VOLUME 56 ISSUE 31 AUGUST 6, 2019 P87
"The app has exceeded our
expectations," says Chuck Ak-
sland. "We had goals with it set
from the beginning of the year,
and it passed them by race two.
The feedback is good. It's a high-
quality production. We have a
lot of Europeans that subscribe
and have the choice to watch
it whenever they want. I'm kind
of surprised by the number of
people—maybe I shouldn't be
because I'm kind of a gear head
myself for motorcycle racing, but
the number of people that watch
five hours on a Saturday and five
hours on a Sunday over a week-
end is pretty amazing."
Aksland also noted the cham-
pionship has been experimenting
with running full races on the
MotoAmerica Facebook page.
Due to television contracts with
Fox and NBC, these races need
to be shown three weeks after
the conclusion of the meet-
ing. However, by leveraging the
followers from 14 MotoAmerica
sponsors, including Dunlop,
EBC Brakes and VP Racing fuel,
MotoAmerica has the potential to
reach five million sets of eyeballs
for one race—and it doesn't have
to be Superbike.
"The Supersport race in Utah
we had 130,000 views in total,"
says Aksland, but this was be-
cause the race was streamed on
MotoAmerica's Facebook page
only. "We had a contact at Face-
book who suggested leveraging
the partners' followers, so we
will be doing that for the Laguna
[Seca] round where we'll show
the Stock 1000 race and another
Supersport race. The good thing
is we know the view times—they
are not 15 minutes, but more like
30-40 minutes."
With more eyes than ever
scrutinizing the series, it's lucky
the racing in 2019 has been
consistently good across every
class, even if it's the same four of
Cameron Beaubier, Josh Herrin,
Toni Elias and Garrett Gerloff at
the head of the Superbike field.
This puts into focus Mo-
toAmerica's insistence to imple-
ment World Superbike-spec
Norris Racing's
Michael Gilbert
leads at VIR.
The Stock 1000
class has been
growing in
stature
this year.
