The race at Circuit of the Americas, the Formula 1 track in Austin, Texas, is barely underway when Jorge Martín attacks a corner too hard and crashes into Alex Marquez on the first lap, taking both of them out of the race.
“In this sport, if you brake half a meter late, you pay,” said Marquez—who also crashed out of the previous day’s sprint race, but not before vomiting into his helmet—after the race.
Moments later, Aleix Espargaró crashes out, followed by Raul Fernandez a few laps later. Later, with a dozen of the race’s 20 laps remaining, former world champion Joan Mir goes down while attempting a risky overtake. After Mir, Taka Nakagami, Brad Binder, Jack Miller, and Stefan Bradl—all down, all out.
If these names—and this bedlam—aren’t familiar to you, there’s a reason: While this race is indeed on the track at COTA in Austin, this is MotoGP—Formula 1, but make it motorcycles, basically. While F1’s had all the attention lately, it’s buck-wild MotoGP that features faster speeds, insane overtakes, extreme unpredictability—and, yes, breathtaking, heart-stopping crashes. And with Formula 1 mired in the most excruciatingly boring season in recent memory—uh, Verstappen for the win?—the people running MotoGP are aiming to seize the moment.
Drive To Survive—at one point reportedly the most-watched Netflix series in 33 countries around the world, including the US—has famously transformed F1 from a similarly obscure niche sport to must-see TV: Before DTS, ESPN paid $5 million annually for broadcast rights; it now reportedly pays between $75 and $90 million, and has major ambitions for the first-ever F1 race in Las Vegas this fall. MotoGP, meanwhile, has attracted mostly a cult audience in the States.
That’s not the case elsewhere. In most of Europe—particularly Spain, Italy, and France—along with Australia and the UK, MotoGP has a fanatical following, in many cases second only to soccer. In Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, fans camp outside the team hotels. “They don’t just know the names of the riders,” says Pol Bertran, head of communications for the VR46 MotoGP team. “They know our names too.”
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Now, Dorna Sports, which owns and oversees MotoGP, is trying to import that global enthusiasm stateside. Early signs are beyond good: Television audiences (races air on NBC and CNBC in the US) are already up 27%, with track attendance up 40% (a record 278,805 fans attended the LeMans race in France in May). There’s also a feature film in the works (working title: Idols)—with production on location at MotoGP races—in anticipation of a 2025 release.
What does all of that look like down on the hot asphalt of the starting grid in Austin? Minutes before the mayhem, a many-splendored crowd of mechanics, engineers, press, PR, umbrella girls, VIPs, and the odd smattering of fans who’ve managed to cajole their way into the rarest credential of the race weekend swarm around the riders. Jack Miller, 28, an Australian rider for KTM, smiles easily in his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, his newly pregnant wife, Ruby Mau, holding his umbrella. Aleix Espargaró, 33, a Spaniard with the Aprilia team, is entirely elsewhere, almost defiantly shutting out the world behind mirrored sunglasses and Apple Airpod Maxes. At the head of the class—first row, pole position—is Pecco Bagnaia, 26, the reigning world champion, exuding quiet confidence atop his 1000cc Desmosedici GP23, its livery in a red hue known simply as Rosso Ducati.
But there were a few important riders not on the grid—or anywhere near Austin, Texas, for that matter: Eight-time world champion Marc Marquez (Alex’s older brother), 30, having endured a litany of brutal crashes and medical setbacks over the last couple of years, is sitting this one out on advice of his doctors. Pol Espargaró, 31—Aleix's brother—crashed during a practice session at that same Portugal race, suffering severe lung trauma and breaking his jaw in two places along two of his ribs, one bone in his neck, and three bones in his back—among other injuries. And Enea Bastianini, 25—who took Miller’s place on the Ducati factory team this year and has been widely touted as MotoGP’s next big thing—has been out since sustaining a broken shoulder in the sprint race in Portugal. The bottom line: If you’re competing to race the fastest motorcycles ever made faster than your competitors, you’re going to crash; sometimes, you’re going to get hurt.
(It’s worth noting: Recent advances in both track design and riders’ protective wear—their leathers are now equipped with airbags, which are in turn activated by accelerometers, gyroscopes, and a GPS—have made the sport vastly safer: While broken bones are still common, there hasn’t been a fatality in the premier class of MotoGP in a dozen years.)
After the national anthem, some daytime fireworks, and a low-altitude flyover by a quartet of the Air Force’s T-38 Talon supersonic trainers, it’s lights-out, roll-throttle, full-roar as the caravan collectively goes from zero to insanity in a couple seconds, each rider jockeying for position. (Analysis of the slow-mo footage from the start of the race in Mugello, Italy a few weeks later revealed something truly nuts: As Miller rocketed past the right side of Bagnaia off the starting line, both riders holding on for dear life, heads tucked down low, Miller held out two fingers on his left hand toward Bagnaia—a kind of combination peace and see you later, sucker.) I’ve managed to scramble off the grid and up the hill from the start to the apex of Turn 1, a sharp left-hander, near to where things started to go so wrong for so many riders.
“Fear is part of our sport,” Bagnaia tells me a day earlier in the team’s ad hoc HQ. “It’s part of our job: When you crash at high speed, you feel fear—you’re arriving to the gravel very fast and approaching the barrier very fast—but before that, you don’t think about it.” Miller, who’s been riding motorcycles since he was two and racing since he was seven, is matter-of-fact about the risks. “In Australia, where I grew up, before every race, you do a rider’s briefing,” he says, “and they tell you: You may be killed or injured; your machine may be damaged or destroyed. That’s something that burns itself in the back of your brain—and I’ve broken well over 30 bones, and lost some really great friends, but did I ever think about quitting the sport? Does it even pop into my mind? Never. That can happen with the things you love: You’re scared about it, but you don’t really think about it.”
I should say: I wanted to love Formula 1, particularly after digging into multiple seasons of DTS, which brought to life the personalities and storylines beneath the helmets and the carbon fiber.
My problem, really, was the racing itself. Upon the conclusion of arguably the sport’s marquee race of the year in Monaco recently, the broadcaster was reduced to bragging (or was it pleading?) that “We did have overtakes!” Yes: Somebody passed somebody else. Really?
That happens on virtually every single lap of every single MotoGP race: One rider, traveling a mere 220 miles an hour or so, tucks himself on the inside line of another, and the two of them play a game of high-speed chicken to see who’s going to flinch and brake first before turning their bike almost entirely on its side, knees scraping the inside asphalt as the two machines appear to be stacked atop one another—before the riders attack the throttle again, stand their bikes back up, and see who can hold the line as they both emerge from the apex. Make a small mistake—an inch or two off the line here, a fraction of a second on the braking there—and you’re in the gravel, if not the ER, and your MotoGP bike (one-off non-production machines which cost millions to develop and hundreds of thousands to manufacture) is headed back to the garage for an all-night restoration project.
“Motorcycling lives in the overtaking, on the track,” says Carlo Pernat, who’s won 13 world championships as a manager with 13 different riders since the 1980s. (Pernat is now managing Bastianini.) “In MotoGP, you win in the race. Formula 1, no: Formula 1, you win in the paddock—is not a sport for me. No: You win or lose yourself. You don’t have someone telling you from the box to go slow because the engine, because the gasoline, the tires are no good. Riders in motorcycling are alone. Do the tires smell good? Does the gasoline seem OK?”
Formula 1 fans thrill at drivers sniping at each other over the team radios. After Lewis Hamilton passed him at the Australian GP in April, Max Verstappen got on his horn to whine about how “He pushed me off the track! I was ahead at the apex! He pushed me off!” (He wasn’t; he didn’t.) When Aprilia rider Maverick Viñales and Bagnaia collided at Turn 11 in Le Mans last month and both riders went careening into the gravel, Viñales was swinging at Bagnaia before the world champion was even on his feet.
As for the in situ experience? If Formula 1 is a tasseled loafer gliding on a hospitality suite carpet en route to the raw bar, MotoGP is a boot in the dirt and a fist in the air. The extracurriculars at COTA included everything from stunt riding and freestyle aerial demos on sport bikes to go-karts, ferris wheels, masked lucha libre wrestling, and a very large contraption called the “human claw.” At most of the European tracks, campsites adjacent to the tracks are a 24-hour-party-people spectacle of campfires, horsepower, and anarchy.
“We simply think that Formula1 is less attractive as a sport than MotoGP,” says Davide Tardozzi, the Ducati Corse team manager. Equal parts racing coach, psychologist, cheerleader, and mascot, Tardozzi also spends much of his time in the paddock being accosted by fans in search of selfies. If you’ve seen even one MotoGP broadcast, you likely already know Tardozzi, who wears his heart on his sleeve and his joy—or his pain—in every fiber of his body. When Ducati wins, that’s Tardozzi leaping into the arms of whomever is next to him in the team garage; when they lose—or when one of their riders crashes—that’s him looking stricken, saddened, disgusted, enraged.
“I am on the bike with our riders,” as Tardozzi, a former racer himself, puts it, his hand over his heart. “My explosion is because I love so much to win. I can’t help it—I’m like this.”
Under the leadership of Gigi Dall’Igna, the director of Ducati Corse, sporting director Paolo Ciabatti and Tardozzi have rebuilt the once-humble Ducati team into a thing of beauty: Aside from Bagnaia holding the drivers’ championship, Ducati is also the reigning team champion and constructors champion (the latter, as in F1, given to the manufacturer scoring the most points in a season). At the German Grand Prix on June 18, for the first time in history, the first five finishers of a MotoGP race were riding Ducatis. (Four of MotoGP’s eleven teams, or eight of the 22 riders, are on Ducatis.)
Building the perfect MotoGP bike is a complicated art: Gains in one realm—speed, say—usually come at the expense of another—maybe cornering agility. It’s a constant process of refinement and subtle retooling—one which Ducati has led in recent years by gathering and analyzing reams of data, and by pioneering the design of futuristic-looking bikes with wings, tails, and fairings to direct the flow of air, and thus the downforce, in the most efficient and powerful way possible.
“When we started in 2015 with small wings on the side, and then on the front, everybody was laughing,” Ciabatti says. “Then everybody started to realize that this wasn’t a gimmick.” Other manufacturers have since been playing catch-up, some more successfully than others: theMotoGP bike that set a new speed record at the Mugello race—227.5 mph—was a KTM piloted by Brad Binder. (KTM, it should be noted, recently hired away a significant brain trust of engineers from, yes, Ducati.)
But if data and aero—along with nutrition, sports psychology, yoga, good sleep, and other handmaidens of 21st century high performance—are now a big part of MotoGP success, more atavistic instincts are never far from the surface. Put more plainly: “You need to put your balls on the bike and give your best,” 2021 world champion Fabio Quartararo, 24, tells me the day before the sprint at COTA. We’re on an outside balcony inside the VIP bubble for a quick photo shoot for Alpinestars—which, along with Dainese, designs and manufactures the suits that keep riders safe—in-between practice sessions on the track.
When Quartararo spots a throng of hundreds of Ducati fans over the track from us at what’s called Ducati Island—many of these Ducatisti have ridden their, yes, Ducatis hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from across Texas, Mexico, and farther south parts of Latin America for the weekend—he laughs as he vaguely waves his middle finger in their general direction. (Quartararo, who is French, rides for Yamaha.)
He’s explaining some of the physics of MotoGP. “Right here, after the backstraight,” he says, pointing up the hill toward COTA’s Turn 1, “we arrive there at 340 kilometers [211 mph] and we take the corner at 60 [37 mph]—that’s 280 kilometers [174 mph] difference in only 250 meters.”
As for the parts of his body he’s been busting—other than, of course, his balls? The list is too long for him to really relate. “I broke my foot, my back, my wrists, my fingers, my. . . [lengthy pause] many things!” He erupts in laughter, but quickly gets serious. “Actually, my left wrist is really bad—I break in more than 20 parts.” And just like that, we’re moving on. “Is past—now we need to focus on the present.”
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Presently, Quartararo is in hostile territory in terms of the rider standings—tied for eighth place after seven of the season’s 20 races. Of the top six riders right now, five of them are on Ducatis, with Bagnaia locked in a gripping battle with both Jorge Martín and Marco Bezzecchi—who, along with Luca Marini, currently sixth, rides for the VR46 team owned by MotoGP legend Valentino Rossi.
If hockey has its Gretzky and basketball its Jordan, motorcycle racing will forever have its madcap, charismatic Rossi, aka The Doctor, who retired after the 2021 season at the age of 42 having won nine world championships, along the way electrifying the sport with epic overtakes and spectacular, sometimes ridiculous victory celebrations. (Perhaps most famously: In the lead-up to the 1997 race at Mugello, rumors were swirling around the paddock that Rossi’s hated rival, Max Biaggi, was dating Naomi Campbell; when Rossi won the race, he arranged for a friend to greet him on the track with an inflatable sex doll wearing only a t-shirt, across the back of which Rossi had scribbled CLAUDIA SCHIFFER in red lipstick—and took his victory lap with his inflatable friend straddling him.)
In Rossi’s hometown of Tavullia, Italy—where the speed limit is mandated at 46 kilometers per hour in honor of Rossi’s number 46—the local priest rang the bells in the church tower for an hour whenever Rossi won (even if the victory was halfway around the world, and thus in the middle of the night Tavullia time).
Many riders have their protective leathers adorned with—along with the myriad logos of their myriad sponsors—a nickname or slogan, for recognition or inspiration: Enea Bastianini’s says Bestia, after his nickname, The Beast; Bagnaia’s reads #GoFree—“it’s like ‘Hakuna Mutata’ from The Lion King,” Bagnaia says. “You have to enjoy your life and discover the limit—but you have to go free to do it.” Rossi’s leathers were notable for the letters WLF placed high on his chest, which stood for Viva La Figa—roughly translated as “Long Live Pussy.”
In only its second season in MotoGP, Rossi’s (Ducati-riding) VR46 team—managed by his childhood best friend and longtime majordomo, Uccio Salucci—is the hottest thing going: Bezzecchi, 24, has won two of the first five races, while Marini, 25—Rossi’s maternal half-brother—has been scoring consistent points and currently holding down sixth place.
Bagnaia, like Marini and Bezzecchi an alumnus of Rossi’s VR46 Riders Academy in Tavullia, remains extremely close to his mentor. “Vale and I train together,” Bagnaia tells me. “We talk every day, about everything—about racing, about cars, about girls, marriage, children, about food, cooking, restaurants—I’m a great fan of Massimo Bottura.” (A few weeks after the Austin race I happened to spend an evening with Bottura at his Ducati- and Damien Hirst-filled clubhouse outside Modena, in Emilia-Romagna. When I asked him if Bagnaia knew anything about food or cooking, Bottura shook his head quickly but violently. “No—nothing,” he said, with a smile. “But he’s a great guy.”)
If Bagnaia is a man of many interests, he’s monomaniacal about his day job: defending his world championship. “It’s the best moment of my career right now,” he says, “but it brings more pressure, because Ducati means winning; it means victory.”
Back on the COTA track, Bagnaia is three laps from taking the checkered flag when he rounds Turn 1 twenty feet in front of me dragging his left knee, his weight thrown almost over the inside kerbs. Moments after he disappears down the hill, the crowd collectively gasps, and a minute or so later Bagnaia is driven past me on the back of a steward’s scooter, his leathers scuffed and torn, his victory hopes dashed.
A few weeks and three races later at that German GP at the Sachsenring, the state of play of the 2023 season seems to crystallize: After the dust settles, Bagnaia still leads the field, but by an ever-narrowing margin after a thrilling Ducati-on-Ducati dogfight with Martín—the two actually collide on the final lap—ends with the latter taking the checkered flag by .064 seconds.
That race isn’t without its harrowing moments, either: After crashing five times—including a brutal, high-speed collision in an early practice that saw his Honda sever Johann Zarco’s Ducati (after lying almost motionless on the side of the track for a worrisome time, Zarco was on a bike and pushing track limits again in mere minutes), Marc Marquez withdrew from the race with yet another broken bone while making his dissatisfaction with his motorcycle ever more apparent.
Rival pilot Jack Miller, never one to mince words, simply wasn’t having it. He didn’t name names, but he didn’t have to. “They throw their toys out of the cot and say that My bike is shit,” he said after the race. "Shut the fuck up and get on with the job.”
So: The dog barks, as the saying goes, but the caravan moves on. This weekend, the circus moves to the Dutch TT at Assen, the legendary track where GP motorcycle racing first kicked off in 1949. Half the field seems to have something massive to prove and a surfeit of horsepower and adrenaline with which to prove it; most of the rest of them, just as ruthlessly competitive, will be fighting for their livelihood and for next year’s team contract. And by the time everybody else is finally catching on to MotoGP this time next year, you’ll likely still be talking about the drama on the final chicane at the Cathedral of Speed.
