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You may have seen the news that the owners of Formula One are buying a majority stake of Dorna, the rights owner for MotoGP. You probably also saw a caveat in those stories noting that the deal could be halted by European regulators who don't want one entity controlling both F1 and MotoGP. I don't think that's the real problem.
First, here's the basics of the news. U.S.-based Liberty Media owns interests in sports and entertainment entities ranging from Formula One to SiriusXM to concert and events promotor Live Nation. It has reached a deal to buy a majority share of Dorna, the company based in Spain that owns the commercial rights to MotoGP, the Superbike World Championship, and the MotoE series. Liberty would buy 86% of Dorna in a deal expected to close by the end of the year that would put Dorna's value at about €4.2 billion (about $4.5 billion U.S.). Liberty Media President and CEO Greg Maffei said Dorna will remain independently managed and based in Madrid with CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta and the rest of the management team staying in place.
One possible threat to this deal is the challenge of obtaining regulatory approval. The European Union has previously ruled that having control of both Formula One and MotoGP under the same ownership is a violation of monopoly regulations. For what it's worth, Liberty executives say they believe the situation is quite different from 20 years ago, when that ruling happened, and they have arguments prepared to address any regulatory concerns. In any case, that's not the issue I'm concerned about. I have a slightly different view.
My bias is as a motorcycle guy, not a car guy, who hasn't paid close attention to Formula One (dating myself here) since the Prost-Senna era, which was when my young mind figured out that motorcycle racing was just a lot more fun to watch. So I don't spend any time worrying about what would happen if one entity controls both Formula One and MotoGP, but I do fantasize about what could happen if the same entity didn't control both MotoGP and the Superbike World Championship.
They say competition improves the breed, and that's true over the long run, even if it may not be true in the short term. I believe one of the reasons we have the MotoGP-Moto2-Moto3 structure we have today was the surging popularity of WorldSBK in the 1990s. Sure, there will always be die-hards who miss inhaling combusted oil and who miss the "when men were men" days of twitchy two-strokes high-siding 500 cc stars into the trauma unit, but it's hard to say MotoGP hasn't benefited from moving to four-stroke engines from the increasingly irrelevant two-strokes. Perhaps it was inevitable, but the fact that WorldSBK was gaining on the GP series in popularity ensured the change would happen, and perhaps sooner than otherwise.
With Dorna controlling both MotoGP and WorldSBK, the focus on development and expansion has clearly been on MotoGP. WorldSBK has become almost another Europe-only series, shoved to the background. So I daydream about what could be if MotoGP and WorldSBK were in different hands, truly competing with each other.
World Superbike produces some great racing. (See the highlights of the most recent Superpole race at Catalunya above, as one example, or for a shorter version watch the video of the final lap.) The motorcycles are more relatable (if only superficially) to ones we can actually ride. But I feel WorldSBK has been held back by Dorna. I don't see that changing under Liberty, which will naturally be focused first on Formula One, then on MotoGP, and may occasionally think about that other motorcycle racing series... what's it called again? The Liberty news release about the deal didn't even mention WorldSBK and the 24-slide PowerPoint presentation for the conference call mentioned WorldSBK just once, at the bottom of one slide under "Other."
The European Union (or possibly regulators in Australia or elsewhere) may focus on a monopoly over Formula One and MotoGP racing and scuttle the Liberty-Dorna deal. But while many MotoGP fans do also follow Formula One, I think a Venn diagram would show a lot more overlap between MotoGP and WorldSBK fans than between MotoGP and Formula One fans. The monopoly over the top two roadracing world championships is the one I'd like to break up.
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