Former Ducati and Honda sporting director and Suzuki team manager Livio Suppo has an interesting take on where MotoGP needs to go under Liberty Media.

Writing in the French magazine GP Racing, (Which is still a print magazine) Suppo says trying to simply duplicate Formula 1’s commercial formula won’t work. MotoGP, he argues, needs its own model. Better promotion, hospitality and sponsorship can help, but motorcycle racing remains a different animal, with an audience traditionally drawn to the racing and riders rather than the social spectacle surrounding the event.

The more interesting part of Suppo’s argument is China.

Chinese motorcycle manufacturers are rapidly gaining market share in Europe, yet remain almost completely absent from MotoGP. Suppo compares the situation to the arrival of the Japanese manufacturers in the 1960s and asks why Chinese companies couldn't eventually follow a similar path. Meanwhile, the European and Japanese manufacturers currently supporting MotoGP are facing increasing economic pressure in their own markets.

Suppo also argues that MotoGP needs to control costs, not simply chase more revenue, and says Liberty's real challenge isn't merely making MotoGP more spectacular. It's keeping the championship affordable and economically relevant enough that manufacturers still have the money—and the desire—to participate.

It’s an interesting argument from a guy who has spent much of his life inside the MotoGP paddock: Liberty may know how to sell MotoGP. The bigger question is who will be building the motorcycles twenty years from now.

Suppo also writes:

Motorcycle racing has historically been a much more specialized sport, whose audience comes first and foremost for the competition and the riders. For twenty years, Valentino Rossi perhaps gave us the illusion that MotoGP could become a truly mass-market phenomenon. He managed to go far beyond the boundaries of our sport. Since he left, no one has yet managed to bring the discipline so far beyond its traditional audience. That does not mean Liberty cannot broaden that audience, but it will probably have to invent a model specific to MotoGP rather than try to reproduce Formula 1's.