How pre-season testing killed the Thai GP buzz

I grew up in South Africa in the 1980s. Back then, to wait for a new season was to live in an information vacuum. If word of a signing appeared in the ‘Briefly’ section of the newspaper, or the sports news on the radio, you had to be grateful for it. Any testing information, if there was such a thing at all, went straight into newsroom bins.

A week or two before the first race, the local press might cobble together a supplement covering off the calendar plus who would be racing for whom – usually with a few question marks and errors. Autosport magazine would do a proper preview job, of course, but that wasn’t much help because the first race was long gone by the time the ship docked in Cape Town with two-month-old copies.

And that’s just Formula 1 I’m talking about! The motorcycle world championship was shown on free-to-air television, but the off-season was a wasteland as far as news was concerned. You knew pretty much nothing until you tuned in for the opening round.

It may not be a coincidence that I counted down the days to the start of international motorsport, whatever form it took. I had forgotten what engines sounded like. I wondered what new liveries would look like. And the biggest mystery of all, of course, was who was going to be fast or slow. The anticipation had me wobbling!

Well, times have changed.

I’ll be the first to admit a large chunk of that is down to not being nine years old anymore. But there are nine-year-old MotoGP fans out there this week. And while they surely aren’t as jaded as I am, they’re not going into this 22-round season with any sense of mystery either. 

Why? Because it feels like we already know everything there is to know before a wheel has turned in practice at Buriram. The culprit? Pre-season testing at the very same track – just a few days ago.

Rethinking pre-season testing in the information age

There is absolutely nothing new about teams gathering to test at the venue for the opening race. That’s old hat in international motorsport, MotoGP included. You can go back more than a decade, and you’ll find the crews pounding around Losail just ahead of the season-opener. This kind of test has obvious sporting merits in terms of travel efficiencies and solid preparation.

But what has changed is the media landscape. The level of coverage and analysis is unprecedented. Fans with the time and inclination can watch the test and access the timing screens. Even if you don’t tune in, testing news will follow you and your mobile device to the ends of the earth. The internet allows – and apparently demands – a steady stream of fresh headlines. The rise and rise of podcasting, a format that lends itself to deep discussion, means experts are deep-diving into the data before, during and after every test.

Nearly all of this is free, of course. Rightly or wrongly, it’s not like you have to go out and buy a newspaper to learn almost everything you might wish to know. Barriers to information are few.

Journalists and media are just doing their jobs, of course. If they don’t thrash out the analysis and get their well-informed predictions in, somebody else will. But letting us media into the paddock for days on end when the season is about to begin is totally detrimental to building any buzz for the first round itself. The form book has been laid wide open on the table. Teams running race simulations at Buriram just days before an opener at, well, Buriram, is hardly a recipe for intrigue. Especially when the press are going to jump on every clue they contain, unravel them and package it into neat conclusions for the fans.

So, there aren’t a whole bunch of mysteries around the racing. In a year with a largely unchanged cast, when little change in form was expected anyway, a few unanswered questions would have helped generate a little dramatic tension. At least for the first race, if nothing else. So too would a few rookies getting to know a new track on MotoGP machinery – but the testing means they too will start practice as old hands.

Still, if the racing’s dull, there’s always off-track shenanigans to keep us going, right? Nope! Again, that’s because journalists have been loitering in the paddock for days and days already, across the Sepang and Buriram tests. So many 2027 signings are already an open secret, with nothing but official confirmations to look forward to. Now that the first event is finally here, most potential sideshows have been covered off. The racing had better be good then!

Alex Marquez, Gresini Racing

Photo by: Gold and Goose Photography / LAT Images / via Getty Images

What could be changed?

I’ll say this up front: testing rules and schedules are a tough area in which to achieve dramatic change. Teams get hot under the collar at the mere mention of a discussion. Change often requires their agreement – and creating a sense of mystery for fans ahead of the first race is a long way down their list of priorities. So take the following as something of a fantasy wishlist – any of it actually happening would be a bonus.

If there must be pre-season testing in warm Asia, I would prune it to one test and let Buriram be cleared as the glittering, exclusive, unsullied stage for the start of actual competition. The one remaining test would, from a storytelling perspective, ideally not be at Sepang either. Partly because the grand prix there is recent, allowing for a too-easy measure of progress, and partly because it’s known as a great measure of a bike’s all-round ability. Perfect for the engineers, terrible for an open-ended narrative. 

What about the aforementioned Qatar track? It’s on the way out east anyway, so wouldn’t involve senseless travel in the wrong direction. And it’s known as an oddball track that might throw up more questions than answers. Which is why this concept probably won’t get a vote from the teams! I like the concept of not visiting a race venue at all. Anybody know if Bahrain could be safe enough for bikes?

The other thing you could do – and I know this would have some people up in arms – is keep the press out of the paddock at the big pre-season tests. Actually, come to think of it, maybe there wouldn’t be so much pushback from the media gang. The 22-race schedule is more than enough time away from home without being obliged to visit tests just to match the competition.

It would represent a huge move in MotoGP, but remember that for many other sports this is normal. Try getting a pass to watch a rugby team train its moves ahead of a big match! Even if you could watch such things, there wouldn’t be many conclusions to draw. From golf to ice hockey, seeing one player or team do drills doesn’t give you much chance of generating a spoiler. The form book is simply the last few games or seasons. Motorsport is quite unusual in that competitors ‘practice’ together, with performance measured down to a thousandth of a second. The spoiler potential is off the charts – and perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that.

If you kick the media out of tests, however, you would also have to switch off the official timing completely. Not just bar access but not have it at all. If the times exist, they will leak out. Get teams to dust off their stopwatches and focus on raising their own performance – that used to be the deal anyway.

Finally, television coverage is clearly a no-no! Call it retro, call it backward-thinking…but if you want to cultivate a sense of mystery in an age flooded by information, these are the extremes you might have to reach for.

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– The Autosport.com Team