I don’t have a problem with the MotoGP coverage on the BBC – I actively enjoy it, most of the time. But trying to nail down exactly what is on and where can be… challenging. I’ve lost count of the number of posts like this I’ve written, attempting to clearly lay out how to catch the coverage.

The Qatar GP and the Dutch TT at Assen tend to be the problems, falling inconveniently on Sunday evening and Saturday lunchtime respectively, rather than the regular Sunday lunchtime. Like it or not, for a mainstream – not to mention public service – broadcaster like the BBC, making room for them outside of the regular MotoGP slot is tricky.

2012 Qatar GP on the BBC

Onto the practicalities of this weekend, then. I’ve tried to spell it out as clearly as I can in the panel on the right.

In short, qualifying for all three classes on Saturday will be on the BBC Red Button and online, from 15:55 to 19:00. The BBC Red Button schedule is a bit vague, but it looks unlikely that it will be available on Freeview.

The MotoGP race on Sunday is straightforward, if not entirely satisfactory: 19:30 to 21:00 on the BBC Red Button, including Freeview, and the BBC Sport website. Then there will be a full repeat on BBC One and BBC One HD from 23:25. Yes, MotoGP will be in HD all year on the BBC.

Where it gets complicated is the support races. The BBC Red Button and BBC Sport website will carry coverage between 16:55 and 19:05. The Freeview stream, however, will finish at 18:30. With the Moto3 race at 17:00 and Moto2 at 18:20, only the very start of the Moto2 race will be on Freeview.

Why?

This is where I start to get agitated.

Masters Golf has a stream on the Red Button 18:15-23:00. An hour of this, 18:30-19:30, is on Freeview. And for that, the BBC chops off the majority – but not all – of the Moto2 race.

Surely there are two logical options here: leave Qatar after Moto3, and show the Masters Golf from the start of the stream; or show the Moto2 race in full.

Cutting away from the Moto2 race to join the golf coverage late seems nothing short of perverse. Who exactly is it meant to satisfy?

Ho hum. At least it’s all online.

Photo Credit
Alex Simonini / Absolutely Simple – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Testing is well under way now, bafflingly fascinating large swathes of the motorsport population. But it’s also my prompt to place my bets for the season ahead. On a couple of Aussies, as it turns out.

Formula 1

Of course Sebastian Vettel is the favourite. Who else? At 5/4 though, I’m not interested. Like most, I’m by no means convinced that he’s going to run away with it this year. No, like last year, I’m going to go for his team-mate Mark Webber. You know what they say: once bitten, twice… bitten. At 18/1, it’s safe to say that I’m going out on a limb. Again.

But there’s a modicum of logic here: it’s in qualifying that Vettel trounced Webber last year, thanks to his unerring knack of making the new, harder Pirelli tyres submit to his wily ways. This season, with softer tyres, the landscape should look a little more like 2010, when Webber was in the title fight until the final race. Maybe.

I’m taking it as given that the RB8 will be the pick of the field. No guarantee there, mind: separating the Red Bull team-mates are Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso (9/2), and the McLarens of Lewis Hamilton (6/1) and Jenson Button (10/1). Intriguingly, after those five it’s Nico Rosberg, followed jointly by Kimi Raikkonen and Michael Schumacher, and Felipe Massa.

MotoGP

I expected the MotoGP odds to be a little closer than Formula 1, but no. It’s curious: there’s a complete change in regulations, so there’s more chance of a shake-up in the order than usual. Yet still 2011 champion Casey Stoner is a clear favourite at virtually 1/1. But I’m still going to go for him, because he’s a class act and, well, I think he’ll take the title.

I assumed that blind faith in The Doctor would lead to inappropriately good odds on Valentino Rossi, but no, he’s fourth favourite at 7/1. The one rider I really wouldn’t put any money on is Stoner’s team-mate, Dani Pedrosa, who is third favourite at 11/2. He’s arguably rather fragile, and unarguably rather small, which is only going to be more of a disadvantage this year with the bigger bikes. That leaves Jorge Lorenzo as second favourite at about 3/1, who on recent form does seem likely to be Stoner’s biggest threat.

The BTCC made a bit of a thing recently of tickets for all this season’s meetings now being on sale.

That got me wondering about how much motorsport tickets vary in price. As is my wont at such times, research and a little visualisation followed. Not every venue has every event on sale yet – for example British F3 & GT meetings aren’t all available yet – so I’ve stuck to the main events: BTCC, British Superbikes, and international championships.

There’s a surprising conclusion, that I really wasn’t expecting: Silverstone is the UK’s bargain motorsport venue.

BTCC & BSB

There’s not a lot of variation in the big two domestic championships. All the MotorSport Vision venues – Brands Hatch, Cadwell Park, Oulton Park, Snetterton – are £25 a pop for race day general admission, as are Donington Park, Knockhill and Thruxton.

The only ones below that are Croft at £24, and Silverstone with an early bird price of £23.20. Do Silverstone’s haul of big international events create economies of scale that enable them to undercut the competition?

Rockingham is the only venue at over £25, though in fairness their £26 includes a grandstand seat as standard. Mainly because there’s virtually nowhere else to watch from.

International

Inevitably Formula Two is the cheapest international event, and again Silverstone comes out on top at £9 compared to £17 at Brands Hatch. You could argue that the Brands Hatch event is co-headlined by the International GT Open, and that Silverstone’s support line-up of Radicals and Minis is not comparable. But having been to F2 at Brands Hatch last year, I can assure you that it’s not worth the asking price, relative to other events.

Next up at £29 is DTM, which doesn’t really work on the Brands Hatch Indy circuit. Moving on, then.

The Superbike World Championship is another where Silverstone wins: £32 compared to £40 at Donington Park.

Silverstone is also the most expensive venue though – but then, hosting the two premier class championships, that’s not much of a surprise. There are still early bird discounts to be had on MotoGP, starting at £52, but no such luck with Formula 1, which is quite the leap up at £135 or more. Perhaps there’s something to the argument that F1 is subsidising everything else at Silverstone.

The festivities are over for another year, everyone’s back at work, it’s wet and windy, the news is unremittingly bleak – it’s easy to get down. So, in an effort to keep SAD at bay, here are some reasons to be blindly optimistic.

• It may be months until the new motorsport year gets into full flow, but until then there’s testing and, more importantly and immediately, the Dakar to keep us occupied. Unfortunately Australian broadcaster SBS seems to be finally using geolocation on its website, but with the likes of JMLatvalaFan around on YouTube, even that’s no reason to be down if you’ve not got Eurosport.
• It’s true that the first couple of Formula 1 races won’t be live on the BBC – but don’t dispair, non-Sky types! I for one look forward to having no temptation to get up ludicrously early. I like F1, but I also like a lie-in.
• I also like Ben Edwards, the BBC’s new F1 commentator. His excitable enthusiasm made ITV’s BTCC coverage what it is, and he’ll be a tough act to follow there. But I can’t wait to hear him getting excited about F1 on a regular basis.
• The new CRT entries in MotoGP may not bother the aliens for podium places, but they’ll add much needed bikes to the grid. And in the same way as the new F1 teams a couple of years ago, the battle to be the least bad of them will be something else to keep an eye on. They have to be welcomed.
• It’s not great in the WRC at the moment – just ask North One Sport or Kris Meeke. But it’s not all bad: we can look forward to Loeb versus Hirvonen at Citroen, Petter Solberg in a factory Ford, and Citroens for new faces Nasser Al-Attiyah and Thierry Neuville. We just need the commercial side sorting in the next fortnight, to avoid the Monte’s return to the WRC being less than the triumph it ought to be.
• With Evo regulations as standard this year, there’s every reason to hope that British Superbikes will be even more competitive than 2011. The entry list is filling up nicely, too.
• There’s never much known about the BTCC at this time of year, and 2012 is no different. But with most other grids broadly known quantities already, it’s nice to have a big reveal to look forward to – and that’s what the BTCC Media Day, a couple of weeks before the season starts, usually is.

Photo Credit
Houston Marsh – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Which nation is best at motorsport? Well, I thought I’d try to find out. To do so, I threw the final standings of an entirely arbitrary selection of world championships – Formula 1, WRC, WTCC, MotoGP and Superbike World Championship – at a spreadsheet, normalised the points to a total of 100 per championship, and totalled them up by nation. Then I made a pretty pie chart.

It’s impossible to make this fair, the most obvious issue being three car championships and only two bike. But given the extent to which Spain and Italy dominate on two-wheels, it doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Plus, this way, the UK comes out on top. Which is the most important thing.

The UK and Spain – second overall – are the only nations to score in every one of the five championships – albeit the UK not very well in WRC and MotoGP, and Spain in WRC and WTCC. They’re followed by Italy, overwhelmingly thanks to lots of riders doing quite well – without winning championships – in MotoGP and SBK. Though to be fair, no championships were brought back to the UK either.

France is fourth, thanks to a couple of championships – Yvan Muller in WTCC, Sebastien Loeb in WRC – and Loeb’s new favourite rival Sebastien Ogier. Almost all of fifth place Germany’s points came from F1, and two-thirds of those from Sebastian Vettel.

Outside the top five, we finally leave Europe, and find Australia, represented almost exclusively by Casey Stoner and Mark Webber. Finland, in seventh, inevitably gets all its points from the WRC, chiefly Mikko Hirvonen and Jari Matti-Latvala.

The USA in eighth is pretty much the MotoGP lads, since most American drivers tend to stay in America. Ninth is Norway, courtesy of Mads Ostberg and the Solbergs in WRC. Alain Menu’s WTCC third place near single-handedly takes tenth for Switzerland.

The whole table follows for your delectation:

(more…)

It’s been a bumper year for motorsport films – this being the fourth to receive decent national cinema distribution – and not without box office success.

A good time, then, for Mark Neale to follow up his 2003 release Faster. I’ve not seen that, but on the strength of Fastest, I shan’t go out of my way to seek it out.

It starts in storming fashion, with Rossi and Lorenzo’s epic battle at Catalunya 2009. It’s a brilliantly inclusive sequence, with suitably grandiose narration by Ewan McGregor, that serves as a magnificent advert for MotoGP. As a short film, it would work brilliantly.

But after that, it wasn’t long into the 110 minutes that I started to wonder what exactly the film was trying to do. The closest thing to a central theme – and a thought that Ewan McGregor bookends the film with – is that history means nothing, and the question is always: who is fastest now?

That’s somewhat undermined by the film spending, at a conservative estimate, half of its running time on the subject of Valentino Rossi. And of course, in the 2010 season – during which most of the film was shot – he was manifestly not the fastest. So history means nothing, unless you happen to be Valentino Rossi.

Not that would be anything wrong with a film about Rossi. But this isn’t that either. There’s some nice stuff from his home town, and the thoughts of his father are interesting, but it doesn’t go very deep. A biopic in the style of Senna this is not.

There are plenty of interviews with riders and team personnel, and though there are some amusing sound bites – particularly from Rossi and Simoncelli – they too are on the superficial side. The riders are perhaps too used to dealing with the media, and as a result never let their guard down. There’s not the open honesty of TT3D, so little insight into what really makes these people tick.

While I’m comparing it to the year’s other motorsport films, it’s not even a comprehensive season review which – for all its faults – I, Superbiker was.

There’s stuff to like, and plenty of bone crunching crashes which look particularly painful on the big screen – which is presumably what a lot of people want to see. But without any sort of narrative, skipping backwards and forwards in time incoherently, ultimately it’s little more than a hotchpotch of bits and pieces about MotoGP.

Which is, you know, sort of fine.

I’m really pleased for Bradley Smith. He was brave to pass up the opportunity to move up to MotoGP in 2012 with Tech3. Now he’s been rewarded with an even better deal: another year with Tech3 in Moto2, then moving up to MotoGP with the team for two years from 2013.

It is, without question, an outstanding deal. Not bad for a ginger lad from Oxfordshire.

It makes for a potentially awkward situation at Tech3 though. Cal Crutchlow has a two-year deal, so continues with the team for 2012. Colin Edwards is moving on, so the team has a bike to fill for 2012.

There’s no secret about who is in the running: Alvaro Bautista, should Suzuki pull out of the sport; and Andrea Dovizioso, who is out of favour at Honda, but may stick with the manufacturer on a satellite machine. Failing that, there’s Eugene Laverty, who is out of a ride following Yamaha’s withdrawal from World Superbikes.

Whoever gets the ride, it’s hard to imagine them wanting less than a two-year contract. So unless the new rider agrees to a one-year deal, Tech3 would have it’s line-up for 2013 sorted already.

Which would be fine, except that it doesn’t include one of their riders for 2012: Cal Crutchlow, who may face knowing that his services won’t be required for 2013, before the 2011 season is even over.

In short: if Tech3 sign their new rider for two years, Crutchlow will effectively be handed a year’s notice. Not ideal.

Hopefully that will be avoided; otherwise it’s going to require some careful management.

Photo Credit
Ben Henderson/ImageNationPhotography – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Like last year, when he emerged as an unstoppable force in 125cc, Marc Marquez has been one of the most interesting riders to watch this season.

It initially looked like he was struggling to adjust to Moto2, with a couple of retirements and a 21st place. But since winning the fourth round of the championship – which, coincidentally, is the same point in the season that he won his first 125cc race last year – he’s been reeling in championship leader Stefan Bradl. Marquez is now only a smidgen more than a race win behind Bradl, with six races still to go.

The title isn’t out of reach of Marquez, then. He would become only the second rider, since grand prix motorcycle racing settled down to three classes in 1990, to win championships in different classes in consecutive years.

The rider who’s already done it? Dani Pedrosa: 2003 125cc World Champion, 2004 250cc World Champion. Incidentally, it took Valentino Rossi two seasons to win each class: 125cc in 1997, 250cc in 1999, 500cc in 2001.

Maintaining momentum

But of course Pedrosa hasn’t – yet (if you want to be optimistic) – managed to convert his lower class success into a premier class title.

He’s certainly not alone in that: as previously discussed, Loris Capirossi won three world championships in 125cc and 250cc, but things never quite went his way in the premier class. His retirement, announced today, is almost certainly for the best. But let’s not dwell on his recent struggles, and instead remember his not-insignificant achievements.

Suffice it to say, though, that continued championship success in MotoGP is not guaranteed for those, like Marquez, currently excelling in the lower classes.

Success from nowhere

Success isn’t always seen coming, either. Who, for example, expected Stefan Bradl to be leading the Moto2 championship? His previous best result was 4th in the 2008 125cc season, and he only won his first grand prix last year.

Or consider Casey Stoner. He was relatively anonymous before moving up to MotoGP: 29th, 12th, 8th, 5th and 2nd in the lower classes. And now look at him.

The lesson

If you’re not winning now, past success has a nasty habit of being forgotten. Unless you’re Valentino Rossi, obviously.

Photo Credits
Marc Marquez: Ben Henderson/ImageNationPhotography – Flickr – Some rights reserved
Loris Capirossi: Jared Earle/MotoRaceReports – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Ah, the wildcard entry. There’s little better than seeing a rider or driver on an unfamiliar grid, beating the regulars. Unless you’re one of the regulars, of course.

Formula 1

Formula 1 doesn’t do wildcards. It’s a shame, but I can’t see how it could work.

Ferrari – famously keen on the idea of running a three-car team – would probably enter a wildcard at every race. Probably the same driver, if they could get away with it.

Instead, one driver getting a chance in F1 means another losing out. Karun Chandhok is the lucky one this weekend in Germany, taking the place of Jarno Trulli at Team Lotus. No bad thing.

MotoGP

Maybe it’s because there’s not as much spare cash sloshing around the sport, but there are no such restrictions on wildcards in MotoGP. And they can provide some real highlights.

Troy Bayliss, for example, winning the final race of the 2006 season at Valencia, on a wildcard entry for Ducati, having already won the World Superbike title for them. That was in place of the injured Sete Gibernau though, so perhaps not the purest example of a wildcard.

There’s a proper wildcard entry for AMA rider Ben Bostrom this weekend at Laguna Seca. He’ll double the number of riders at LCR Honda, persumably as a bit of a kick up the arse for Toni Elias. It’ll be fascinating to see how he gets on.

Hopper

The man LCR Honda really wanted was apparently John Hopkins – who suddenly finds himself in demand this season, after a couple of troubled years.

His performance in British Superbikes has been one of the highlights of the year so far. To so quickly return to winning ways, on the unfamiliar and – shall we say – idiosyncratic, circuits of the British Isles is hugely impressive. Hands up who wouldn’t love to see him win the championship? If your hand’s up, shame on you.

He’s already been rewarded by Suzuki with one MotoGP race – standing in for an injured Alvaro Bautista at Jerez – and he’s got a wildcard entry on a second Suzuki at Brno next month. Not only that, but he – along with his BSB team-mate – has a wildcard entry for the World Superbike round at Silverstone.

You can’t blame him for passing on LCR Honda, and not risking his clearly very good relationship with Suzuki. Already I can’t wait to see what he’ll be doing next season.

Superbikes

He’s by no means the only superbike rider to get about.

Tom Sykes had a wildcard entry for the Brands Hatch GP round of British Superbikes last year, with the Kawasaki World Superbike team, and won two of the three races. He’s doing the same again this year.

And before he made his MotoGP debut proper in 2010, Ben Spies had a clutch of wildcard entries: three in 2008 for Suzuki, when he was riding for them in AMA; and one in 2009 for Yamaha, when he won the World Superbike title with them. He scored points in every one of them.

Four wheels

Unless I’m being an idiot – quite possible – wildcards on four wheels don’t tend to be quite so high profile.

There’s a bit of it in touring cars – Colin Turkington at the Donington Park round of the WTCC last weekend, for example. But that didn’t go terribly well.

Rallying too. Volkswagen, for example, preparing for the debut of the Polo R WRC in 2013, by running Skoda Fabia S2000s for various young drivers this season.

But most enticing is The $5,000,000 Challenge in IndyCar – which will see five non-regulars race at the finale in Las Vegas. The lure is a $5 million payout if they win the race. How great an idea is that? Very great.

If only Formula 1 had an appetite for that sort of thing…

I’m troubled by the potential boycott of the Japanese Grand Prix at Motegi by MotoGP riders. They are not experts in nuclear radiation. That much, I think, is clear. Clear to everyone except the riders, it seems.

Dorna has commissioned an independent report into the potential dangers of going to Motegi. For riders – chiefly Jorge Lorenzo and Casey Stoner – to come out and declare that they will not go to Japan, irrespective of the conclusions of that report, is hugely disappointing.

I like to think of myself as a rationalist. It alarms me whenever ignorance, fear and hysteria threaten to triumph over science, logic and reason. But when those ignoring reason are high profile role models, it’s nothing short of irresponsible.

Ideally, the riders will reconsider their position on the matter. Otherwise it may come down to contracts.

Either way, I hope that the decision on whether or not to race is based on the report due in a matter of days. Not the fear and ignorance of a bunch of bike racers – which would be a disservice to Japan, the sport, science and the public.