Moto GP boss open to date share with F1 – but not before 2027

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In the round-up: The CEO of Moto GP’s owner Dorna says the series has had talks with Formula 1 about sharing a race weekend.

In brief

Moto GP ‘could share weekend with F1’

Dorna CEO Carmen Ezpeleta says he discussed the possibility of a joint race weekend with F1 when its CEO Stefano Domenicali visited the season-opening round at Autodromo do Algarve in Portugal last month.

“It’s something that Stefano and I crossed our minds, although at the moment it cannot be done,” he told Soy Motor. “But we are studying the possibility.”

Moto GP’s existing circuit contracts would rule out a joint race weekend happening before 2027, Ezpeleta added. “We are going to study it, because it is not something simple,” he said. “There are security problems, because our measures in some cases do not coincide with theirs. There are also sponsor problems.”

Red Bull unlikely to face competition from rivals – Massa

Red Bull are at least half a second ahead on pace and are unlikely to be challenged by their rivals this year, says Felipe Massa.

“The only hope, for the show, is that they have some technical failure or that there is a battle between their team mates,” Massa told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “I have the impression that Sergio Perez can hit some win and have a good championship, but Verstappen’s level is impressive.”

He believes Verstappen could beat the championship and race win tallies of Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher. “He’s very young, he’s on his way to winning his third world title and with Red Bull he can win almost all the races on the calendar, which are many,” said Massa. “It will only depend on his desire to race for many more years. But he has every chance of overcoming the Lewis and Michael records.”

Ferrari needs “dream team” – Montezemolo

Former Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo says the team needs to recreate a ‘dream team’ line-up of the kind it had in the early noughties to get back to championship-winning ways.

“I’m sorry to see Ferrari like this and I don’t think that it is a short-term crisis because it is a matter of rebuilding,” he said in an appearance on Italian television channel La7. “It’s also about finding the best technicians on the market, see when I put together the team that today is called the dream team.”

Despite Ferrari’s failure to win a race in the second half of last season, Montezemolo thought they would begin the new championship more strongly. “I would have expected a more competitive car, an evolution of last year’s one which was very good especially in the first part of the season,” he said.

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Comment of the day

An interesting detail about Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix, which featured three red flags during the race and another one after it due to the track invasion:

There were more red flags yesterday than there were between the start of 2004 and end of 2009.

Both of those were caused by torrential rain making it undriveable, rather than a spot of gravel.
Señor Sjon

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Lak!

On this day in motorsport

Having failed to score in the first two races, Felipe Massa took a much-needed win today in 2008

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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17 comments on “Moto GP boss open to date share with F1 – but not before 2027”

  1. How viable would sharing a circuit on the same weekend even be?
    Yes, F1 does that with F2, F3, Porsche Cup, etc., but what about other series with presumably less flexible formats?

    Yes, unlikely this season, but next season is another matter, given they’ll start with the wind tunnel-CFD penalty having fully affected them by that point & as for beating the championship & win tallies, time will tell.

    Racer: No, still wrong.

    An interesting note in the COTD, & another statistical example illustrating the post-2019 excessiveness, although I can’t recall the other in-race red-flag stoppage from 2004-09.
    2009 Malaysian GP, yes, but other races with wet weather, such as the 2007 Japanese GP & 2009 Chinese GP, didn’t get red-flagged at any point after they started, iirc.

    1. 2007 European GP, at the beginning, because of heavy rain.

  2. Carmelo shows he’s got even more disastrous plans and ideas somehow

  3. Let’s not have these bike people with their blatant disregard for each other’s bodily integrity leech off of Formula 1’s success.

    1. Not much chance of it happening.
      “These bike people” (specifically the spectators) are not likely to want to pay the F1 prices for admission to see a race that they would ordinarily pay a fraction for.
      In a similar vein. how much extra would F1 fans be willing to pay to see a Moto race or two (or three).?
      There are also issues with curbs, run-off and tracks that would be willing to invest in a Long Lap. Red Bull Ring is an exception and if you really wanted to do a trial, likely the best place for it.
      Would F1 gain from the dual event, not much if anything. Moto GP would stand to gain the most just from exposure to a larger and non bike related audience.

  4. The ‘Racer’ opinion is interesting and there are some valid points. For one a rule about there being no changes to the car under red flag conditions would definitely make things more fair I think.

    It seems that there has been an over-reaction and then counter reaction to many things in F1 in the last few years, as explained with the three incidents. The decision was made following Monza I think that races should always try to finish under green-flag conditions but is this reaction now having an unintended consequence ie unnecessary red flags.

    F1 obviously needs clear rules but we also need people to apply the rules using common sense. The ability to apply a bit of sense just doesn’t seem to happen any more with every decision being black or white, entirely good or the worst thing that’s ever happened.

    We’re all guilty of this to some extent but we need people in charge who can show best qualities.

    1. F1 obviously needs clear rules but we also need people to apply the rules using common sense. The ability to apply a bit of sense just doesn’t seem to happen any more with every decision being black or white, entirely good or the worst thing that’s ever happened.

      I agree, no two incidents are ever going to be the same, and writing a rule book on that basis is going to be incredibly hard / impossible. Nobody gives a round of applause or a trophy to the FIA for doing a good job. *They could maybe give themselves an award at the end of season gala for ‘best motorsport authority’.

      But since Charlie passed, it seems common sense has become somewhat haphazard / random. I get things need to settle, but it’s been a while. A good FIA is one you never hear about or question. And for the vast majority of my time following F1, you rarely heard from them in the context of an ongoing race. As COTD points out, more red flags in a dry Melbourne than there were in half a decade.

      I’m going to guess that behind the safety car, it’d take about three minutes for the pack to circuit Albert Park. If someone shoves Albon’s car behind the barrier, gives me a big broom, I could easily sweep the track in that time. I feel like the FIA have become a random WWE character running down the aisle to throw some crazy shapes and blow sand in someones eyes then disappear into the crowd.

  5. I would absolutely love to see MotoGP and F1 sharing a weekend at the same track. But I would do 2 weekends like this to make it more fair to both the sponsors of each series and so that one weekend, F1 can shine a bit more, the other one MotoGP.

    It would always be a compromise on both ends, but I believe the commercial aspect would be huge. Not to mention what the fans would get for their money.

    I would also leave out the supporting series for both and only leave F1 and MotoGP, perhaps add a few show runs and stuff, so that the days are filled out properly.

    Perhaps on one weekend, MotoGP running the daylight schedule and F1 the night schedule and in the other one vice versa.

    But overall, I would really love to see it happen.

  6. Fun to see Montezemolo saying to create a new “dream team” when he was the one who disbanded it to regain his power.

    1. Clearly he doesn’t realize that he just trashed the whole current team at Ferrari. And that is the entire organization.
      You mobilize all of your technical resources and have them polishing up resumes, well you just did it.
      No wonder that Ferrari is in trouble.

      1. You .. want to .. mobilize all …

  7. The recent overuse of red flags is undoubtedly a direct consequence of Pierre Gasly’s win for Alpha Tauri at the 2020 Italian GP.

    Prior to that weekend Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull had won every single race since Kimi’s victory for Lotus at the 2013 Australian GP – a run of 146 consecutive races where nobody outside of the big three teams had won. We can go back another 10 races to the 2012 Hungarian GP for the last podium without any of those teams.

    The red flag at the 2020 Italian GP to repair the barriers following a hefty Leclerc shunt at Parabolica (where you absolutely need intact barriers) directly led to the Mercedes misjudgement and turned that particular race upside-down. In the end it gave us the totally unexpected podium of Gasly (Alpha Tauri), Sainz (McLaren) and Stroll (Racing Point), created headlines around the world, and was a great underdog story for the sport – completing the Gasly redemption arc from demotion to race winner.

    However, it seems to have led to the same knee-jerk reaction that we saw after the 2010 Canadian GP 10 years earlier. “This is what we want. This is entertainment. This is what the fans want more of.” Just like 10 years earlier, when we were given the designed-to-degrade Pirelli tyres in response to an unexpectedly classic race, we have been handed designed-to-shuffle-the-pack calls from Race Direction – Safety Cars and red flags where they were previously not required.

    It’s no coincidence that prior to the 2020 Italian GP, the last in-race red flag we saw was over 3 years earlier at the 2017 Azerbaijan GP. It’s also no coincidence that in the 2 and a half years since that day in 2020 we’ve seen 16 in-race red flags – the same number as we’d seen in the 17 and a half years prior to that (stretching all the way back to the Webber/Alonso shunt that ended the 2003 Brazilian GP).

    Some of the red flags since that day in 2020 have of course been 100% legitimate and required. Nobody can argue that Romain Grosjean’s horrific crash at the 2020 Bahrain GP, or Zhou Guanyu’s flip over the barriers at last year’s British GP were not red flag incidents.

    But the sheer number of in-race red flags we’ve seen since Gasly’s victory that weekend is surely indicative of a conscious decision by those in charge to rinse and repeat the formula. And that conscious decision is one that undoubtedly fits the same old modus operandi of knee-jerk changes to “spice up the show” that we’ve seen so many times over the past 20 years since Schumacher’s dour annihilation of the 2002 season.

    Liberty Media and/or Netflix certainly took the 2020 Italian GP as a model for future unpredictable races. But they are also just the latest stakeholders in a long line of powers-that-be to make the same type of choice for our sport in the name of improving the show.

    1. A fair comment. It does ring true.

  8. It’s actually Carmelo Ezpeleta. Carmen is a female name.

  9. I’d happily agree to the sharing idea on one simple condition – that it is not considered before 2097.

    My initial thought though was that this was a very late reported story from April 1st…

  10. For goodness sake don’t date share with bikes, it’s bad enough most of the good tracks are being neutered to pander to them, without them being at the same events!

  11. Lewisham Milton
    7th April 2023, 20:45

    Let’s have F1 and MotoGP sharing a track. Multi-class racing! The bikes could go in the opposite direction.

    If this is the answer, what was the question?!

Comments are closed.