Thursday in the British MotoGP paddock was a busy day for myself. Alongside my conversation with David Emmett, I also had a chat with Ian Wheeler (@IanWheeler) who is currently Marketing and Communications Manager with the Marc VDS Racing Team.

I have split the conversation over two parts. In this part, myself and Wheeler chat about the logistics of preparing for a race weekend, along with an introduction to where MotoGP currently stands in the social media landscape, a topic that we will also cover in part two.

F1B: Thank you for the interview Ian, just give us a little bit of your background, what you’ve done before, what has led you to where you are today.

IW: Like a lot of people in the paddock, I used to race and was pretty poor at it, I stopped before I seriously injured myself! I ended up going off and doing something completely different away from racing into a normal job. I went to work for a defence contractor and they put me in charge of their website which I knew nothing about. I decided that I’d learn how websites work by building one. I was away on a trip to Malaysia, the same weekend as the first British Superbike weekend. I went online to find out who won what and couldn’t find anything anywhere. I came back, started a British Superbike website, went to the races myself, did the interviews and it just took off because there was no other source of information. As a result, I ended up working for an online company Bike Net and then from there started working for Kawasaki in British Superbikes and also took over as editor of Motorcycle Racer Magazine. With Kawasaki I moved from British Superbike to World Superbike and onto MotoGP in 2003. I stayed with Kawasaki as their Marketing and Communications Manager until 2009 when they stopped. I had a couple of years with Dorna doing the pit lane commentary and then in 2010 came back on this side of the fence with Marc VDS when we came back into Moto2. And obviously being with Marc VDS now, the 2014 championship win and the move to MotoGP with Scott [Redding] in 2015 and now with the two riders in 2016.

F1B: Wow, so the British Superbike stuff I’m guessing that was when the internet started to become a thing?

IW: I was doing it around 1999 and 2000. Then in 2001, I was a press officer for the Kawasaki team, still a little bit involved in the website but not as much. They sold out to another company, gave it to them and they carried it on.

F1B: You moved from Kawasaki to Dorna, what was it that prompted the move from team to rights holder?

IW: At the end of 2008, there were issues with the economy in Japan and the exchange rate, so they decided to stop racing. When you’re developing a factory bike in MotoGP, it is a fairly big financial commitment, and they decided that they had higher priorities at the time commercially. So they stopped the MotoGP project, it was around about Christmas time in 2008, which meant that we were too late to find another position in 2009 with another team. I sat at home doing some freelance and then Michael Morel from Dorna called me saying that we’ve lost our pit lane reporter, do you fancy doing it. I wasn’t doing anything that was keeping me too busy at the time and it was an opportunity to come back to the paddock. I’ve never done it before, apart from once when they made me stand in at Rockingham with Fred Clarke. I thought it sounded like an interesting change, I did it and enjoyed it. Then in 2010, I got a phone call off my ex-boss at Kawasaki Michael Bartolini saying that we’re going racing again and can you come to Belgium. I continued with Dorna for the rest of 2010 but by then it was starting to get difficult.

F1B: What did you learn with Dorna that you were able to bring back to the team?

IW: It’s a good question. When I worked in this role with Kawasaki, your circle of influence is quite small by choice because you’re focussed on securing the exposure for the team, promoting the sponsors and partners for the team. So you’re focussed on a small part. When you’re doing it from the other side where you’re effectively now the journalist and you require things from other teams, then it opens up this circle of context. What I found was that I got a lot of help from the teams. A lot of people in pit lane are looking for the same story and the same information. I got a lot of help from the guys at Yamaha, the guys from Honda, who I only really knew in passing because it wasn’t where my focus was with Kawasaki. When I came back to the team [Marc VDS], it was helping these guys out rather than always looking for the angle. These guys have a tough job, they have to keep people updated, it’s better to help them with information that you normally wouldn’t think to give to them because it is of no advantage to you or the team.  It’s better to build the relationship with these people who do quite a difficult job and are under a lot of pressure. If something goes wrong in the race or in practice, it can be quite stressful. We can help a lot because we have access to the information faster than they do.

F1B: Thinking more about your Dorna role, but also your current role, what sort of preparation is involved for each weekend?

IW: They’re different, but also similar. With Dorna, the Monday before a race you start looking at what is happening across all three classes, looking at the news feeds to see if anything is happening that you need to be aware of, specifically with riders. It is learning about the characteristics of the track, is it going to be hard on tyres, is fuel consumption going to be an issue for the MotoGP bikes. How does the track suit the characteristics of each of the bikes, does the track suit the Honda or the Yamaha. It is also looking for stories that others may not have picked up on by using the contacts in the paddock rather than just looking at the news feeds. It is to make sure that when you arrive on the Thursday at the press conference, or sometimes interviewing specific riders, you were up to speed with everything that is going on rather than to walk into the paddock and be surprised at something. Over the course of the weekend, each evening you go through what’s gone on during the day, pick out the interesting stories for the following day. It is to try to stay ahead of the people who you are broadcasting to.

F1B: What about your job role now with Marc VDS, what preparation do you do?

IW: It is twofold really. On the one hand it is the media responsibilities for the riders, organising the media schedule for the riders in terms of access to journalists, access to TV, specific TV interview features. When the rider arrives on Wednesday, there should be a riders’ schedule explaining exactly what they need to do, what time, who it’s for, which country it is going out in.

F1B: Makes their life easier.

IW: No, it makes my life easier because then I don’t have to spend hours speaking to their answer phone! It’s just so they know exactly what they have to do, who they’re doing it for and for TV features, we’ll give them a little bit of background about what the journalist is looking for so they don’t go into the interview cold. On the other side, we also have responsibilities for the sponsors. For example, this race, Pro-Bolt is one of our sponsors here, they’re based here in the UK and have been a loyal sponsor since 2010. We’ve got some events with them, which we also use the riders for. We’ve got guests from Estrella Galicia who is our biggest sponsor, so it’s making sure we have a programme for them that includes the riders, pit box tours and also it is scheduling commercial meetings. It is easier to have commercial meetings at the race track as the sponsors are based in that country as well, rather than flying in for a meeting between races. A little bit of everything really.

F1B: Sounds pretty good. The whole area of sponsors leads me nicely onto our next subject: MotoGP’s future with regards social media. Where do you see MotoGP from a social media perspective going?

IW: The most important thing is the championship itself, the product if you like. What we’ve seen over the past few years from Dorna is some quite clever moves to strength the championship, to make it more attractive, to make it more unpredictable and interesting to the viewer. We’ve also see a massive step forward with the TV coverage. The quality is absolutely fantastic. When you compare us to Formula 1 in terms of TV coverage, I think Dorna exceeds what Formula 1 does. Okay, they [Dorna] have a little bit more freedom because we don’t have the rigid rules about the driver access. What they focus their non-race coverage on is exactly what people want, the personalities. Not just on the riders, but the people who you would want to see on the TV, Tito Rabat’s crew chief or Sam Lowes’ tyre guy who you see all the time. They build these interesting personalities because we have some really interesting characters, most of them have got their own story which MotoGP tell very well in different ways with the TV coverage but also their online video coverage. So, we have a strong championship, we have a strong TV presence. They’ve done a lot of the job for us in MotoGP rather than Moto2 or Moto3 of building these interesting personalities. Their social media policy has changed massively over the past two years; they’ve really taken on-board the fact that social media is one of the most powerful communication tools. They’ve brought in people to make the most of that. You look at their audience on social media, it is constantly growing. Even if you don’t understand social media, you can’t argue with the figures.

Even better for us is the past two years have seen a fundamental change in how they interact with the teams via social media. In the past it has very much been standalone. MotoGP and social media, it’s to promote the championship, it’s to promote MotoGP. The teams had been left to themselves, we don’t have that audience at all. Even the biggest team here does not have the audience that the championship has across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Now, they couldn’t help us anymore than they are. They really are making a massive difference, they share content, they are proactive with us, they give us advice “okay, if you do this, then we can share that, this is the benefit you get from it.” If there is something we don’t understand or something we want to know, their door is open, we go to speak to them and they always have something constructive to say or some way to help us out. It has allowed the teams to look at how they utilise social media. Our way has not changed, we focus very much on the personalities, we focus on our riders because that is where the interest is. We’re not a factory team, we have a responsibility to our sponsors, in terms of their image and also securing coverage for them. We’re not limited in the same way the factory teams are by the corporate style, we have a little bit more leeway on how we use social media. It allows us to have a much better relationship with not just the fans but also the journalists as well, we feed information out on social media specifically for the journalists as well as putting information out there for the fans. One example is a rider who crashes during a session, for us social media is the fastest way to communicate that the rider is okay or what has happened to the rider. The fans see it, they’re happy. The journalists see it, including the TV commentators. They have the Twitter feed open while they’re commentating as it’s a good source of information, they get the information and push it straight out on TV.

My thanks go to Ian Wheeler for spending the time with me on the above interview. In part two, we continue to look at MotoGP’s future, and Ian explains what is meant by a ‘social media’ workshop.

Ahead of the British round of the 2016 MotoGP championship, I sat down with David Emmett (@MotoMatters), talking all things MotoGP.

The interview covered a vast array of subjects, including testing, social media, and what MotoGP may look like post Valentino Rossi.

F1B: Thank you for this interview, just give us a brief overview of yourself. How did you get into MotoGP?

DE: My name is David Emmett; I work for MotoMatters. I did all sorts of stuff when I was much younger. I spent five years working as a translator, then worked as a technical editor. In 2005, I wanted to start a blog.  I wrote an entry saying “this is my blog” and I’m going to write my thoughts there, except I didn’t write anything at all for a year! Ahead of the 2006 season, I wrote a MotoGP preview and people were quite positive about it. Because it got so many positive responses, I continued writing about it. At the time I was working as a software developer looking at Content Management Systems and I did the two of them together for two years. In September 2008, I decided to quit my job as I was getting enough interest that I thought I could make a living from it. A few days after that the Lehman Brothers collapsed and the whole house of cards fell apart. I didn’t have a job, so had to make a go of it. I went to races, people read my stuff, liked my stuff. That’s how I ended up here. I grew up with motorcycles, my Uncle raced grass track in the 1970s and 1980s. When I was a teenage, I had a picture of a Yamaha RD350 hanging above my bed. So, that was it really.

F1B: You mentioned translating, it’s actually really important for a journalist to have some translator skills.

DE: It’s basically language skills. Just being able to make sense of stuff. You are trained as a writer, I also worked as a technical editor where you had to digest complicated technical information. It was the technical writers who were writing it, I was editing their copy so I had to make sure I could understand what they were trying to convey. You learnt a lot about communicating.

F1B: Interesting to know that you started blogging before blogging became popular.

DE: I don’t know; I would say blogging started to become a thing in the mid-2000s. I got in I wouldn’t say early, but I wouldn’t say late. One of the advantages of being old is that when you do things, quite often you’ve done things early just because you happen to be old enough to actually understand it.

F1B: Moving onto the current day, you guys are going to every race this season I assume.

DE: I’m going to about 12 of the 18 this season. I don’t go to the overseas races; I don’t go to Le Mans because it is shit. It’s a fantastic place to go for a 24-hour car race, I really want to go to that and I don’t like cars, I don’t own a car. The atmosphere at the track is awful, it is not a nice track. I don’t go to the Asian fly away races, I don’t go to Qatar because it is horrible, I don’t go to Argentina because it is almost impossible to get there.

F1B: Do you go to the pre-season tests as well?

DE: I go to at least one of the pre-season Sepang tests, especially the first one. The new bikes are being pulled out, riders have had the winter to go away and think. Immediately after Valencia, you have the post-season tests. You saw it at the end of the last year with [Valentino] Rossi, Rossi was so upset that his mind was not really on testing. What you see is that people are tired after 18 races, the season takes a lot out of them physically. The bike hasn’t really taken shape yet, the bike they roll out at Sepang is much closer to what they will actually be racing. It is about trying stuff, what works and what doesn’t. Testing is also boring. Those eight hours of track time, especially at Sepang because of the heat, they spend two hours on track. You’ve got a lot of time to talk to people which you don’t have at a race weekend because the race weekends are so intense.

F1B: There was a whole thing a few years ago where people wanted testing live.

DE: Testing is a bit like cricket, it is much more interesting when you listen to it on the radio or via the timing screens. You see much more of a story. The actual process of testing doesn’t have the intensity. It is much more difficult to understand because different people are doing different things. Testing highlights are really interesting, live coverage of testing is really, really boring. I remember in 2010 when Valentino Rossi switched to Ducati, they had live coverage of testing then and it rained in the morning. The track was wet, it was cold, nobody really wanted to go out. They sent one of the test riders out to go and circulate and to dry the track out. They were desperate for something to happen. I think they sent Rossi out for five laps and brought him back in again. There’s always pressure to create that content, but the content you are curating is not particularly memorable. There’s about seven hardcore MotoGP geeks that would sit there all day and watch it.

F1B: So, you’re going to 12 of the 18 races this season, tell us in a little bit more detail how you prepare for the races.

DE: To be perfectly honest, I don’t do a great deal of preparation. It is more of a continuous thing. You are thinking about what you are doing, and I try to watch the race from last year. I’ll go through the results of previous races, take a look at the race track, read a few press releases. This year Michelin have come in, new tyre manufacture, you read their press release to try and understand what they’re not telling you, what the story is, what they’re doing. For me, it is part of a larger narrative, it’s not a race weekend, it’s another chapter in the story of the season.

F1B: I’d assume it is a lot more intense for the TV guys considering they’re on air for seven hours.

DE: Oh yeah, absolutely. I wait for things to happen and then write about them afterwards.

F1B: I guess we can talk about Rossi and [Marc] Marquez, the approach [between TV and online] would be completely different.

DE: Exactly. I can go and talk to people. For example, the last race in Brno, all of the tyre issues. The TV guys are reacting immediately, they’re unprepared for it. They can do a certain amount of prep; they may have talked to people after warm-up, but I get the chance to talk to all of the riders first, talk to crew chiefs, talk to people from Michelin and then form an opinion. Because it is more reactive it requires less preparation, because I write 2,000 words in the evening, I have time to sit down and think about it.

F1B: How was Sepang last year?

DE: I wasn’t there. It was just really strange [the crash]. But I was talking to the rest of the media that were there, we were chatting via WhatsApp trying to figure out what was going on, what the atmosphere was like. It was very odd. Those are the times that you wish you were there, because then you can go around afterwards and actually talk to people. But then, being at home, it meant that I could watch that clip over and over. If I had been at the race, I would not have had time to sit down and watch it.  So instead, I sat down and watched those two laps for two hours trying to figure out the whole story.

F1B: And then the championship went to Valencia, where I think there was crazy behaviour from what I remember.

DE: Amongst the fans it was fine, there was nothing there. The fans were booing [Jorge] Lorenzo and Marquez, but then they often boo them so it was not that much different. There was some oddness, not really craziness. The fact that they scrapped the press conference was a mistake. I think Dorna got caught unawares by that as well, they were not expecting it all to happen with the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) appeal against the penalty. That also made it a little bit more difficult as we were sitting around waiting for the outcome of this appeal.

F1B: This leads us nicely onto talking about MotoGP’s future. Part of that future is social media. Social media activity jumps when incidents like that happen, which can be a good thing.

DE: Absolutely. MotoGP and social media have a very long history. I’ve been on social media since 2009. At first, Dorna didn’t really know what to do with the internet. It has got slowly better and better, Dorna started to understand how the internet can help them. There’s lots of crap out on the internet, especially in the Spanish and Italian press writing any old thing, just to generate ‘hits’ and attraction. Dorna were very concerned and cautious about social media. That has changed over the years. In the last two or three years, Dorna have totally embraced it. For a long time, they spent most of their time chasing down video clips. Now what they’re doing, which I told them to do five years ago, is getting the content out their immediately. Using the Snappy.TV clips have been really, really good and they’ve been using those clips. If something dramatic happens, the first thing fans do at home is share that video clip. When MotoGP immediately shares that clip, everyone else shares that clip because it is in much better quality.

F1B: The Rossi and Marquez crash had 20 million views on Facebook, you can’t buy those numbers.

DE: It’s Donald Trump’s election strategy really, earned media instead of actually buying media. You just say something ridiculous and people report it.

F1B: What is the future post Valentino Rossi? What is going to happen to MotoGP?

DE: Quite honestly, it will be smaller. This is one of Dorna’s biggest concerns. One of the reasons they’ve changed a lot of the technical regulations is to try and create exciting racing and to create a structure where young riders come and grow their fans. You’re also seeing team structures, so the Marc VDS take young riders aged 12 or 13 from mini bikes all the way up to MotoGP, and that talent can be coached and helped along the way. There’s lots and lots of talent, the problem is: how do you replace an icon like Valentino Rossi? The honest answer is you don’t. What you have to do is mitigate the effect. So what you want when he goes is a stable, attractive product in place which will retain some of the existing fan base. The idea is people come and see Valentino Rossi, but they stay because they find MotoGP an interesting and exciting sport. Dorna are trying to figure out what the sport is. They’re not F1, they’re not champagne and glamour, but we are a little bit upmarket and a little bit edgy. It is trying to figure out what the brand of MotoGP is, what motor cycle racing is and how to sell it. One of the biggest problems they face is that MotoGP riders are now sportsmen or sportswomen. They’re professional athletes, which is a problem because they tend to be boring. They train, they race and they sleep, and that’s it. They’re not formed as humans. In the 1970s and 80s, Barry Sheene had a hole drilled on his helmet so he could have a cigarette through it. He could afford to do that because the sport was much less developed in terms of physical training. You can’t go out on a Saturday evening and get steaming drunk like the 80s. The boys and girls like to go out and have a party but it is much more controlled and restricted. Their partying is constrained by a strict training regime. This isn’t just MotoGP, it is also to an extent in F1 and a lot of other professional sports, they’re fairly dull. There’s the pressure of sponsors, the more money there is in the sport, the less freedom there is to be a maverick.

F1B: Where does pay-TV stand within all the MotoGP change and social media?

DE: Well pay-TV is the future of a lot of professional sports. Someone has to pay for it. Large public broadcasters are not prepared to pay large amounts of money; they can’t afford it. So, for example, it goes to BT Sport because BT are trying to flog broadband connections. So they can afford to spend money on the likes of football and MotoGP because they are linking their package together to sell broadband. That’s why it ends up on pay-TV, advertising revenues are changing. You can’t subsidise as much straight from advertising.

F1B: Is one of the concerns post-Rossi is that sponsors will leave, which will increase pay-TV deals exponentially again?

DE: To be frank, that’s going to be more of a problem for teams than for the sport and a lot of the sponsorship people are working very much on building relationships. So, for example, Phillip Morris, the tobacco people still sponsor Ducati. It’s just you don’t see Marlboro anywhere, but they use it as a way to build relationships. They’re doing it very differently. Sponsors are using teams to build relationships, making them less reliant on a particular figure to entertain their clients and to do business.

My thanks go to David Emmett for spending the time with me on the above interview.