A taxi driver at Assen station has a precise answer to that question. He doesn’t reach for charts or press releases: he speaks with the voice of someone who knows exactly how much a race weekend weighs on his year-end bank account.<\/p>\n
“If it weren’t for the Grand Prix at Assen, I might as well close up shop.”<\/em><\/p>\n Those were the words David Emmett \u2014 the reference journalist for the two-wheel world at Moto Matters \u2014 heard during a transfer from the train station to the circuit. A few words, clear enough to explain something that academic studies and economic analyses take pages to demonstrate: a MotoGP Grand Prix is not just sport. It’s economics.<\/p>\n The only rigorous academic analysis available on this subject is by Maria Luisa Mart\u00ec Selva and Rosa Puertas Medina, published in 2012 in the Spanish Studies of Applied Economics. The case study is the 2010 Grand Prix of Valencia \u2014 the last race of the season, held in front of approximately 80,774 spectators.<\/p>\n The figures are clear: over \u20ac5 million in tickets, around \u20ac14.5 million in hotels, restaurants, transport and merchandise (of which over \u20ac8 million in hospitality alone). Total: nearly \u20ac20 million generated in a single weekend \u2014 equal to 0.24% of the GDP of the Comunitat Valenciana, one of the most tourist-competitive regions in eastern Spain.<\/p>\n These are 2010 figures, at a time when MotoGP had considerably less international reach than it does today. The real impact of a contemporary Grand Prix \u2014 driven by the growth of television audiences in Asia, the Americas and the Middle East \u2014 is presumably higher.<\/p>\nThe Valencia Study: The Numbers Behind a Race<\/h2>\n
Why Circuits \u2014 and Regions \u2014 Pay to Host MotoGP<\/h2>\n