become which then became 22, which became 24. And I think now it's like 26. Skylar, collect me if I'm wrong on that number.

But it's up there. It's so if it's if there's 52 weeks in a year and there's 26 races, you are half the year you are racing a car. At some point, you got to say that there's a bit of it that's like, well, I'll just catch the next one because there's going to be another one next week. I don't think we want motorcycles to become like that because that's kind of what keeps it special, I think anyway. Rich, what's your thoughts there?

Well, I've said many times, I think more than 18 races is too many. I suppose and again, I don't know the answer to what I'm about to pose as a question. But from Dawn's point of view and going on forward with Liberty is having more races is just purely about making more money for them. I mean, as opposed to making the show better, because I kind of feel well, I mean, we feel it in terms of reviewing the races. There's a sort of an overload fatigue that kind of comes in with that many races.

It's really tiring to keep up with it. And it's almost too much. And and I, although I don't like the period when there's no racing going on. I think it's just way too short, the period where there's no racing at the moment. We don't have time to catch breath, really.

I mean, God only knows what it's like for the teams and the riders, more so the teams actually, and the traveling circus that goes along with it. So. And particularly with MotoGP, as we've just been talking about, we're trying to get people invested into the sport. Well, you need to give them a chance to actually understand it. And at the minute, I think it would be like a bit of an overload situation.

They can probably get away with it with Formula One, but I'm not sure that they can so much outside of the core audience, of which, of course, we are part of that and we'll watch as many races as they throw at us. But even I struggle with the number of races that there are. And let's be honest, some of the race venues that they go to are pretty dire, really. And we could do without them and we could definitely do without a couple of races in Spain. So and I just wanted to have a follow on thought for the other guys come in on the drive to survive MotoGP version.

I mean, I want to go back, actually, and I've been meaning to do it for one. Look at the MotoGP unlimited thing that Amazon puts out. I actually do have an Amazon subscription bizarrely because I don't know why I'm helping to fund Jeff Bezos's phallus rocket aspirations. But anyway, the free deliveries are helpful, I suppose. But I remember the series actually being not too bad.

I quite enjoyed it. It had that terrible start because of the thing that they did with the dubbing. Or was it? Yeah, they allowed the riders to speak in their native language. I'm not saying it's the wrong thing to do because it is their native language.

But the launch was just terrible. And then people just switched off from it. And I remember it actually being not too bad. But I just think it was not the right time for MotoGP to try and piggyback on to the drive to survive phenomenon. So Liberty have to sort of reboot that now in the way that we've already described.

And I think it will do much better, actually, provided they focus on the characters and the drama of the sport. I mean, the Mark Marquez thing, you know, his comeback, that was good. I know about it and it's a great story. Skylar, I know you got something to say. Just give me one second.

I'm going to take a second of your time on this one. I think if they redo a ride to stay alive or ride to feel alive, whatever you want to call it, right, if it was done the way faster was done. Now I think you've got something because that's telling a story, which is what I think we all want. It's telling the story of the season from behind the scenes with great narration, great action that you could peel off from there and you throw a few more cameras into the paddock. I think it'd be really good.

Skylar, your turn. You know, it's funny that I was shaking my eyes. I had these little notes of them. They belongs like like Richard there. I've been making notes, you said the timing of when it was going was I pulled up a trailer for MotoGP Unlimited because I wanted to see like how I can't even remember it now.

It's been so long. Right. And the first comment, wow, Rossi's retirement, Marquez's injury, Fabio's made in title, couldn't have picked a better time to start the series. That's the first comment. I'm like, well, we have some difference of opinion there.

Right. It's like, yeah, but you were fled the market with, you know, people who have fatigue. And that kind of goes to what we were also mentioning with the number of races. Right. F1, it was their time and they weren't going to pick up another racing series.

There's too much of that. But for the number of races, I'm right there with you. 18 to 20. But I think that does limit the growth. So, you know, we keep hearing about it and they're starting to do it in some of the series, rotating the tracks.

Right. Especially like we said, Spain does not need four races a year. Let's rotate through Spain because those tracks all are good in their own way. So I want to see another GP race there, but I don't need it every single year. And I think the same thing when it comes to the United States and F1, I don't need to see Miami and Las Vegas give me one or the other each year and kind of rotate it around.

It makes things interesting. It keeps people engaged in the series. Oh, we get new races this year compared to last year. Not the same old Monaco we can expect every single time. The same Bahrain or whatever the case, maybe Qatar for GP, whatever.

Right. Because we've seen fatigue hit in the in the Americas and the biggest motorsport, and that's NASCAR NASCAR races every week. They do like 32 or 34 weekends or something like that at its peak. And the reason why they had to get so gimmicky after a while because the races got too long, people weren't paying attention. They started doing all this playoff stuff because people were winning races with like eight races to go.

So why tune in? So if you have a really long series, there's greater opportunity for that championship. You racked up super early and then nothing else matters to a lot of viewers after that. Right. But a more condensed season from March to October with 18, maybe 20 races.

And maybe those two races, we get to have some type of something that makes them unique, whether it's, you know, it's the nighttime race or it's a Saturday race or something different. Can allow enough variables season to season to keep people wanting to come back instead of knowing it will already know how this is going to go. Marquez is going to have it wrapped up by the time they get to, I don't know, Thailand. And then I don't need to watch the rest or something. Right.

And so, I mean, there's your documentary series, Jim chasing Marquez. That's that. Oh, I like that. But, you know, I think it's you got to have people like the off season as much as us hard cores want. We'd love to see racing all the time.

It does get you like frothing for more. The more you have to wait, it's almost here. It's back. I've been waiting for four months to get to this day. And now when it's arriving, I want to be here rather than be like, didn't we just finish this in like November?

We can read a fire back up like I'm still doing my taxes. I'm not ready for this. You know, a lot of that hits. Yeah. Jake.

Yeah, I think 22 is insane, especially when you consider what a Saturday is for the riders now. I can't imagine doing what they're doing. But the Saturday thing is crazy with with Q1, Q2 and a sprint race. I mean, that's the day to go to see a MotoGP, in my opinion, go on a Saturday. It's probably the most exciting day by a long shot.

But yeah, it's it's way too many. And I agree, like it ends in November and then it's you know, they're already broadcasting, you know, the subpaying test. And it feels like it was just yesterday that the season ended. So, yeah, I think it's I think they're chasing a lot of TV money. That's my theory.

They just the more the more events, the more revenue that comes in from broadcast stuff, not necessarily from the actual events themselves. So, you know, and I'm sure you guys have been reading that a lot of there's been a lot of chatter amongst the teams just complaining about how they just can't keep staff on. It's just too grueling. The season is too long. And it's just I think they've found the limit and they need to back off.

So, yeah. A question for you guys. Do you think obviously a lot of these new venues are throwing a lot of money at both F1 and MotoGP, right, especially in the Middle East, where there's a lot of money coming from, because the sport really does need money, no matter how much you want to face it. Racing is the is a sport of kings. We needed a lot of it.

And so when all of the booze and cigarette money went away, this is the new source of money, but they also know that the fans don't go to the Middle East races necessarily. And they're more centralized around Europe and and maybe some more North American stuff. And so they have to do that where they have to try to appease both hands. Well, we want people to go to the track to see the races, but the people they're going to track will sell whoever we can on this new idea to bring MotoGP out to Dubai or whatever. And it's like they gave us, you know, an eight year, one billion dollar contract.

We don't care who goes to the racetrack. We're just going to get bikes out there because we can take that money. Whereas before that sponsorship was, oh, we've got Marlboro over here. They gave us 15 million dollars just to have a race this weekend. Right.

So I wonder if it's a bit of a tug of war with especially the dollars. I'll go here. Yeah, I think they're looking at it because of the that's where the money exists. It's the ironically, it's the oil company, oil rich nations, I should say. That are the ones that are pointing up to build racetracks and stuff.

Now they see it. I think they see it differently. Right. They're there. Look at what all of has been done in Saudi Arabia as far as they've built the track.

And now they want to build the jet a track and then they're going to move that one to another track that's going to be like built on columns or something. Oh, yeah. First, it was a kid. Yeah, something I can't remember that. Yeah.

Mario Kart track. Yeah. Yeah. So you basically are building real life Mario Kart tracks. So in that case, yeah, but I think it's comes down to like you got to chase that money, right?

Then they do things where they say, well, we want to bring it to the people. So what do they do? They put a track, they build a Jersey barrier track in the middle of a city or they race around a football stadium here in the U.S., the oblong one or something to that effect. Well, I can't do that with a motorcycle. I have to have sufficient runoff.

I can't just put a wall there for these guys to actually hit. So that sort of cuts down the number of tracks that you're going to be able to go to. But I would if I'm Liberty, there's one track I want back on because it's Turkey and that's because of top rack. There seems to be an influx there. So let's go find money there.

So if we're going to add one, let's add Turkey. But let's take away Barcelona because I think it's boring. OK, yeah, 2009 is the exception to the rule of that. But I'd rather see them try to go around Devil's Elbow and down the – it goes downhill to the kink and then up the hill. And I just remember that being one of the signature parts of that track.

They're chasing that money. But then this is my question about this. OK, if Liberty, if you're chasing the money from the oil magnets and whatnot, what are you doing to help the teams to get commercial viability to where somebody who's a big name besides an energy drink wants to be on the side of that motorcycle? I think if you are promoting the sport and that's – you bought it to make money. So to make money, you need motorcycles on the track.

So there's an argument about whether 24 is a big enough grid or whether you want to have more than that. OK, I'm OK at 24. The thing is that, as you said, there are no more cigarette companies on Ford-induced motorcycles. There's not the free will of money where, you know, Morse would just write you a check for $15 million for a season and away you went. Look at like, you know, LCR.

They're struggling. They put different people on for different tracks. It's like, think about how much work that's going to take them to do that. So how does – what do you give to the teams? What document?

What documentation? What do you want to do? What can you do? And give them this paperwork and say, hey, Mr. Microsoft or Mr.

Apple or whatever, come sponsor this whole series. You know, look at the really big ones. But, you know, again, you have all the energy drinks, so I guess this is a bad example. But why isn't there like Coca-Cola on the side of a Ducati? Or why isn't there some other companies that are – you know, again, they could be tech companies of some kind.

I don't know. But there's got to be some way that you could go between the two and help the teams by giving them something viable to sell. Jim, I think the answer to that actually is the other way around. Well, my sort of business brain tells me that we've got a good product. We've got a great product in actual fact.

We've got a lot of it. I mean, we can argue whether it should be 18 or 24 or 26. You know, that's beside the point. We've got what we've got. It's a great product.

We just don't have enough people seeing it. So Liberty's opportunity is to get more eyes on the sport and then the sponsorship flows in. That's exactly what's happened with Formula One. The money, you know, you follow the money, basically. You know, yes, there's this thing about where we go and undoubtedly there's an argument around sports washing, whatever you call it.

I mean, Liberty or Dawn or whoever, they'd hold a race in bloody North Korea if it paid enough money. So let's not be shy about saying that. They go where the money is. So they don't care who they're getting it from. Otherwise, we wouldn't be racing at probably a third of the places that we go to already.

So that's just the reality of the world as far as I'm concerned. So I don't think the problem is lack of sponsorship. It's lack of eyes to bring the sponsorship in. And that is actually that is a really good opportunity for Liberty and for the sport in general. And it's not a coincidence, for example, that people like Gunter Steiner are suddenly taking interest and buying into a team like Tech3, because I think they can see this opportunity opening up.

What that means for us as hardcore fans, you know, for years and years and years in terms of does this become a big RASMATAS exercise? That's the bit that I fear a little bit. And I've said that before many times on the show. But, you know, rough and the smooth, isn't it? Yeah, I I'm scared of that, too.

But I think I'm scared of it in a different direction. And the fact of is that you have Formula One, everybody is a constructor. They're building that car from the smallest team of Williams to the powerhouse that's Red Bull. They are designing and building their own chassis. The power unit is a different story because a lot of people are using a Mercedes that they're buying.

So it's being supplied here. We're sort of the other way around the independent. What were the independent teams, which there aren't any anymore. We'll come on to that in a few minutes. They're having to lease a motorcycle from the factory.

And then, you know, you're getting their bucket of parts and supplies. So that's an even tougher sell, because if you if you somehow in this tick off the factories, they're just going to walk away and be like, I don't need this anymore. I'll figure out a way to sell mopeds somewhere and not really going to care. So that's why I think that Liberty has to give the team something to spark their interest to want to stay, at least the factories. Right.

Like Honda is never going to really probably leave. Right. They're probably the one that's never, ever going to leave because just racing's in their DNA. And Ducati might be the same way. They'll probably wouldn't leave either.

But I can see Yamaha walking away at some point. I could see KTM failing just from the standpoint of all the financials or whatnot. Right. A pretty small little company making motorcycles. How are they how are they going to survive and put, you know, theoretically more bikes onto the grid unless there's the money for it.

So that's where I am with it. Don't forget the Chinese factories, though, Jim. I don't think it'll be long before we've got a Chinese factory competing. Yes. Yes.

In the sport. India, too. Yeah, true. So I thought about something in the sponsorship and made me think about and Jake, you'll probably as a hit home for you is if you want to watch personalities drive sponsorship, but America. Doesn't have too many exciting characters in it from a sponsor point.

But they have Josh Heron and Josh Heron decided one day, I'm just going to kind of lean into being a bit of a heel. Right. And then I'm going to make social media posts where I'm going to be wild on a bike. I'm going to do crazy shit on a Ducati. I'm going to do this.

I'm sliding it through the streets. Now, of course, he did all this in, you know, in a very spectacle spectacle way. He did it with the right protections and all of that. But he made this show. He started bringing people that had never been to race, Channing, Tainting all of a sudden was like, who's this Josh Heron?

He started showing up at racetracks. Then he had his personal sponsor, Lean and Fresh, come in. It was on his helmets. And like the next year or two, then that Lean and Fresh went to sponsor an entire team. Then was Yamaha.

That all started because Josh Heron decided, well, the sport's not doing good. I take a very good interest in wanting to keep my job. So I'm going to make a really big push to get myself out there. And a ton of people started coming to Moto America races just to see Josh Heron. And a very similar thing is happening in IndyCar, where if you go and ask anybody in that paddock, who's the biggest guy in IndyCar?

It's Pato Award, because he's made himself that next guy there. So that personality drives a lot. And if we can get some of these guys or like we mentioned, having someone like Toprak, you know, bringing in the Turkish crowd and getting people excited that way, it does a lot of it start with the people on the bike. And so if Liberty Media can do that and push them out there to help them do that themselves, then I think the sponsorship that we're looking for will come to the riders first and they get a taste of how it feels, especially if there's some victory behind that and we have that guy on our sponsorship. Well, why can't we have the team now, too?

And that conversation gets easier for teams to then get money from sponsorship because in F1, it was what 2019 when that Williams rolled out and it's pretty much an all white car. And now they're trying to figure out ways to make room on the vehicles to get enough of the sponsor names requirement size on there. Right. Even the back of the pack. But to say that, you know, if the manufacturers, they won't come back.

Let's go back to F1, too. Audi, oh, we want in. Oh, Toyota. Well, we left for a while, but we want to come back. We're going to work with Haas now.

Honda, we left, but we're going to come back as an engine supplier now because they saw the boom. So, yes, there is a big part where manufacturers do play. But I think you can't bow down to them all the time because the sport was there before them and will be there after them. But to have them there is great. So, like you said, Jim, you got to give them something to do.

But the popularity of this work will attract everybody sponsors, factories. That's the part we got to get going. And I think that starts with making sure the faces that represent the sport are widely known and widely followed. I'm going to dredge up an old fact that it was a fact at the time that we dredged it up. And it was actually, I think, Simon Pattern that pointed this out.

So a few years ago, the late and much missed from Lewis's point of view, I'm sure dog Rocco at a certain point had more Instagram followers than 90 percent of the Moto GP riders. That tells you fundamentally something is terribly, terribly wrong. Yeah, I doubt that metric has changed very much in the meantime, because the riders do not do anywhere near enough to promote themselves or the sport that they're in. And that will obviously have to change and will change under Liberty. And some of the riders are not going to like it very much, I expect.

But they learn a lot more money as a result of it, potentially. I think this is where Liberty can help them, too. There are personalities that they're Jackie Miller. You give him a mic at any time. We're going to listen.

Right. And people don't know who he is because he also has the personality where he doesn't give two F's about this and that. But at the same time, he can't be bothered to do that much social media. So they got to do it for him. They got to force them into it.

All right, we got to get you in front of this. We got to get small bits. Right. And F1, you saw that because they what F1 went out and they have social media teams now that go out and every weekend they're responsible for getting a five second blurb off the driver and doing a video and we're going to hand the phone to Toto this weekend and he's going to do some crazy like that stuff matters because it's these quick bits that it's always in your mind because it just comes across your phone really quick. It's probably worth pointing out, Scott, that say a team like Mercedes F1 probably have more people in their marketing division than the entirety of the Tech 3 team.

No, that's very easy to say. That would be the case. But it's got to start somewhere. And that's it's almost to do that. I can do it right here.

Right. We can take fan submitted stuff and ask them, oh, you want it. You want to be part of our team launch. You go out there. How many times, you know, they reach out.

How many people have built a career now that we're doing what we're doing right now. We're talking to each other about it. And they're like, hey, we're going to bring your podcast out and in front of the crowd and talk to these people. Because like you mentioned, it's been very much it's been extremely hard. I mean, I remember how many times Martin has to wheel and deal his way into a test in the style.

Right. Because he knows a guy that knows a guy. And even then he gets there like, we can't take five minutes to you because you're some peon that we don't really care about. And it's like those people are the ones like, no. OK, fine.

Like, oh, we're going to put it on the major. It's like how many people are following you after the ride show? I'm just curious how people stick around the broadcast and actually watch that. I guarantee it's less than the guys on YouTube that are bigger with the sport. So I think Liberty will help that mindset of like, we're going to push it more towards this and drive people in.

And I think you're going to see a big uptick of not so much the celebrity involvement, which is going to happen naturally if any spark gets big, but more so of the, you know, us people like us who are obviously doing it bigger and better. But they're going to drive those individuals and have that free media coverage because somebody else is doing the work, promoting for them at no cost to them, except for maybe a free pass. And hey, we're going to get a paddock pass. You can walk around and try to talk to all the writers that you want and then put it up on YouTube page and that drives people. So they spread that without having to hire a media team.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I to me, there's so much that you could do. Just quick Instagram reels. I mean, who wouldn't want to see throwing this out here? Like a day of training with Mark Marquez.

Just show him jumping a few jumps, right? Show them ripping around on a super motor, super moto bike, or just how about watching Mark Marquez do some dirt track? I don't care. Just give me 30 seconds of it. I'm going to be in like, oh, we're trying, you know, and then he's got a little snippet at the end and says, yeah, great day.

We were just goofing around, learning throttle control. That's it. You don't have anything else. That's 30 seconds across my feet. I'm like, well, that's kind of cool how that happened.

Where did it come from? And you're right, Skylar. You're completely right. But these are the things that Liberty has to do because you're, you're not going to get motorcycle riders to do that naturally because it just isn't their thing. You need a team of people who are going to be there, cognizant and get those moments that we want to see and capture them so that we can see them in 30 seconds.

And again, you're talking about the after show. I hate it. It's just the dumbest thing. OK, the three guys in the car. That's kind of funny.

But would it be wouldn't that be a lot better if that was done by, say, general podcasters to just ask questions and then promote that from their shows or their platforms? I think it's a brilliant idea. And it kind of goes to one of your other questions, right? Does it help or hurt people like us on a podcast or anything else? And I think what I was mentioning, it helps if they take the same mentality or they drive people in and they want you to talk about the sport and get it out to your masses, because that's their masses, no matter what, who has to come to the gate eventually, who wants to watch their show on TV?

And I think it took racing a little bit too long to get onto that. And thankfully, you know, at the time, F1 had stars that could support themselves. I mean, Lewis was making a big push for social media and Bernie was butting heads with him a lot on that because it was a control. Right. I want to control the narrative, the message of my sport.

But when that pulled down, teams went just nuts with it. I think we're going to see a bit of that here during this transition of getting out there and getting the support in front of people, because like Richard talked about very, very early in the show, it is way more exciting than F1 almost every single weekend. And once people realize that this 45 minute race was pretty much action packed the whole time, and I didn't have to stay for the first three laps and then watch the end and slept in the middle like you do with most F1 races, because honestly, F1, I watched the 30 minute those are great. Right. I watched a 30 minute race like two hours out of my Saturday or Sunday and 30 minutes.

I can do 30 minutes. I got stuff to do today. I'm sorry. But if 30 minutes is probably overdoing it, to be honest. But 30, 40, you know, 45 minute motorcycle race that was action and action packed the whole time.

Yes, there's going to be some stinkers. We all know that. But for the most part, 80 percent are going to be action, at least for over 50 percent of the race. Right. People will start to see that.

And then and then it's their guys out there. Did you see so and so rider? Oh, dude, he was out there bad at the heart of the place. Then, you know, all of that is there. And it still has the same world appeal.

It still has the same. It's a little bit less glitz and glamour. So maybe people don't get so put off by that part of it as well. But it's still, you know, these are the top guys in the world that do something that you can never envision yourself doing. Right.

So you can have that nice separation of like, these are very special people doing something that I can see on the road. But no way would I ever even try to do something as crazy as them. Jake, you've been quiet taking it in. Yeah, I I feel like the question started off with. You identifying some potential problems with the new, you know, I don't really understand it, but however F1 does their financial equalization between the teams.

I think you were talking about that initially, right, with this with this question. And that potentially is we're thinking that might happen in MotoGP. It's not confirmed, obviously. Right. Or is it confirmed?

I haven't read anything that confirmed that. I think it's been talked about that basically there is not going to be independent teams, there's just going to be teams. And so that then gives them. What word is the right word? Bargaining power.

OK, bargaining power. OK, that's good. I'll take that. To basically bring on people and sponsors, right? Like as the scholar said, look, hey, let's fill all the bike with different stickers from people.

Well, that gives the team value because they have that. And it's how do you do that? Then, you know, I think that. Well, I'm almost positive. And maybe I'm swerving away from what you're asking, Jake, but.

There's that big talk about why are we bringing Moto2 and Moto3 everywhere? Formula one doesn't. If they four and one's in the states, the four F2 cars are not there. Right. Well, that's no different than MotoGP.

They don't bring the little bikes here either. Right. Yeah. They do. Kota, you got them.

Yeah. The only time they didn't do that, it was because of Laguna Seca and it was too small. They didn't have the paddock space. Yeah, they didn't bring them to Laguna. I thought they didn't.

Oh, I can't remember. Oh, I can't remember. They bring to the Kota, they brought them to Indianapolis and was there as well. But yeah, so it's just it was a paddock space limitation is the only reason they didn't bring them to Laguna Seca. But Formula one does they do bring the smaller the support classes to quite a few of the races.

Right. And I know it's not all of them, but it's mostly. They rotate them as well. So some races have F3, some races have F2, some races have F4 Academy. They don't very few have all of them again.

That is due to space reasons as well. Yeah. And just overall logistics for those teams. They can't really ask a lot of those F3 teams to be like, hey, I know it was 10 million dollars. Let's fly you halfway around the world now, too.

It just makes more sense to have them specifically in certain areas. Yeah. And all that makes especially cars just obviously it's just way more expensive. But I don't I don't understand how you would. Fill MotoGP weekend that wasn't combined with some other series if you didn't have the support classes, like you just you can't fill all the time, you can't have the MotoGP guys out on track three days all day, it's just not possible.

So you've got to have some other support class of some type, you know, whether it's the local, you know, series like Moto America or I don't know. And also, if you don't if you don't have the support classes going to all the same tracks, like how are you? You've lost your feeders, right? You have to kind of you have to do that to some extent. You can't just not do it.

You have to have it at least to a large degree or then where your next, you know, seasons of riders going to come from. So I don't know. I don't like the idea of getting rid of this feeder series. I think that's a horrible idea. And I think it also.

Is more in tune with the less elite status of motorcycle racing and motorcycle fans in general. It's just not elitist the way Formula One is. So I think I don't know. I don't like the idea of sending it in that direction to just tons and tons of money and celebrities and status and less grit. And I don't know what makes motorcycle racing so amazing is it takes real courage to do that, that Formula One drivers do not have, in my opinion.

And I think you're tapping into something, Jake, which I think I was trying to get at when we started this off with the first question, and that is that I think a lot of people that go now to Formula One are really genuinely only interested in Formula One, possibly because of the whole personality thing. Right. It's like it's like the new world of celebrity, which is just you're famous for being famous, not for any particular talent. Yeah, you know, because my wife and my girls, when they begrudgingly come to racetracks with, you know, they get absolutely second time. Got to be there right from the beginning.

You know, the first time an engine fires, I want to be there. And I don't care if it's, you know, nine o'clock in the morning and I'm going to walk all the way around the track. That is not the way the majority of the Formula One audience behaves. And I worried that Liberty believed that Moto2 and Moto3 is kind of inconsequential. Right.

And for numerous reasons, it's not. And just final thought, because I won't talk too much. It occurred to me that a great kind of social media thing or even a televised serious thing to do would be to show, as you were saying, Jim, I think, you know, watching the Marquez brothers flat track in out. Oh, and with their protege, Mr. Max Maximiliano Chiles.

Yeah. What's the bloody point of then going to a race and Moto3 is not there. You know, and he's not there. Why generate that interest and not fulfill it? It makes that is a completely failing strategy to me.

If that's the way it goes and it will not satisfy the vast majority of people that go to bike races, I think most people that go to bike races want to watch everything. Yeah, and I'm not sure that's the case with Formula One, and this is why Liberty must not just try and play a formulaic rulebook that says it works there. So it will work here because it won't. I don't believe it will work. Yeah.

Me and Jim actually talked about this not too long ago about race weekends and what's happening, because we did talk about, you know, Moto2, Moto3 and them happening with what if they take them away? And much to everyone's point here, they're already not at every race weekend just because of the logistics of getting around. But if when we have the Guinness Seca, I remember the first couple of years, 2005, I think about seven or eight. You had a ton of stuff going on the track all the time. So you only had MotoGP, sure.

But then you had at the time, I think it was AMA, Superbikes coming out. You had stunt shows. You had mini bikes. You had the like Red Bull kids out there doing a race. So there's five or six races a day, which allows you to have a race, have a break, have a race, have a break, have a race.

And then it almost builds up to the show, especially, I mean, even the big series here, M.San, Indycar, they have all kind of other series they're going on, Porsche Cup, Lamborghini Cup, building up to the it's two o'clock. Here comes the big show. Right. And motorcycle racing is so short. They have to have these other things because I can tell you, I've been to Kota when it was F1 and that's it.

And there was nothing else except for I think we did have the women's championship, but they only ran like two practices because the other downside to joining up with F1 or MotoGP, they want control the entire weekend. Now, I don't know, Richard, if you've been to Silverstone during a MotoGP weekend and BSP was there as a support race, how much BSP is allowed to influence that weekend. But here in the United States, they go and tell the teams because I was working on a team when they were doing this. All your banners come down. We cannot you.

They cannot be shown from the grandstands. You have to have all this tucked away as if you don't even exist. Even though you're here to help support us, you cannot exist in our area because we want to control that. We get the gate money. You don't get that because we're we're putting audience in front of your show.

And it gets very much that way. And so what happens to Mono America was like, yeah, we're not going to team up anymore because we're just going to do our own show because we can make our own money and get the full thing. And so sorry. And we'll build our own stuff. So I think we got to get rid of that attitude, especially because we are in a niche sport.

We know that motorcycles, I think it's becoming more niche. And I think the thing is, while here in the United States, I would say maybe not so much less people are riding motorcycles. The demographic changed. People are riding more adventure bikes. They've gone back to more motocross because that's massive here.

I don't see sport by well, and just like Jake said, you see a sport bike on the road now. Whoa, holy crap. Sport bike is out here today. And it's usually like you said, it's a bit older because someone's been hanging on to that thing since 2007, because honestly, the new ones cost $17,000 and not going to buy an R6 for that. Just ain't going to happen if they still make that.

And that's the other thing. Just don't even know what bikes are coming out. And the classifications kind of got all funky, too. It's like it's a 600 class. OK, we got 748, 600, 636 is set.

It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, 600, though. What does that even mean? I don't know. Just sport bikes. So some consistency in with the product would be great.

But more importantly, like you said, the the supporting series are exactly why we call it that it's going to get them to come in. And it gives people like all of us or Jake or younger kids. I may not make it to MotoGP, but this other racing is here. And it's just as cool. I can go talk to those kids and realize I could do that part there.

And I can grow up to that. And then, wait, this is local. Let me go watch the local. And then when the circus of MotoGP comes back into town, I'll go check that out, because I would I would highly doubt that one MotoGP race Silverstone even comes close to the amount of money BSP pushes in for the entire year. Well, I mean, to answer your question, I was at Silverstone last year and they had sort of the British Superbike Fires and Stock series there.

It wasn't kind of named in any way that was making it obvious that it was part of the British Superbike sort of circus that goes around the country. You know, they stuck it on at half five, six o'clock in the evening. So most people have already left or they're leaving the track. And I know that the teams that I know in BSP, one in particular, Tag Honda, great team. This was this is not their terminology.

This is my inference. But it was very clear that as far as they were concerned, you know, they've been told lately, they didn't know where they had to go. They didn't know what the program was. They were being treated with complete and utter contempt. To be honest with you and to be honest with you, I don't know why they bothered even doing it.

So, again, it's just a massive opportunity missed. I don't know why they can't run an actual round of the BSP there, because I mean, Silverstone is vast. It's like, you know, the circuit of the Americas. You could easily run an actual proper round of BSP on the Moto GP weekend without any problem at all. But sticking it at the end of the day, I mean, we have to acknowledge that people are going to watch Moto GP, which to me means Moto 2 and Moto 3 as well.

Not to everybody, but people are there for the GP bit. And I totally get that. But it makes sense to run some other stuff there when you've got the size and facilities. I mean, at Silverstone, obviously, we've got two completely different pit lanes and garage complexes. So you can easily do it.

But most people wouldn't have even known that the stock thousand people out of the British Superbike Paddock were there last year. It was very sad, really. And I was quite angry about it as well, because it's just you think, well, the teams are paying a lot of money to travel down there and to put on the show and nobody's watching it. It was it was a bit sad, really. Also, it's value to people's tickets.

You can charge more if you have more. Should be. If it's you know, if we have a four dollar ticket, you're like, that's four dollars, a lot of money. But we're going to give you BSP and you're going to get Moto GP and Moto 2 and Moto 3, like, oh, man, four races, a hundred bucks a piece. I can live with myself on that decision.

Four bucks. You get to see GP. That's it. Mm hmm. I mean, we're so big.

Did that for me when I got a ticket to World Superbike? I got to watch two races on Sunday and a World Super Sport race. And they split them. They went Saturday and Sunday. You think those prices of those tickets went down very much in the United States?

Nope. Stay the same. So I got paid the same for this racing. Didn't go to Superbike. Come back to the United States.

Nope. That's the other problem, I think, that we have to look at, too, is. Liberty needs to tap into the next generation of writers, not just fans, the next generation of writers. So, yeah, there's a conveyor belt of Spanish kids that are going to be there. And there's a conveyor.

There's a fan. Well, it's not really a conveyor belt. But let's say there's a line of Italian writers that are going to be there. The question is, like, how are we going to get an American there? How do you get the Australians there?

How do you get the kids from that are in the Southeast Asia? How are they getting there? How is any how does anyone get there? And you the way that they have the way that it would make it easier is like, OK, if you had some common formula, like kind of like Red Bull rookies where everybody's on equal equipment, right? You can spot talent, right?

But if you put these people in front of the people who are talent spotters and you can give them an opportunity to be there, that's what has to happen. Liberty needs to look at that. They got to say, wait a second, Mark Marquez isn't going to ride forever, nor is Quattroraro nor is. Anybody Acosta, right? Nobody father time wins every race.

There is no way around that one. And if they're going to be short sighted about that and not present. But an alternative for us to be able to find and look for new talent and grow that talent from not only to Spain, but I'm sure there's kids that are probably in England that would be fast, like we've seen. What? Rich Casey O'Gorman, he's kind of bullet fast, really.

I mean, he just jumped in there and all that. But I mean, I remember and that's where the people coming, the sponsorship all ties together that Liberty has to understand. Because I remember going to Indianapolis. I remember talking or talking to Randy Momola. And he said that for his son, Dakota, to ride an F or Moto three ride, they were expected to come up with one hundred and twenty thousand euros.

You have to buy your way into that. I I get a lot of people bought their way into it. You can go through a form of the one list. You can go through a Moto GP list of guys. People that all bought their way into it.

But there's also those people who were found in town and have a great amount of talent. And you've got to somehow tap into all that, too. I know we're always trying to ingratiate ourselves to the powers that be. But, you know, I'm going to sort of do a Foxtrot Oscar on that moment because I'm going to say what I think about this. And it's not that there is no lack of talent in America, Great Britain, any other country in the world.

You just cannot break into the Spanish mafia that runs sport. That's basically the problem. And again, I'm hopeful because I think there's an opportunity here for Liberty to break that cycle. I mean, there's yeah, you can say there's a lack of money in the sport. I mean, I mean, that's probably true in certain areas, but there's certainly enough money to help to promote the kids that run in these talent cups, which you've got one running, I think, or going to be having one running in Moto America.

We've had a British talent cup for years. So there's no shortage. And there's very talented riders in those seasons or series. But the minute they try to go overseas, you know, to get in, you have to go through the Spanish system at the minute or the Italian one to a lesser extent. It's mostly in Spain.

You're crowded out. And if you haven't got the money, then you've got no way in. And that monopoly has to change. And I'm sorry, I just can't excuse the fact that there's a correlation between who runs a sport and that situation existing. You know, it's a Spanish run kind of mafiosi kind of approach for decades.

And lo and behold, you know, we've only got Spanish people really running in the series in all three categories. Plus Red Bull rookies, plus what used to be C.E.V., Junior GP, whatever they call it now. It's extraordinarily difficult to break in if you are outside of that kind of Iberian peninsula. That's the fact. I'm sorry, it's just that's just demonstrably true.

Well, Carmelo's Carmelo's staying on for a little while, right? Isn't that he's he's not going anywhere just yet. So it might take a few years. I mean, it would take a few years. I think they will shake it up.

I think they know they have to because you'll never run three races in the States if there are no American riders. That is not a proposition that holds any weight. One of the things that you mentioned there, right, in Spain, Spain does make motorcycle racing a national sport and they have a bunch of academy that pump this talent through. And there's only been one person that recognized that and did his own thing with that. It's Rossi.

Yep. When Rossi started his academy, how many Italian riders we went from Rossi and Biasi to half the grid, right? Because you had that when we had a here, when we had Red Bulls, we had Garrett Geroff, we had Jake Gagne, Kambo, J.D. Beach. These are names that are known outside the United States as well.

Who have been top riders in other series. Ben Spears was outside of that. He was just a freak of nature that came from the old AMA days when. But these were guys that were on that path. I mean, Bobie was Marquez's teammate when they were down in in Moto3.

So a lot of that has to do with the systems in place to build those riders up. But that can come from the top down from Liberty and establishing these series that are controlled by price first and foremost. That is the most important thing, because talent always gets outshined by a dollar when it comes to racing, unless you are an extreme talent that can produce that kind of money. But yet to break that cycle, we have to learn from it and just kind of put what works in other places as well, and not be the only place where we allow that to happen. Right.

Because it's like, well, of course, Spain is going to put out the most riders because Spain invests the most in the series as well when it comes to talent or a lot of sponsorship on the side of those motorcycles, the Repsol and others. Right. We got to get that mentality across to other folks. We can bring up more grassroots racers, as long as the areas are willing to support that as well, because here in the United States, we got to have people go out to mode America races for it to make sense and have these new series, which we can. But if you want to talk about mode America and talk about marketing, that's a whole other podcast we could do.

Right, Jake? I want in on that. I want in on that one. Yeah, there's some things to be said and had. Maybe they can learn from Liberty and pushing on social media, which, again, Josh Herron has taught them a lot about getting out in front of that.

But I do agree in the sense that it's very Eurocentric, especially coming to the States. And F1 is starting to break that mold. So what did you be can do it to they just have to get everybody else ready to go and accept this. And a lot of that has to do with, of course, with what you see, but also following personalities that you like there as well, because many people knew Rossi was from Italy. They didn't really care.

They just that guy had a following to this day. It probably still rivals anybody's in the in the GP bad, even though he hasn't been there in years. If you were to show up, people will go to a race because he says, I'm going to go there and watch them just to get a peek at him. That's insane amount of power that nobody else has in this sport. And just so we can get a few guys to do that, that that's going to help get things going, because right now, the United States, the only time we see more GP coverage on national news, it's when something tragic happens.

And I hate that. Right. It's always shown in the bad light. So we start getting some superstars like, oh, man, did you hear about this guy? Mark Marquez or Fabio?

They were spotted out in California today and people were like, were they? Where are they at? That's when the sport will have reached a level of where it markets itself almost. So let me ask this question. Does it help Liberty to sort of become the overarching overlord of all motorcycle racing and create a class structure or a set of rules that allow a relatively cheap motorcycle of some kind to be standardized sort of across the world, if you will, with the same set of rules, same tires, same da da da da da.

That allows a path. I mean, it's basically it's like Red Bull Red Bull rookies, but on steroids. Do you want them to be have that much power over everything? No. Or no.

But to team with a governing body that they work with, that because that way two people can come to the table and have a discussion rather than telling how everybody is going to be. Sure. If we have a standardized like here's the F.I.M. or whatever, that kind of helps. Like this is our structure.

If you want to follow it, that's how you can work your way up. Fine. If you don't want to follow it, cool. It's going to be harder for you, but you can do it. Maybe then.

But I don't think the people that own the series should be governing the series necessarily, because then you start getting into vertical power. That never works out. I'm not going to argue with you the most, because it probably doesn't work out. But like endurance car racing, it seems to be fairly working because you've got IMSA here with what they call Daytona, LMPH, hypercar or then versus like the hypercars that are in Europe. But there's an equivalency.

Like if you have your Acura team here running the 24 Daytona, that same car can go to Le Mans and runs a 24 there. There's not a there's no problem with that. I'm advocating like that. Like could like it seems as though Pirelli wants to dominate motorcycle racing with its tires. Right.

So why can't we get. Like at least one class from in America that runs on Pirelli as a sole tire so that they do, at least people have a feel for what that tire is. If they get a chance to jump on a Moto two bike or a Moto three bike or something like that, they're going to be a little bit familiar with the Pirelli tire, per se. So you're talking about World Superbike about 15 years ago when it was awesome and you know, you guys would show up and BS show up and go up there and thump guys like who? And that's how I got that.

Yeah. Yes, that's what I want. But I'm a curmudgeoning and it's not going to happen again either. Yeah, I mean, to your point, I mean, IMSA and WC are two different governing bodies that had to get together because their sports were dying and they had to get together on that. So that's my parallels.

My fear is I can see this parallel with where the Spanish mafia, as Rich just said, is driving the sport, because I think they sort of set themselves up. I think they've got this exit plan. Carmelo and all of his minions have an exit plan of how they're getting out. It's going to be however many years it's already been figured out. Right.

And I think in those years, they are going to absolutely possibly do everything they can to bleed as much money out as they possibly can so that they're going to look really good sitting on the beach. That's my fear. I was I've just had an idea and I don't know if it holds any water. Having been just lambasting the Spanish, I mean, I generally feel that Dorn have done a pretty good job to get the sport to where it's been. But I think the liberty change could have done with happening a few years ago.

But putting that to one side, I should also acknowledge actually that the Brits have dominated in World Superbike for a number of years. So things happen for a particular reason. And so, you know, potato potato. But it occurs to me that there's been this idea to well, not an idea. I mean, we've had the British Talent Cup where they're running on, you know, somewhat up to date, Moto3 machinery, Hondas in the case of Britain.

You've got the Moto America version. Obviously, we know there's the Asia Talent Cup. I think it should be the case that the whoever wins those series go into like a draft for the Moto3 teams. They automatically get up there and the teams fight over who they're going to take like a draft system. Can we tell like American?

Absolutely. Because I think that'd be wicked. I think that's a wicked idea, which is like, hey, here's here's the champion. Junior champion of from America, here's the junior champion from from Austria and wherever, right? Figure it all out from whatever.

And there's whichever suit. Whatever you're running, right? So, yeah. And you have it in somewhere and you televise it and you have them trying to say, you know, offer, counteroffer. It's like the like the NHL draft and stuff.

You know, people are calling like, oh, who are you going to take with your pick? And I think it'd be fabulous. Right. What what do you want? There's offseason content that I think all of us would tune into.

Because if you had the show dedicated to like, here's the champions. You gave everybody like a. Three or four minute review of what they accomplished in their career arc, right? To get to this point, there's a story, right? Hey, this kid came from small beginnings, blah, blah, blah.

This kid came from this blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, you know, you know, you could talk to teams like who, you know, that background like, oh, who are you thinking you're going to get? Well, if it's on the board, we'd like to take him. I mean, that's intrigue of itself. That would be amazing.

And the reason the reason I think we need to have this is there's no point running these sort of prototype bike in national series. If there's not an actual route for the winner of those series to go to GP and it has to be a fully funded by Liberty, let's say the winner. That series gets fully funded into a Moto three team, because if you win in those series, you've got talent. That's why the things are called bloody talent cups. So but there's no point if you can't if you can't generate the funding then to get yourself into Moto GP.

As far as I'm concerned, if Liberty were to do this, it's an investment in the sport. It's an investment in their future because they've got great top line talent. And it is meant to be a world championship. And so I will continually bleat on about the fact that 20% of the races are on the Iberian Peninsula and probably 70% of the riders are from that place as well. That to me does not stay, you know, in great, big, bold, bright lights.

World championship. But that suggests to me a bit of a closed shop. And again, that's not something that Liberty can really work with very well. So I think they'll do what they can to try and start an incremental change to that. But you've got to give the kids the opportunity to get up into the GP paddock.

Otherwise, there's no point going through these talent systems. Rich, to add on to that, you brought up an important thing where they have to fund it. And we have the Indy NXT series here. And if you win that, you get a guaranteed scholarship to go to an Indy ride. And the way that teams, because you're like, why are teams going to make room for these rookies?

Because they come with money from the series. So it's reinvesting in itself. So very much. Now, I'm not saying you have to do it for all of them. You have to do it for.

No, it's like, hey, our stepping stone is you win the championship. You get a full one year ride into Moto three. Right. And then teams will look at that and go, cool, if I'm going to sign somebody, this is a kid that's going to have a guaranteed sponsorship for at least a year so we can survive and then our other sponsors can pick up whatever checks that we need to as well. Or maybe somebody wants to do a bias program, whatever the case may be.

But I think that's a great way of mentioning like, hey, let's cut a little profit sharing off the TV revenue, put it into that series. So we'll take these kids who are just the top, put them in and then we can drive that story as well as a media opportunity to like. He's from your country, he run the talent. Let's watch him going into the next season and that they don't worry about getting the money. And this is a natural step that takes people from all over the world.

So, yeah, I think that's a great idea. In addition to the process of being able to one, localize it, standardize it and have the money available. That's the same for everyone across the board, no matter where you come from, because your talent got you there, your talent takes you this after that. Hey, man, you got to it's on your own because everybody you're in the big boy club. You got to ride well, you got to talk well, you got to get your own sponsors and your team can help you and train you for that.

But you don't have to come from the peninsula, like you mentioned, right? You don't have to come from these areas to gain that recognition or go through. Like, I mean, it's the same way in carting, right? If you want to be big, you got to go through Italy. And that's the way it is.

Like if you want to be. And it's it's four million dollars for a kid from the United States, because I know because we have the national one of the carts down the street for me. These kids are here and it's four million dollars for a seat. If you want to go out there and maybe do OK. And you're asking a 12 year old, by the way, to go out there and change their entire life, different languages, different foods.

You think they do very well? No, not all the time. It's too much of a change. Young writers, you want to get them in. You got to make it easy.

And if they live at home and do all this, then transfer when they have everything lined up. I think that's a recipe for success, in my opinion. We just solved it. Hey, why are we getting paid more for this? And careful what you ask for.

I'm going to say to ask us to do it. But we did all you guys on a podcast three times a week, six hours a week. OK, we're going to pay. Oh, what the hell would be? Oh, very do is it in.

What's the next question, Jim? Oh, gosh, we've been all over the place so far so much. It's crazy. So I think one of the ones that we kind of brushed on, but we never did really kind of go deep into it is the fact that most people consume Formula One nowadays in literally like an eight minute YouTube review of what happened during that past weekend. I know I'm into it, too, because essentially I think the racing is relatively boring.

It's not motorcycles. But that being said. That that push is coming from liberty to somehow figure out how to make racing more important. Skyler, you touched on it with NASCAR, where they came up with the race for the chase to the cup thing and they eliminated people out. And now they've got what they don't really run like 500 miles straight.

I don't think anymore NASCAR. They got like a 250 and there's a checkered flag and we rest. And for a little bit, we go back out. Because, you know, because the attention span of everybody is now consumed by their electronic device. They hold on their hand.

And it's well, there's other things. NASCAR is a little bit of we won't go on. Yeah, that's not there. But it's a generalization. So the question that I got about this is, do you think that they're going to try to shorten up, say, Moto GP races instead of being roughly 45 minutes?

They try to make these like a 20 minute race or, you know, kind of like make like a sprint race on Saturday, sprint race Sunday and maybe one, you know, because I think they want to I think they kind of want the Moto GP guys to ride more because that's the stars. Everybody's there, which, you know, I'm OK with that. But if you want more racing, why not create qualifying races for Moto 3 and Moto 2 to decide where they start on Sunday? I don't know. That's a whole different thing.

But anyway, who wants to go at crack at that first? I mean, it's just motocross at that point. Heat race one, heat race to last chance qualifier, 20 minute final. I mean, that's and it's great. Motocross is great for that because it's all in front of your face.

It's in an arena. You're watching it right. Or if it's outdoors, it's really quick. So I can see why people would go that route. I could understand why you would take a bite sized chunk and maybe you get two races in an hour instead.

You get a little bit of a break in between. But I think it. Strategy will leave at that point, which could mean more excited makes everyone pushes, but at the same time, you don't get any. Well, we've got that with a sprint race already, and it's great. Right.

But we can you through the magic of editing, we can shorten all the races down and deliver all the content, you know, in bite sized portions. But I I really hope I mean, a 45 minute race is already quite short by motorsport standards, right? It's already a sprint race. It's just, you know, good luck being in good enough shape to go actually do that. So I really hope they I think the sprint races are great.

I was skeptical before they came on, but I think it's been really good. I don't know how the riders feel necessarily. I think it's a lot, but I think it's extremely entertaining. And it's like another practice session for them to figure some things out. So, yeah, I hope they don't shorten the main event.

I think it's I think it's kind of perfect because it's also like a fuel management challenge and tire management and strategy and watching somebody, you know. Start poorly and then come back like those are great stories when they have a horrible qualifying and still manage to win. So I. Personally hope they don't mess with the formula. I think part of the reason why they want to mess with the formula is because of markets and riders like this, there's the dominant rider.

A lot of periods it gets out and then the last 10 laps, five laps of race were completely boring or five, six seconds ahead. Everyone's checked out. They want that first. If we could just make everything like the first year of Moto two, right? Then you would want 50, 80 minutes.

Which is insane. And maybe we might strike gold here during all this transition period because we're going to switch to new bikes again, new platform. Maybe those bikes the first couple of years will give us that kind of we don't know who's going to win. Everyone's trying to figure it out. There is no dominant Ducati or Honda or Yamaha of its era.

Right. There's any rider can win on any weekend. And I think that's what's so appealing about motocross. There is no real domination most for the most part. You get a few guys that become very special in certain eras.

But for the most part, you're not going to walk about this guy's going to win because he can get start get buried in 35th just as fast as he could getting a whole shot. So it's it would be interesting. I understand both sides of this court essentially, where I can see why, why they want maybe a shorter format because of guys that can get out there and stretch it out and people don't maybe stick for the whole thing. But on the other side of that, I think they weren't going to stick for the whole thing. They never were going to anyway.

You make it 20 minutes, they're going to stay for 15 because people who they're just checking it out. I think a lot of times you have to be OK with that. And people are going to check it out at different times. So they're going to start some people going to be there for the end. And that's OK.

But I think if you abolish it down to this is just a 30 minute spectacle, it is some point. It's kind of like when you buy something, there's a mental game you play with yourself. If it's too affordable, it must be cheap and low quality. And if it's expensive, it must be great quality. But those things are just correlations.

They're not necessarily a fact. So at some point, if you drive it too short, it becomes like, oh, this is just a quick little thing these guys do for 15 minutes on a Saturday. It's club racing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Well, the thing of it is that was the magic that was Rossi. Rossi understood there was a show because the quality of guys that were in while Rossi was there is not like we have today. Rossi never want to race by more than about one or two seconds. Rossi would play in the pack. How many times did you see him play with the Aji or Jeeber now or anybody?

And Rossi rode around in the pack, rode around in the pack. Oh, he'd lead the lap and I bet you like, oh, my God, this is such great racing. No, it was actually just theater because Rossi had everything under control because he knew he had everybody beat. Even when he was on the five cylinder Honda, which you got to argue was probably the best bike when they went to four strokes like again, Honda because of some crazy and wild. Then you, hey, we can do five cylinders.

And he he could have won races by 45, 50 seconds every time. But Rossi knew that was wrong. He knew that wasn't right. Like you how can you I got to the point where I could watch a Rossi race and he'd be there like, yeah, well, hang on. But oh, we're at five.

What were we at? Oh, we got five laps. Let's watch this. And Rossi would go straight to the front and win by a couple of seconds. And people would be like, oh, my God, that was a great race.

Like, no, it was a great race by Rossi. But he was do you realize he was toying with everybody? I mean, it's just one of those things is like Marquez is not that person. Marquez is so designed to one, just beat any record that Rossi has. OK, I can't.

And then he's also he cannot do anything but win. He has only wired to win. He's not going to do anything else but that. And if that means that I whip you by 35 or 40 seconds, fine. I'm good with that.

If I beat you by a half a wheel, that's fine. But next time I'm going to try to beat you by that 35 or 40 seconds, because that makes me that much better. It's the old stoner thing in qualifying. Right. Go down and throw down a lap at the beginning and go, guys, try to try to beat that.

It's like, nah, three laps. That was it. Three laps. Yep. It's it.

It's crazy. You mentioned the show that was a there was a I think late, great gym gym race of this podcast, interviewed Randy Momola one time. And Randy Momola talked about how him and they had an agreement, the paddock agreement that they would not blast off in the beginning. And these guys were dicking around during the race, really, sometimes sliding the tires because they could. And then but last night, OK, we'll race the last five laps or so.

So a lot of what you saw was them in an agreement that we're not going to pull too hard because then you get the 2021 F1 championship for Stappen and Lewis 50 seconds in front of the rest of the field kind of deal. Right. Or they're the only two that can go the hard. That'd be the same thing here. So Marcus doesn't have that rival in this together right now.

And we saw that when he dropped back to see how what was it? What race was it last year where he dropped back and was just kind of watching his tires and hung back for a while. Then eventually went past like his brother or whoever was out there, too. And he was talking to. Yeah.

And he gave up a like what six second lead to do that. So he was literally just playing with the guys. I think it was a tire pressure issue on that. He was going over. So he had to drop back.

Yeah. But he was playing. Yeah. I mean, he was not getting that tire pressure issue. No.

So, you know, yes, the one change I would like, I'm you know, I'm Mr. Traditionalist, so a bit like Jake, I've kind of struggled a little bit with the sprints, although I do actually generally quite like the sprints now. I kind of it's become part of the tradition, I suppose. The one change I would like Liberty to make is not to touch the main Grand Prix because it's a Grand Prix, but it should be the length that it is. But I would really like to see the sprint dictate what the starting grid is for the Grand Prix, because that throws in some jeopardy and some various variants in terms of who gets to start where I know that's controversial.

Some people will like the idea. Some people won't. But I just think that would perhaps help to entice a bit more interest elsewhere from the non-traditional fans as well, potentially. But I don't know. It's a bit of a controversial one.

Jake was Jake was shaking his head. He doesn't like the idea. Yeah, I don't I just I don't like messing with these basic tenets of racing. You know, like remember when BSB was at BSB that did the reverse qualifying 10 years ago for a season, and it was just like it was ridiculous. Or was it World Superbike?

It was ridiculous. Yeah, I just yeah, I don't. You know, then you're kind of going more like club racing does that a lot of the times because they don't have time to do real qualifying. So they just, you know, you basically get gridded based on your points, which is essentially your past performance, which is fine. But I just think qualifying is an amazing sort of element of the weekend.

And it's even better with Q1 and Q2 now. I think I think that's been for from a fan's perspective. I think it's really exciting and much more fun than the old format. It's probably more waste, more stressful than what it used to be, where they just had an hour to go out there and do whatever they wanted. But I yeah, I don't like the idea of removing some of the incentive to qualify really well for, you know, because now the sprint is sort of the qualifier for the race.

I don't know. I was skeptical of the sprint race format as well. So, you know, I'm usually wrong when you when you look back. So I don't really know. But I think it's a pretty good setup right now.

Qualifying is always those tough ones, right? Because right now, what do we have? We have guys going out there. Let me just wait on this track and doodle around and wait for somebody to come in and get behind them and follow. Right.

And then it's like, OK, so in a way, they are kind of messing up qualifying as it is because you used to have to go out there instead of time. There's been other times a super poll, which is probably the most boring way to do qualifying, but also the most was was was, you know, kind of the fair way. If you had to draw the straw out of the hat as to when you got to go out there and you didn't get optimal time, depending on when you drew the straw. But I don't know about racing for qualifying because. I guess you can have your, you know, qualifying affected in any way with other riders, but it seems like in a race, there's a higher chance that something can happen.

And I know that adds variables, but I do wonder if it's almost kind of like a false variable where it's like, OK, well, yeah, you're starting from the back, but it really wasn't you. But the same can be said if you have a mechanical. So I guess you said it's one of those things where maybe the sprint try it and we might like it after all. We're back to being five years old and getting broccoli service for the first time. You got to try it.

You never know. It may look funky, but you got to you got to eat it. You know, it's not so bad. It's not so bad. Or it's like, oh, this was disgusting.

I hated it. I knew it was going to let's get rid of it for next season. I don't know. I think the worst thing we could do, though, the worst thing, I think, is just to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again. And so, yeah, let's have sort of maybe even try it out some races.

Maybe, oh, this sprint weekend matters because this is the all star weekend where your sprint actually is your qualifying. So now just to just to test waters with that stuff, make those variable weekends, maybe something like that. I'm trying to think how will Superbike do it now. So they have a race on a Saturday, then they have the sprint on the Sunday morning. I think the results of the Sunday morning sprint dictate the starting grid for the Sunday afternoon main race.

I think that's how World Superbike runs now. I should know because I watch enough of the races, watch all of the races. But so I don't know. Yeah, I mean, like you, Jake, I'm not a fan of contrivances and stuff. And certainly the reverse grid world superbike thing was just that was just an affidavit to me.

But, you know, part of this is about how do we sort of generate interest in the sport and create a bit of, you know, variability in it? Because you know that if Marquez is on pole at the moment, the likelihood is he's going to just dictate the race from the front. And as he is perfectly entitled to do, and that's his skill. What are you going to do? I mean, you can't you can't dictate these guys personalities like you just.

I think I think what you have to do is just focus on where the battles are. On the track, there's always some battles. Send the cameras there. Ignore the front if it's boring. Like, well, that's very true.

You know, I mean, there's usually people want to see battles. They don't really care where they are on the track. So, yeah, that's I don't think you can. If you get a Rossi every 15 or 20 years, that really understands what it's all about and really wants to be a showman. That's great.

But you know, that's just so far beyond what you can control for, you know. I think you can make Rossi's though, in a way. And that's kind of leading to earlier words like we the reason why Rossi exists because he was the first to do it. Right. He was the first.

And the reason I think about this is because Lewis in the F1 side was the first to really grapple social media. And now it's everywhere and every driver, especially because the generation behind learned this is the way forward. Adoption by current generation will be lacking. But the kids behind who want to know, hey, just like, you know, I want to be faster than Rossi. What do I have to do?

Here's all the things he did. And then I'm going to do harder than that. That's why you have Marquez who can't stop winning because he's I do everything Rossi does and then more and then more was just getting past that. I'm not here for the show. I'm here for me thing.

So. I think they could do a lot for that. The media influence of like, you know, we can we can build up and make these people. Now, the talent, you may have to talk to your eyes and think, listen, let's try to keep it cool for ten. Right.

I don't know if that that that's going to fall on deaf ears or not, because people are there to win. And I don't know if that's something you can really relate this day and age, especially because this is how people eat. Right. And you start messing people's money and if you tell them to chill out and someone from the back and did pack, they shouldn't have been there anyway. Takes you out.

No. Last time you do that, you're like, no, never mind. I'm just going to run off the front. I'm not going to deal with these guys back here on some paid or I think not going to work. So there's I think a little bit of them can help with that.

And then but there's there's going to be anomalies and quality and talent always. And hopefully you can get a couple or at least get a bike combination where maybe they aren't the all encompassing. So maybe in the switch where, yes, Marquez is probably the best writer out there. But now let's say Pedro Casas on the best bike and you get that clash. So one's going to override, one's going to try to write.

And then you get a good battle versus right now you've got best and best. And there's nothing you can do about that, really. So hopefully we get that in the next generation or we get something worse where someone is so far ahead that everybody is behind and we're back to. Oh, geez. But I don't know.

I. To me, it's like one of the things I think that's missing. And I miss the post-race celebrations that Rossi had. I really miss those. I mean, I didn't like the idea that like him and little Lorenzo were having a battle over who had the better celebration.

But there's something that was iconic about what Rossi did with those snow white and the seven dwarfs, the Claudia Shiffer blow off. To all the stop at the side of the track, run across and go into the portal, because I had to go. And that's why I was so fast today. Like, there's not a caricature any. There aren't characters, not characters.

There's not characters in the sport anymore. Rossi Rossi under also understood he could get away with all of it because he was bigger than the sport itself. He was that you said he clomped onto the idea of social media. Well, there wasn't really social media at that time. But Rossi made headlines and people sold preview reviews all the time of him and whatever antique he had at the end of the race.

And they don't have that. So one of the things is like not that you mean they're obviously choreographed and illustrated and stuff, but even Marquez kind of died away from it because he had the one where he was at ascent. He was like swimming across the the line with the bike is wet. Like there it seems like they somehow decided they had to like just clamp down on personalities and not let the personality of the riders come through because it's corporate. But I don't know.

I think the bar was so high with Rossi, anybody else? It almost felt disingenuous when they tried to do it. I mean, that's true. Hell for that when you try to be creative as well. It was so hard to follow up.

I mean, tell me how many riders nicknames do you know? But what's Rossi's? It's the doctor. Yeah. So there was he started like the bright colors, the yellow, all of this.

This is all marketing stuff that Liberty hopefully is paying attention to to do these kind of things with. Right. He was just a great marketer to go with the great talents. I'm not trying to diminish that part, but it's it's tough to follow those kind of acts. We got to be almost like a generation away from it because all these right now we're almost there because we have a few leftovers.

Marquez was there. Fabio was there. These guys that raced with him. Right. So in the fans that are there or they're on their Rossi hangovers because they like that guy so much that's hard for them to follow anybody else.

And then you have to have that guy who's now exciting to keep going. And people probably hate this because using F1 is this. But in F1, they've gotten so lucky that they get the gaps of their generational talents. OK, well, here's Schumacher. Cool.

Well, he got a little spiced off by Alonzo. Cool. Oh, wait, Sebastian Vettel's here. He's the new. Oh, wait, here's Lewis Hamilton.

Oh, Max Verstappen. And they get enough time to be there and then have the next one come up. So Marquez is his time right now. Right. And we have had Casey's time and we had Rossi's time.

But Rossi's was such a hangover over those two that you never really got to be like, this is the next thing. And so maybe now Pedro can do that or somebody else that isn't there. Yet we'll come right after Marquez and be the new thing. And then that's you'll get that generational shift that maybe no one even who is part of that generation even remembers Rossi like the same way that I grew up and don't remember Kenny Roberts, right, because I was like when I came in and I was watching sporting, it was Nikki Hayden for me and watching the Hayden bros go up in AMA and watch it. That was my guys that I watched.

And when, of course, Nikki was gone soon. But I kind of sat around for a while. I was like, who's the next person? And I, to be honest, I never, you know, being in the sport too much like us, sometimes you don't really have a favorite so much anymore. You kind of just your respect for the sport and what they do.

I think at this point, people I like less than some others, but there's not really any that I like more than others necessarily. Right. I just like to see a good race. So I think maybe there was a there's a huge hangover that they're paying that price for right now as a sport, because Rossi was, like you said, bigger than the sport and the sports got to get bigger than that. And then they can succeed on their own marketing without having to rely on just that one magical person that comes through once a generation.

I think Acosta and the Zeki are kind of flirting with it a little bit because Acosta did have the time where he pulled the pizza box out of the backpack and gave it to the mechanics, which that was in Italy. And then you have you had. Bez with the wooden leg, which was nobody knew what it was, but it was interesting to try to figure out what it was like that. And seeing that drove me to try to sit there and Google and figure out what does that mean. Right.

So anyway, we got one last question that I want to put forth here. And this is that if the Liberty is successful, if Liberty then thinks that they should have a better team, if Liberty then thinks that they should have three races in the US. And I only say this because I know there are people that are on the East Coast that will no way shape or form go to Texas. And I know there's people that are in California that won't go to Texas. But if you were to do it, you'd probably put three.

You put something in the East Coast, you have something in the central part of the state country. You need to have something on the West Coast. I think it's obvious Kota is in the middle. Right. That's the done deal.

Flat Rock, I think, is a done deal with Justin Marks his track once they finally get it finished. The question is, if it's successful, if you get talent, if you got people following it, where do you put the third race in the US? Jake, you want to start? Where's Flat Rock? Tennessee near Knoxville.

So that's kind of east. Yeah. Yep. Man, what happened to Miller Motorsports Park out in Utah? That was an amazing place.

Well, the owner who had it and then passed those kids, they sold it. And he was a big dealership guy. So he was funding all of that as his personal playground. Then the car, then sell the people to go to the track to the car. And he had a whole system.

And now it's a it's a club track now. And to be frank, Utah is boring for people to visit as a tourism spec because of the rules and structures there, so to speak, for a lot of folk. Well, I'll tell you what, Laguna in 05 was incredible. Skylar, it sounds like you were there. I was there, too.

Oh, my God. That was I mean, that was the first time I had been exposed to the, you know, the new four stroke era. And I never forget the first moment of being at the track and having some big bang Kawasaki fly by my ear. That was incredible. I mean, it's kind of an aside, but.

Laguna, you can't beat that location. It's just so beautiful. And it's like a natural track that's on a natural part of the land. And it's close to some pretty cool tourist spots. So I don't know if it can ever happen again.

If they could ever modify the track to get it up to spec. And I know there's all kinds of local issues with it being, you know, a state park with noise regulations and everything. But, you know, my heart wants to say Laguna, whether it's possible or not. Skylar, if I wanted a third race, which I don't think I do necessarily. But if it was on the West Coast, I mean, really, Laguna is the only option.

Laguna does have work to do, though. Parking has always been a nightmare for big events. 05 and 06 were the only time I felt like it felt on par with European scale races. I mean, it was nuts. The amount of people they packed into there.

We ran out of water and we almost started a riot. They were flying it in on helicopters. It was awesome. I mean, it was it was bad. But the thing is, the energy, just the energy, the people, the campsites were overbooked, the amount of motorcycles that were parked in the fields and everywhere you could go, the parties.

It was just it was magical. But that's a hard thing to recapture because there was a reason it was magical. It was gone for 20 years before it ever came back. Right. And Yamaha put up a big bill for that and so did Mazda to get that track ready.

Ten years, ten years. They need to have a big investment in cash because the paddock needs work and all of that. And this track is pretty much, you know, it they redid it. So the safety is there a lot for the bikes. But realistically, it's just that it has the same problem that almost every single American track has.

It's glory days are behind it. It's aging. It needs a ton of infrastructure. And the only tracks that are being built in the United States are club tracks. And that's it.

And you're seeing a ton of it. There's people think there's no new tracks. There's a lot of new racetracks being built in the United States that me or anybody else in this podcast cannot afford to go to. They're building condos right next to that track. People think thermals don't want thermals is one of them.

There are so many. I looked up because I had to do a database built for for iRacing. I was building for the team all the tracks that we maybe could scan. And I didn't even know half these tracks existed and they're fantastic. But they're they're just for the millionaires to play with the Porsches.

Right. And the thing is, they don't have infrastructure for racing either. There's no grandstands. There's no paddock. Any of that is just garages in there.

You know, if they're a car and a half wide, if not maybe two. Right. So throwback to some of those racetracks out there and across the pond. Richard, for some very skinny, older tracks. But I think you guys have some of the same issues with a lot of your tracks, too.

But you have Silverstone, which is we have Kota. But anything beyond that, you'd probably like is a MotoGP race going to come here? Most likely not. Right. No, well, it's a constant clamber for MotoGP to go back to Donington Park, which I think the majority of fans in Britain would probably be up for.

I mean, I actually quite like Silverstone. It can be a bit soulless and they don't really run it quite as well as they should. I think. I mean, they try really hard, but there's a there's a missing ingredient there. I mean, in an ideal world, we'd be at Brands.

But again, there's just there's a bit like Laguna Brands. There's just too many environmental issues. Noise. There's a lot of residents nearby. So, yeah, I mean, coming back to the I know we're going to sign off in just a couple of seconds coming back to the American question.

I'm not sure that the third race is necessarily needed in the States. But I'd kind of like just so that Jim doesn't have to drive for three days in his RV, I'd go for mid Ohio. Oh, God. No, no, no. I would drive three days in the RV to get that.

That was a joke. No, I promise. That was a joke. And I'm kind of curious. I've only seen Motor America from there once.

And you say you go regularly given where you're based. So I don't know if the ridge could ever be brought up to snuff. I mean, that's a great looking track. It's. Kind of it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere.

And the the the road to get there is pretty narrow. And I think it would be very difficult to actually flow traffic in and out. But I don't know, it's it's not impossible. I mean, Flat Rock seems like it might be the promised land for the future. Doesn't it, Jim?

Yeah, because that's a mighty venue that they're building now. I don't know how far along it is now. You spoke to the guy from a couple of years ago. Yeah, I'm trying to get a hold of Eric again. Flat Rock is probably the future, mainly because it's right there.

Eastern Tennessee, it's off of I-40. Access is not going to be a big deal to get in and get out. They're building an amphitheater for like bands and give you all that other. Carnival party atmosphere that you're looking forward to at a race or whatever. I'm not looking forward to that.

No, I'm not either. But that I don't understand that. I don't understand that. I don't understand. That's not I don't think that's where it should be going.

It's all the distractions of like, dude, I totally don't. Car can attest to that when Iowa had the race and they would bring out the music shows, do the people at the race, it was hundreds of thousands. And when they took the show away, it was tens of thousands. And again, about getting people getting it in front of them, even though they may not be there for it, that's racing in general. That's that niche market getting out to a broader market by bringing in someone that has a broader market.

And that's what a lot of that does. So it may not be for us. We talk to my very weird corner of we're probably way too into this stuff. And that kind of skews our opinions. But that definitely it's so bad that I lost the race because they took away the venue.

They couldn't get enough people to support the race and it's gone now. So that does, I believe, have its part out there of driving people in, because even even if it's not during the race, just think about the health for the racetrack. It's multipurpose track now where you can have events and stuff like that, too. Oh, I get that. I get using it for other purposes, but to just to distract.

I don't know. Yeah, I guess as a as a real motorsports fanatic, I can't I can't abide. I mean, yeah, but take a value to it's like, hey, you pay for this race. And if you want to stick around, there's a concert. You don't stick in traffic.

You can go so sometimes you don't like the music, still live music, get a little food, sit out, wait for traffic that down, something else to do. Besides, watch warm up, practice and one round of qualifying and go home. That was your entire day. You know, so there's there are generally there is a concert or something going on at the at Coda. Always something.

There's always another something happening as well. It never really affects us because like we're on the far side of the track. We can't hear any of it. And we just go back and crash out the camper and, you know, like, hey, get ready to go get up and do it again in the next day. And this is where this is where Formula One, I think, have got it right.

So they if they run a concert, they've got like Metallica headlining. They've got a top top band. You know, I love noise. So if there's a MotoGP race and Lana Goddard playing or Ginger or whoever it is, Metallica on the on definitely down for that. All right, guys, it's been like almost two hours of all this.

I think we all have other stuff that we want to do and whatnot. So give you a chance to give your goodbyes and I will wrap this up and take us out. So Skyler. Sure. Well, first and foremost, thanks for having me back.

These are always fun to jump into. And it was great to meet Jake and Richard. You know, you get used to hearing somebody and I get to put a face to it and see how accurate you were on your description in your head. Right. That's always a fun one.

But it was a great talk, as always, getting these opinions out, seeing where everything is and who knows? Maybe we'll reconvene in a year and see what Liberty did. And will we right? Will we wrong? Or was this really good or was this really bad?

And I'm excited to see more racing. I'm excited to see what the next couple of years is going to bring. But as always, in the current climate, I really just hopeful that racing sticks around and stays healthy because we're getting back to that. A little worried about it kind of phase, but, you know, nothing is forever. So hopefully we can get back to having more of promising news coming out of the racing world very soon.

Oh, Jake, final thoughts? I just want to say it was great. Great to meet Rich and Skyler and talk to you again. And I'm really excited to be joining the crew. So, yeah.

That takes us to you, Sir Richard. Yeah. Well, again, to echo the thoughts, great to meet you, Jake. Glad to have you on board. Really looking forward to expanding the motorway stuff.

I'll reach out to Scott as well, just to see if he'll still be around doing the odd little piece of bit and piece as well. And nice to meet you, Skyler. Listen to you so much back in the years. And yeah, weird that this is the first time we've been on a call together. So and obviously, Jim, I'll see you again in probably a week or so.

So it'll be back to normal service. We'll be resumed fairly shortly because we've got the next test coming up, I think, in a week or so's time, haven't we? And then racing gets going before very much longer. So, yeah, lots to look forward to in 2027. And I'll be doing a not a Liberty show, but a similar sort of intro show for Carl and Danny who are coming on to help out with the sort of the World Supers and the BSP stuff.

So, yeah, 2027 is shaping up to be all sorts of exciting and all sorts of different ways. So I'm looking forward to it. All right. I enjoyed this one immensely, guys. I love having this big four way conversation talking about the sport that we actually love.

And with all that said to everyone out there, ride safe.