CN
III ARCHIVES
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
P118
WHAT ARE THE TRENDS
IN MOTORCYCLING?
enough now, that there is beginning
to be decent historic data show-
ing trends based on searches that
reveal interesting insights into where
the various segments of motorcy-
cling were 15 years ago and track-
ing them to where they are today.
In this week's Archives, we'll
take a look at what Google can tell
us about certain segments of the
sport. While not a perfect indicator
of the health of any particular seg-
ment of racing, Google Trends pro-
vides insights into what people are
searching for on the web and with
the mass of data compiled by the
most visited website in the world,
we can at least understand the
broad interest trendlines of various
sectors of motorcycle racing.
Motorcycle Racing
I used the search of the generic
phrase "motorcycle racing" to
serve as a baseline in the overall
interest of the sport in general,
regardless of genre. You can eas-
ily see from this graph that inter-
est in the last 15 years has fallen
quite dramatically. In fact, overall
Y
ou hear a story of the de-
cline of motorsports nearly
every week. When you see on TV
sparsely populated grandstands
that were once packed at NAS-
CAR events, there's no denying
that something fairly dramatic
is going on in terms of just the
general interest in motor racing. In
motorcycle racing, the trends are
also down overall in terms of atten-
dance and general interest. And
that applies pretty much across
the board in all genres of the sport
with a few notable exceptions.
The decline in the interest of
motorsports—motorcycle racing
specifically—and motorcycling
in general have been discussed
and contemplated a lot in recent
years. In 2017, Give A Shift is-
sued results of an industry sur-
vey that concluded, in part, that
motorcycle sales continued to
be flat coming off the disastrous
downturn caused by the recent
Great Recession. Baby Boomers,
the generation that pushed the
popularity of motorcycle racing to
all-time heights in the 1990s and
early 2000s, are aging out of the
sport at a rapid rate. Additionally,
the report was somewhat critical
of the motorcycling industry for
catering to the ever-decreasing
demographic of established rid-
ers instead of working to attract a
younger generation of riders.
Google has been around long
MOTORCYCLE RACING
MOTOGP AND SUPERBIKE
