REGULAR visitors to this remote corner of Cycle Torque's most excellent real estate will be familiar with my suspicion of the FIM's continual meddling with grand prix regulations, but even I have to acknowledge an inspired decision in opening MotoGP to big four-strokes 10 long years ago.

Whether the regs for 2012, with their top limit of four cylinders, maximum 81mm bore and claiming rule will do anything to maintain the quality of racing we've grown used to over the past decade, I'm not so sure. On the other hand, with most of the world's economies on the verge of meltdown I suppose it's only reasonable to acknowledge the economic imperative and try to play within its evolving strictures.

Bottom line though, I'm still of the opinion that MotoGP shouldn't have too many constraints imposed upon it. It's the flagship of motorcycle racing and the promotional vehicle of motorcycling as a whole, and should be allowed plenty of elbow room to get on with it.

Thanks to the colourful, spectacular, exciting racing we've seen for the past 10 years, all manner of unlikely souls have become Monday-morning experts, and Valentino Rossi has truly become a household name, internationally recognised to a degree none of his predecessors could have managed. We certainly haven't reached the point at which we should be trying to justify the sport that propelled Rossi et al to the dizzy heights and helped them enhance the Sunday viewing of so many.But pressure is mounting.

Not so long ago the green lobby decided to get Formula 1 car racing in its crosshairs and began making rumbling noises about its ecological footprint. So some bright spark over yonder did a few sums and concluded that all the F1 cars running in all the grand prix and all the test sessions in a given season burnt enough fuel to get one Boeing 747 across the Atlantic. Just. Make sure you know where your lifejackets are, folks. And the fuel consumption of MotoGP on that basis? Enough to get a Fokker Friendship from Werribee to Cloncurry, maybe.

Flippant, yes, and hardly the same argument, but bear with me. Wiser and far better connected folk than yours truly have done equally interesting calculations and come up with the guesstimate that Honda's MotoGP budget is some $100 million per year.

Well, to the best of my recollection no one has ever claimed that that an RCV212 is a budget build. Honda, Yamaha and Ducati probably represent the best resourced and hence most expensive teams on the grid. Everyone else probably gets by on a little less lolly, perhaps as little as a penurious $50 million. But just for fun, let's call the average per team $70 million and multiply that by 10 teams Ð so $700 million gets you a gridful of barking 800cc MotoGP bikes for a season.

A lot of money, to be sure; but to put things in some kind of perspective, it's about five per cent of the NSW education budget for 2009-10. And it wouldn't buy you more than a couple of Formula 1 teams. Trying to assess value for money in such matters and in such uncertain times is a parlous business indeed, but we can be sure that MotoGP is far from the most expensive form of motorsport, and on any seat-of-the-pants assessment, it is doing what it says on the tin; it's delivering.I'm not sure our cousins on four wheels can claim quite the same thing.

Twin-track vehicles racing on circuits as little as 12 metres wide (the FIA minimum) are likely to have the occasional difficulty mounting wheel-to-wheel thrillers, and a sport that requires an 'overtaking working group', not to mention various technological aids such as KERS to boost the chance of the cars actually racing, seems to me to be a sport that's lost sight of itself. I wonder what the mighty Jim Clark would have made of it all. And F1 is not above criticising its circuits as contributing to the problem.

To cite but one example, Magny-Cours, redesigned in the 1980s and the most recent home of the nomadic French Grand Prix, has copped its share of flak for producing processional races. Not so on two wheels. A quick search of YouTube produced video aplenty of the lads in World Superbike and World SuperSport banging elbows and swapping paint at Magny-Cours.Car racing has traditionally been bigger, more spectacular and faster than motorcycle racing, but I wonder if the times they are finally a-changing.
Check out a MotoGP event today: top speeds to rival F1 cars, an abundance of colour and visible drama at every event, prodigiously talented blokes routinely plunging into corners four abreast. What more could you want?Motorcycles should be the natural vehicle of choice for motorsport – it's obvious, isn't it?
Happy New Year.

– Bob Guntrip