OK, this might be hard for you to hear—it’s certainly hard for me to write—I will never be in MotoGP. There, I said it. This might have something to do with the fact that I’m yet to have my first official race or that I was 31 years old when I did my first track day, but I like to think it’s down to the opportunities I had growing up.
The problem with even finding these opportunities is that there’s only one road to being a MotoGP rider, and the route starts in Europe.
The last time anyone became a MotoGP champion who didn’t was Nicky Hayden, and that was two decades ago. What's more, the last time it was commonplace for riders to come to the premiere series from other championships or two-wheeled disciplines was nearly two generations ago, when we had flat trackers like Wayne Rainey and motocross champions like Kevin Schwantz, move to the 500cc GP class and dominate.
Today’s reality is if you’re not racing on a GP-spec bike from a young age, the trajectory of your riding career is not going towards MotoGP. And if you’re not from Europe, you’re already at a huge disadvantage.
Thankfully, Wayne Rainey, 3-time 500cc World Championship winner and MotoAmerica President, is doing something to give the next generation of US riders more than just a fighting chance.
He’s giving them a talent cup.
The European Edge
Right now, the Red Bull Rookies Cup is the main feeder cup for Moto3.
To put that into perspective, for seven of the last nine seasons, the winner of the Moto3 Championship has been an ex-Red Bull Rookies Cup rider. The best riders from the Rookies Cup go to Moto3. A select few from Moto3 go to Moto2, and the cream of the crop becomes MotoGP riders.
This is the way.
But if you’re not in the Rookies Cup by the age of 14 or 15, you’ve probably missed the boat. And that means you'll never get to MotoGP.
The problem is, if you want any chance of doing well in this talent cup, you need to be in Europe. It's where all the riding academies are that your competitors are in, and where all the races take place. So if a rider that shows great potential is from America, Australia, or anywhere else that’s not Europe, they need to move, ideally by the age of 14. Not only does this place great stress on the families, but the racers themselves.
Rainey and the MotoAmerica Talent Cup aim to alleviate that pressure by helping the top homegrown riders succeed in the Red Bull Rookies Cup.
“It's really tough for a young family to sell everything that they have, their home and all their assets, and then take their little 13 or 14-year-old, go live in a caravan and root 'em on and hope he gets noticed," says Rainey, adding, "That's all part of the journey. And if the kid's got the talent, it'll work. You'll get there. But if we can create other opportunities where it doesn't have to be as extreme for a lot of the families, then that's what it's all about.”
But uprooting families to move to Europe and compete against the best of the best wasn’t always the way, as Rainey knows all too well.
“What is it going to take to get more riders on the world platform other than just Spanish and Italians, right? So if you go back 30 years, America probably all the way up until the early 2000s, America was where everybody went to hone their skills. It was the most competitive national championship in the world… I think we were spitting out so many world champions. I think the mentality was it was just never going to end.”
Unfortunately, it did end, and we haven’t seen a US rider’s name on the MotoGP championship trophy since the late, great Nicky Haydon in 2006.
The fact is, it’s a ridiculous financial ask to place on a family to move to Europe, especially when the child is so young. But racing against European riders is a necessity for anyone who wants to succeed at the highest level. Rainey knows this—that’s why he’s building the MotoAmerica Talent Cup.
Replacing the Junior Cup
The new Talent Cup will replace the Junior Cup, and in my eyes, it will become the most important MotoAmerica championship since it’s the only one that could realistically lead to MotoGP.
Riders will race the same races as the current Junior Cup riders, but instead of racing production bikes, like Kawasaki’s Ninja 400 or KTM’s RC 390 R, they’ll race the Krämer APX-350, a GP-spec track bike, which has more than 50 horsepower and weighs just 255 lbs. So it’s more powerful than the current crop of Junior Cup bikes and lighter, but critically, its chassis, brakes, and ergonomics are more akin to the bikes used in the Red Bull Rookies Cup and Moto3.
The top five finishers in the MotoAmerica Talent Cup will get the opportunity to try out for the Red Bull Rookies Cup and receive help from MotoAmerica if they’re successful.
“So right now, we're working on a few programs that we're going to be announcing soon that are going to benefit the riders and it's going to help them be a hundred percent ready when they go get the tryout because my idea is I want them to have some time in Europe," Rainey tells RideApart, "I want them to go over there and ride with these guys in these different academies and get 'em up to speed, and see what level they have to be at. Now we have our US level. Is that going to be good enough when they get done racing in our series on these GP-spec bikes? We hope they're going to be a heck of a lot more prepared than they would be if they were just riding around on production bikes.”
More Than a Feeder
To me, it seems that the intention of the MotoAmerica Talent Cup is to set US riders up for a shot at the Red Bull Rookies Cup. But a couple of things felt off about this.
Firstly, the Krämer machines the riders will use in the Talent Cup have an extra 100cc on the KTMs used in the Red Bull Rookies Cup, and appear to be on par or even have a slight edge. Secondly, the cut-off age for the Red Bull Rookies Cup is 17, whereas the Talent Cup will allow riders to compete up to the age of 21.
But what ultimately made the idea of the MotoAmerica Talent Cup acting as a feeder class for the Red Bull Rookies Cup not sit right with me was Rainey himself. Even through our Zoom call, I could feel the relentless competitive nature and tenacity that only the world’s best athletes possess, and age doesn’t temper it.
Rainey isn’t just building the MotoAmerica Talent Cup to feed the Red Bull Rookies Cup—he’s building it to stand toe-to-toe.
“Yeah, look, we're not just doing this for the Red Bull Rookies Cup tryout, right? We're making this investment for… young talent, and you have to have a serious class that promotes that. And we didn't have a class that was on par with the other talent cups throughout the rest of the world… This is our first go at it,” Rainey states.
The fact of the matter is that you need to come up the right way—through GP-spec bike championships. And if you deviate from this path, you might very well have decided your fate and set a glass ceiling for your career. So, the capability of the bike MotoAmerica is creating in association with Krämer is critically important.
Rainey tells me, “We put a lot of pressure on [Krämer]. We looked at the current chassis they use in the World Championship. We looked at the Hondas. So we think the thing's going to be very competitive. We believe in what they're building… I think it's going to be a little bit better than what is currently in the other talent cups.”
During our chat, the ex-racer predicted that we’ll see a rider who emerged from the MotoAmerica Talent Cup throw a leg over a MotoGP bike three to five years after it begins.
“If this was available when I was 16, I would've figured out a way to raise money, probably just enough to get me over there, and then I would've hitchhiked. I would've swam across the ocean to go for this opportunity,” he says defiantly.
I hope MotoAmerica can make this work because, hopefully, it’ll spur other nations to create similar cups, and we’ll move one step closer to democratizing motorcycle racing. In a world where we seem to be moving further from this idea, MotoAmerica’s Talent Cup is a beacon for young US riders.
