At times during the season, MotoGP and Formula 1 hold Grand Prix races on the same weekends, splitting media attention between the two championships.
A recent example occurred with the F1 Singapore GP and the MotoGP Emilia Romagna GP, both held from September 20 to 22, with similar time schedules. MotoGP even moved its main race forward by an hour to avoid overlapping with the F1 race.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper AS, Dorna’s CEO, Carmelo Ezpeleta, addressed these calendar clashes. He explained that avoiding them is difficult given the size of the racing calendars: ‘It’s very hard for them not to coincide because they have 24 rounds and we have 22, competing between March and November. There has always been good collaboration, and there will be more [now that Liberty Media will acquire Dorna], but it’s very hard to avoid clashes’.
Ezpeleta also mentioned that both F1 and MotoGP are mindful of each other’s schedules when planning: ‘We look at their calendar before making ours, and now they look at ours before making theirs. It wasn’t always like this before’.