Liberty Media has completed the acquisition of MotoGP, but the reality is that getting the same number of people to watch and engage with the category, as it happens with Formula 1, is a completely different thing and not easy to achieve and they will not achieve it unless… ‘there is a reason for it,’ believes Roland Sands.
The high-performance custom motorcycle designer and also a motorcycle racer in the United States spoke about the agreement and how it will probably not have a big impact on the American audience, unless there is a reason for it to happen, which does not currently exist, as he explained in words to CNN: ‘Americans won’t care if Europeans are racing motorcycles until there is a reason for it. We have to build characters and we want to feel like we know who is behind the helmet, and Liberty has done a fantastic job not only in doing that (with F1), but also in telling the teams’ story. Now we feel like we are up to date with everything,’ alluding to the very successful documentary, Drive to Survive.
He then tried to explain why this is not currently happening, as MotoGP needs to increase its popularity in the US but that is not easy to achieve: ‘If we are going to do it for America, the program has to be in English, number one. Because here no one wants to see subtitles. We need to develop the characters and we need to make it a party, we need to take it to a point where people watch it in a bar. I mean, now people watch soccer here. They get up early in the morning, go to the bars and drink beer’.
Sands a rappelé l’impact que Valentino Rossi a eu et comment « un seul pilote » a fait grandir la catégorie, rassemblant les gens pour le regarder, ressentant une certaine connexion avec le pilote et la catégorie : ‘Qu’est-ce que Rossi a apporté au sport ? Et pourquoi était-il si fantastique et pourquoi a-t-il aidé le MotoGP à grandir de la manière dont il a grandi ? C’est comme si les gens l’aimaient, il était sympathique, drôle, il célébrait, donnait aux gens des raisons visuelles de l’aimer’.
