Liberty Media chief Greg Maffei has confirmed that Lewis Hamilton was one of many influential figures to get in contact regarding purchasing a team after the American company completed the purchase of MotoGP earlier this year.
In April, Liberty Media successfully completed a 86 per cent takeover of MotoGP with the series’ management retaining a 14 per cent stake. This deal followed immense success in F1, which they purchased for a reported £3.5billion ($4.6bn) in 2017.
Since taking over the commercial reins of F1, Liberty Media has successfully grown the sport into one of the biggest on the planet, turning drivers and team principals into global superstars. With this spotlight came financial rewards, and all 10 teams saw significant boosts in their valuations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that when Liberty Media secured the rights to the MotoGP championship, interest in purchasing teams was registered. “I think, frankly, growing in the US – [MotoGP] have one race in Austin for which they receive relatively modest revenues from TV and the like,” Maffei said when discussing the possible growth for the series.
“I think there’s an opportunity to improve that. The opportunity perhaps for a second race in the US. All of those … are interesting in ways that look familiar to us from Formula One and hope we can replicate here attractively.
“When we announced [the acquisition] … we had immediately people call up and say, ‘I want to buy a team’, including people like Lewis Hamilton.”
The opportunity for MotoGP to expand into the US will be an exciting opportunity for Hamilton, who has a property in the country and already owns part of the Denver Broncos NFL franchise. F1 has added Grands Prix in Miami and Las Vegas since Liberty Media purchased the series eight years ago.
“I think MotoGP is … an unbelievably exciting product,” Maffei noted. “I don’t know if many of you have seen the racing, but to see people driving motorcycles, 220 miles an hour six inches from each other, it’s wild, and the overtaking there is incredibly impressive.
“It is unfortunately one that is too little known here in the United States and around the world. There’s interest in Asia and other places, but the real heart of it has been in Spain and Italy [and] to some degree France.
“We saw what we were able to do with Formula One by telling the stories, making them humanised, making the story larger than just about the car [and] the technology. But, also about what the drivers were doing, what was going on behind the scenes, telling those stories, making sure the world understood the breadth of what was going on.”
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