Why do they go so fast?
A new book, ‘Motorcycle Grand Prix: Insider stories from world championship racing’ gets under the leathers of MotoGP.
By Adam Wheeler
For me, the best sports books page-turners were the ones that fixed my imagination into a specific place or time. The vintage ‘lifting the lid’ accounts.
That’s why Pete Davies’ ‘All Played Out’ (a writer’s personal experience of living in Italy for a month with the England football team on their memorable trawl to the semi-final of the 1990 World Cup) and Richard Williams’ ‘Racers’ (a journalist’s take on mid-1990s F1 and the dissection of personalities like Hill, Villeneuve, Schumacher and more) were indispensable. The paperback versions sit on my shelf today, and I have been picky about lending them to people; how often do those gestures end up with a permanent gap between books?
When it came to writing ‘Motorcycle Grand Prix: Insider stories from world championship racing’ (an overly generic title, it must be said, and wasn’t my first choice) I knew I wanted a deviation from other motorcycling titles that tended to focus on biography matter, machinery, historical appreciations or season recaps. Very few books in the field have attempted to transport the reader trackside, where these ferocious 225mph, 140db physics-defying bikes rip ear drums, dice within centimetres of each other and are utterly captivating.
I grew up thirty minutes from Brand Hatch and was riveted to a loving and inclusive father who was a biker and fan of the sport. Racing was a strand through a professional journey that has now lasted a quarter of a century, and after two other books on motocross I fancied a go at trying to impart my experiences in Grand Prix.
Watching MotoGP across social media or in any video will expose the thrill of the sport in a matter of seconds. But chipping away at the complex psychologies of the athletes that actively put their lives and health in the balance every other week, was rich ground for exploration and something that can never really be grasped through, say, TikTok. Also, don’t underestimate or ignore the ingenuity and the scruples of the technical minds that construct those two-million-euro prototypes. These characters then ask racers as young as 20 to scratch limits and occasionally feel the burn of gravel rash through those leather suits or the crunch of a bone.
The dearth of avenues for observational long-form content in media meant ‘MGP: Insider stories’ was the ideal vehicle to relay a lot of what I see, what I (still) learn and what fascinates me while travelling to MotoGP. Forming eight chapters with more than forty fresh interviews took well over a year as I made my usual route with the championship and the trek to most of the 20-round 2024 series. Those interview transcripts and notes could be cross compared to other recordings; some made over twenty years previously and the book became a sliding puzzle at times.
There were topics that couldn’t be ignored. Like the cognitive and physical peculiarities that make MotoGP racers, the virulent efforts at safety (through innovations like airbags, suit development, air fences), Ducati’s utter domination in the last half a decade and how promoters Dorna Sports took a niche sport to the point of a 4-billion-dollar acquisition by F1 moguls Liberty Media. Then there was also life inside a MotoGP pitbox, the sometimes-murky business of the paddock and the idiosyncrasies of circuits old, new, notorious and revered. And of course, mortality.
I wrote too much. I cut too much. I left appraisals of key or historical MotoGP figures to one side. There is more than enough ‘track’ for a second volume. I liked the finale of this book though. I asked current rider Jack Miller, a very popular ten-year veteran of MotoGP and a ten-time Grand Prix winner, what he himself would like to glean from a MotoGP publication of this ilk. ‘I think what makes us tick,’ he said in an interview at the 2024 Aragon Grand Prix. ‘As a fan, that was always what I was curious about: to see what makes them do what they do and be the person they are.’ I hope the Australian and other MotoGP or motorsport followers might find some worthy material here.