CMG is delighted to welcome Mike Nicks, who covers motorcycle racing for national newspapers including The Guardian and The Observer, to Crash.Net for the 2007 season.
Mike - who will be writing an exclusive monthly column covering MotoGP, WSBK and BSB - begins by detailing the final MotoGP test at Jerez, James Toseland's success at the opening WSBK round at Qatar and much more...
THE MOST SIGNIFICANT person at the Jerez MotoGP tests may just have been, not new world champion Nicky Hayden or even I-want-it-back
Valentino Rossi, but one David Garrido. A name like that may be lighting this thought-train in your mind: Spanish.teenage.prodigy.the next
Dani Pedrosa.
But Mr Garrido is nothing so exotic, although possibly as influential.
He's an English bloke, probably late twenties, and a sports reporter for
BBC Radio 1's Newsbeat programme.
Radio 1 at MotoGP? Kinda doesn't make sense - and that's what Garrido thought before those two final rounds of last year, when Pedrosa bunged his Repsol Honda team-mate Hayden off-track at Estoril, Rossi fell in the final race at Valencia and Hayden grabbed an against-all-odds title.
"Those races made us ask the question, 'How much is our audience interested in this?'" Garrido told me at
Jerez.
"We had such a big response - bigger than cricket or rugby," he said.
"We thought
Formula 1 was big - but this was bigger. Our listeners read Motor Cycle News and Max Power. A lot of them are big, big petrolheads.
"MotoGP is a sport that's closer to them in real terms."
So Radio 1 decided to come to its first MotoGP event - blissful news for promoters Dorna, because the station brings with it ten million listeners in the 10- to 30-year-old age group, the core of them in the prized 15- to 24-year-old sector. No wonder that Dorna, which desperately wants to attract new, richer sponsors (read our exclusive news story on this), paid for flights and a hotel for David Garrido and four colleagues from BBC TV news and two regional radio stations at Jerez.
You will be reassured to know that they spent our licence fee wisely.
Garrido and co muscled in beside the rest of us and interviewed
Nicky Hayden, Valentino Rossi,
Kenny Roberts Senior and Junior, Jeremy Mc
Williams, Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta and the Brit youngsters Bradley Smith, Danny Webb and Eugene Laverty, amongst others. That's a fair work rate.
You can listen to Radio 1 Newsbeat at 12.45pm and 5.45pm weekdays.
Better still, you'll be able to hear David Garrido live from
Donington Park on the weekend of June 24, when Radio 1 runs its first live outside broadcast from a MotoGP event. They're thinking of doing World Superbike rounds too, maybe the
Silverstone and
Brands Hatch events.
