Liberty Media concluded the acquisition of MotoGP but the reality is that getting the same numbers of people watching and interacting with the category, just like it happens with Formula 1, is a whole other thing and not easy to accomplish and they won’t unless… ‘there’s a reason for it’, says Roland Sands.
The high-performance custom bike designer and also motorcycle racer in the United States spoke about the deal and how it won’t have, probably, a big impact right know for the american public unless there is a reason for it to happen, which doesn’t occur now, as he told CNN: ‘Americans aren’t going to care about Europeans going around in circles on motorcycles, until there’s a reason for it. You’ve really got to build up characters, and you want this feeling of knowing who’s behind the helmet, and Liberty have done a fantastic job of not just doing that (with F1), but also telling the backstory of the teams. Now you feel like you’re in the know’.
He then tried to explain why it doesn’t happen currently, as MotoGP needs to built it’s popularity up in the US: ‘If you’re going to do it for America the show’s gotta be in English, number one. Because nobody here wants to watch subtitles. You need character development, and you gotta make it a party, you gotta get it to a point where people are watching it in a bar. I mean now people will watch soccer here. They get up early in the morning and they go to bars, and they drink beer’.
Sands even went to recall the impact that Valentino Rossi had and how «a single rider» made the category grow, gathering up people to watch it, feeling a certain ‘bond’ with the rider and category: ‘What did Rossi bring to the sport? And why was he so fantastic and why did he help MotoGP grow the way it grew? It’s like, people cared about him, he was personable, he was funny, he celebrated, he gave people visual reasons to like him’.