The Need for Scorecards in Motorcycle Racing

In the 1880s Harry M. Stevens, an entrepreneurial Englishman, came to the US, fell in love with baseball, and started a business selling stuff to fans. He arguably invented the hot dog, but he certainly invented the baseball scorecard, selling millions of them using the tag line, “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” He knew fans got more involved in the sport when they knew the players’ names and numbers and charted the action themselves; they also attended more games (and bought more hot dogs). Baseball scorecards have been a fixture of the game ever since.

Fast-forward 120 years and cross the Atlantic. In 2008 a support series called the SEAT Leon Championship—a one-make series using Spanish SEAT (a VW subsidiary) cars—runs with the British Touring Car Championship. The cars are all the same except for the liveries, and the drivers are relatively unknown. How can the fans tell who’s who and what’s what?

Another entrepreneurial Brit has an idea. A designer named Andy Blackmore reasons that the fans need a graphic reference showing each car as it will appear on track, color illustrations of the cars including numbers, driver names, and sponsors—all the information needed to make sense of the races. Blackmore puts the graphics into a kind of “scorecard” he calls a Spotter’s Guide, which is supported by SEAT and the BTCC. The following year ITV Sport, the television presenter of the series, picks up the Spotter’s Guide to use in their coverage of the races. Blackmore then produces Spotter’s Guides for the Le Mans 24 hour and several UK events and, following his predecessor Harry M. Stevens, sets up shop in the US.

I don’t follow car racing much during motorcycle racing season, but in the winter I keep an eye out for other motorsports action. I first saw a Spotter’s Guide in this year’s run-up to the Rolex 24 Hour sports-car race at Daytona. Checking out the qualifying field online I found a handsome, downloadable graphic presentation of the 54-car field, a section of which is shown in the illustration above.

Blackmore told me Spotter's Guides are funded not only by the race organizers (IMSA in the case of the Rolex 24) but also by car sponsors, who get more exposure to both home viewers and trackside spectators. Whether online or on TV, the race leaders usually get the most air time, while the backmarkers are seldom shown. The Spotter's Guide evens the playing field, giving basically equal coverage to each entrant in static rather than moving form so the images can be studied in detail.

A Spotter’s Guide would be a great tool for motorcycle racing fans—even for me. I’ve followed MotoGP for many years, since long before it was MotoGP. With MotoGP, Moto2, and Moto3, there are about 90 bikes and riders on the track during any given race weekend. I’m familiar with many—but by no means all of them—and I’m a relative expert. Some friends of mine who follow MotoGP don’t even watch Moto2 or Moto3 because they don’t know the riders or the bikes.

Sponsors benefit as much as fans. During the race you can’t see all the sponsor liveries at the same scale and graphic quality without something like a Spotter’s Guide, which allows sponsors to see where their liveries succeed or fail to attract attention and helps them find ways to improve their corporate images.

It's no coincidence that Andy Blackmore's core business (andyblackmoredesign.com) is providing racing livery designs for the motorsports industry. He's been comparing his own livery designs to his competitors' work for many years now through his Spotter's Guides, and in my view he's developed an expert's eye for what works most effectively.

Like the baseball scorecard, Spotter’s Guides can bring racing fans closer to the sports they love. Let’s hope, for experts and potential fans alike, we see Spotter’s Guides in motorcycle racing soon.

James Parker designed his first original motorcycle in 1971; his most recent design is the Mission R electric superbike. In between, he worked on multiple other motorcycle projects, including 30 years spent evolving the RADD front suspension system used on the Yamaha GTS1000 and various other prototypes.

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