Márquez on MotoGP copying F1: 'They ask more and more of us and some day it will explode'

MotoGP has a long habit of copying Formula 1 in Dorna’s efforts to jazz up the championship to attract more fans. Nothing wrong with that. But MotoGP riders aren’t circus performers, so one day there will come the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Sprint races are a case in point. They more than double the weekend’s maximum risk and danger points from two (the end of qualifying and the start of the race) to five, for riders that go through Q1 (pre-qualifying, Q1, Q2 and the start of the sprint and the GP), and to four, for riders that go straight through Q2.

Like LCR Honda rider Johann Zarco says, “Every qualifying lap you lose a life.”

No wonder that 2023 – the inaugural sprint season – was the first year in world championship history that not one grand prix started with a full grid, due to increases in crashes and injuries.

At the same time riders are forced to do more and more promo work, with track time reduced accordingly. On Sunday at Misano the latest copy-and-paste feature from F1 was introduced. Before the start of each GP, when riders are trying to get themselves in the zone, visualising the start and first few laps, they must go to the front of the grid for the national anthem.

When I asked Marc Márquez about this after Friday practice, he answered, “Always they ask more and more and more [of us] and some day it will explode.”

Misano was significant in this process because it was the first race since Liberty Media completed its acquisition of Dorna that company management turned up to check out their new property.

There is little doubt Liberty will further jack up the razzmatazz in MotoGP, but they need to understand that this isn’t Formula 1. If they need convincing of this, all they need to know is that two Dorna/Liberty championship riders have died in the last few months, one of them a child.

Thus Liberty is playing with lives much more so than it does in F1. An F1 driver can crash into a guardrail at 120mph, his car catch fire and then walk away with minor burns. MotoGP riders are not afforded this luxury. Most of them are permanently hurt, carrying new and old injuries, because they crash all the time, because MotoGP’s performance-equalising technical regulations (also F1-inspired) force them to take more risks. That’s why today’s MotoGP riders crash almost twice as often as MotoGP riders of the late 1990s.

MotoGP riders are so concerned by this state of affairs that they often talk about hiring a riders’ representative to look after their interests, mainly from a safety point of view.

But they don’t need a riders’ rep, they need a lawyer. A riders’ rep would most likely be a former rider, who would stand little chance in a fight with MotoGP management and if he/she got into a big fight with Dorna, he/she would most likely never work in racing again, because Dorna basically own international motorcycle racing.