American motorsport has never lacked confidence. From NASCAR’s thunder to IndyCar’s oval wars, the US has always known how to make racing loud, proud and unmissable. MotoGP, for all its brilliance, has never quite cracked that code. Justin Marks thinks he knows why, and he is not shy about saying it.
Now in his third season as the only American team owner in MotoGP, Marks sat down with Motorsport.com this week to lay out exactly what he believes the sport needs to do. His message was direct. Racing series have historically been too slow to make big changes or try new things. MotoGP needs to encourage risk taking and investment. When an opportunity arrives to bring the series to a new audience or region, you act decisively and go for it.
That is not corporate speak. That is a man who has spent his career backing instincts over convention. Marks built Trackhouse Racing into one of NASCAR’s most talked about outfits in just a few years, then took the calculated gamble of entering MotoGP before Liberty Media had even finalised its takeover of the series. The timing was deliberate. The vision was clear.
Liberty Media Changes Everything
Formula 1 is the obvious comparison. Before Liberty arrived, F1 was a closed shop, brilliant on track, opaque off it, and largely invisible to casual American audiences. Then Drive to Survive happened. Social media exploded. Suddenly F1 had tens of millions of new US fans who had never watched a Grand Prix in their lives.
MotoGP has the same raw material. The racing is arguably more dramatic, the stories are just as compelling, and the access to riders is far greater. What it has lacked is the machine to amplify those stories to a mass audience.
Marks believes Liberty will change that. He expects expansion to accelerate, pointing to a group of smart people who have invested significant money in the championship for a reason and have spent time defining a long term growth strategy. The blueprint already exists. They wrote it with F1. Now they need to execute it on two wheels.
Trackhouse As The Bridge
Marks is not just talking. Trackhouse Racing is itself the bridge between American sports culture and MotoGP. The team is the only one in the series currently operating without a title sponsor, which tells its own story about the commercial gap that still exists between MotoGP and the US market. But Marks is not panicking. He says interest from investors has increased significantly since Liberty announced its acquisition, with meaningful discussions already underway around sponsorship, marketing, brand positioning and fan engagement.
The team runs Ai Ogura and Raul Fernandez on Aprilia machinery as a full factory satellite operation. Marks describes the Aprilia relationship as exactly what he wanted from day one, a genuine factory partnership running the same equipment and contributing to development. That is not a team just filling a grid slot. That is a serious operation building toward something bigger.
The Window Is Open
MotoGP’s 2026 season has given Liberty and the teams something powerful to sell. Bezzecchi’s dominant championship run, the Aprilia versus Ducati factory war, Marquez fighting injury and form, Toprak Razgatlioglu making his MotoGP debut, the storylines write themselves.
COTA proved the appetite is there. The grandstands were full. The crowd was loud. American fans showed up and got exactly what MotoGP always promises.
The question is whether the sport is bold enough to convert that energy into something lasting. Justin Marks has already placed his bet. Now he wants MotoGP to do the same.
The window will not stay open forever.
