MotoGP is 100 times more compelling and impressive than any type of four-wheeled racing, and it should be, if not a top-five sport, at least more popular than the goddamned NHL. Which it’s not.

The world famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway has a policy, possibly related to how world famous it is, against releasing official attendance figures for the events it hosts. Nevertheless, conventional wisdom has it that on Indy 500 day there’s an ass in every one of the 250,000 or so grandstand seats on the premises, plus a small city’s worth of revelers going HAM in the infield. The Indy is basically Woodstock (with a demographic that’s the opposite of Woodstock’s), and it happens every year. Google Image it. It’s pretty amazing, especially when you consider that, at this point in the continuing saga of the United States zeitgeist, the race—which, in terms of socioeconomic-strata- and region-spanning popularity, used to be something like what the Kentucky Derby also no longer is—retains about as much cultural cachet as New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

On the other hand, at the Red Bull Indianapolis GP a couple weeks ago—part of MotoGP, the motorcycle equivalent of Formula One auto racing—unofficial attendance at the Brickyard was, according to media-center scuttlebutt, between 60,000 and 70,000. Not bad if you’re the promoter and you’ve designed your budget properly, but it’s impossible to overstate how wan and tumbleweed-strewn the facility—whose 1,025-acre immensity TV doesn’t even begin to capture—seems when occupied by that number of people. If you’ve been to Busch Gardens ten minutes after the passing of a named tropical storm, you have some frame of reference.

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