VOLUME 57 ISSUE 2 JANUARY 14, 2020 P89
main event, and where we're going with the AFT
Twins for next year, which we've now renamed
SuperTwins, is that the population of the grid
for the main is known before the races start, it's
just a question of qualifying and getting the grid
positions for the main. We will still run practice
and qualifying, and two semi-finals to set grid
position for the main, but if you've turned up to
race in SuperTwins, barring a disaster of you
breaking all your bikes or breaking yourself,
you're going to be racing the main event.
Are you saying that you won't accept
more than 16 entries for SuperTwins?
No, what we'll be doing for SuperTwins in
2020, is we will be limiting to 14 riders the
number of season-long entries by teams, and
we will have up to four wild cards per race. So
we will have a grid of somewhere
between 14 and 18, I suspect 18,
at pretty much all the races. And it
not only gives all our hundreds of
thousands of new fans, who are not
experts in the sport, they've just been
attracted to it because it's exciting,
it gives them a much easier way to
follow the sport, to follow their heroes
and their villains, seeing the same
guys on the same bikes each week.
Of course, in other motorcycle sports
we take this for granted—in Super-
cross, or MotoGP, or World Super-
bike you expect to see the same guys
turn up every week, racing for the
same teams on the same bikes, you
would never think otherwise. Well,
flat track doesn't have a long tradition
of this, so we're trying to change it.
You talk about hundreds of
thousands of spectators follow-
ing it, but you do have millions
watching it live on links around the
world. Has your global following in-
creased, held steady, or declined?
It's increased substantially. We're
now recording an average viewership
for each race of around 305,000
people. So obviously across an 18-
race season, that's somewhere just
short of four million, and to put it into
perspective, before we had the NBC
deal, before we had YouTube Live
and Facebook Live, basically the only
way that you could see AFT was to
buy a ticket and to go to an event.
And we had, on average, about
5000 people do that for each race.
So we've gone from 5000 a race to
305,000 a race. So the sport has
grown exponentially, and continues
to do so.
(Above) Lock strongly believes that the Singles
class is the future of the sport. (Below) Still, the
main focus is the rebranded AFT SuperTwins class,
where the elite, such as Jared Mees (1) and Briar
Bronson (14) vie for the ultimate flat track prize.
