~ THE HANKY-PANKY ~

50ml gin
25ml Italian vermouth
5-10ml Fernet-Branca

Place an elegant cocktail glass in the freezer. Now you're going to make a cocktail. Measure the gin, the vermouth and the FB and s…

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~ THE FIG MARTINI ~

One black fig
One fig leaf
30ml vodka
30ml gin
10ml French vermouth
10ml Italian vermouth

Fans of instant gratification, look away now, for this one involves an infusion. Slice a ripe bl…

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I was drinking a Gin and Tonic in my sister's garden on a recent family occasion, when two small nieces began a clapping game nearby. Their song went like this:

"I went to a Chinese restaurant
To buy a…

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Friends —

I left my phone on the plane on my way back from France. It had been such a restful week, in spite of the insane heat, really just one long rollover lunch, French supermarkets are the best. …

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Friends, if all has gone to plan, I will be in Burgundy while you read this — possibly drinking a Kir Royale made with local cassis and Aligoté. And so, I thought I'd regift you this old post from a …

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Friends, as you read this I am — well not on holiday quite yet but I soon will be. So I thought for the next couple of weeks, I would unlock a couple of useful 'Cabinet' posts. Here is everything you…

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~ BLUE CURAÇAO ~

Orange liqueur that is blue / 15-35% ABV / £15-£30 for 700ml.
Friends with: rum; pineapple, coconut, almond, citrus, tropical fruits; cocktail umbrellas, gardenias, etc. But frankly it goes with almost everything in the cocktail universe and especially lightly coloured things: gin, pisco, French vermouth, etc.

Curaçao (pop. 157,000) may have exited the World Cup at the group stage, suffering a 7-1 defeat to Germany on the way but the achievement of this tiny island nation in qualifying at all is really something to celebrate. Not only was it the smallest nation ever to qualify for football's premier competition; it was also the first cocktail ingredient ever to do so — and under the management of a man named Advocaat too. Liqueur aficionados will further note how fitting it is that the team has a core of "orange", i.e. Dutch players, renationalised from the Curaçaoan diaspora within the Netherlands. And yet they play in blue, too — which, as everyone who has sipped a Blue Lagoon under a palm will know, is the colour of tropical dreams.

But why? Why? Why did they make curaçao blue? Here we must follow the dream logic of Paul Éluard's classic surrealist sonnet: "La terre est bleue" (1929), which opens with the lines: "La terre est bleue comme une orange / Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas" ("The Earth is blue, like an orange / It's not a mistake, words don't lie"). Like the best nonsense, this is not entirely nonsense. The Earth of course is blue — and it is also like an orange in that both are round; and so it follows that the Earth is blue like an orange. By the same reasoning, a Martini is transparent like the Sahara, while Campari is bitter like the planet Mars. And so, according to wisdom of the glass camels of Timbuktu and the resentful Martians of Olympus Mons, a liqueur made of oranges must be blue. This arcane truth cannot have been far from the minds of the creators of the Franco-Belgian live action Tintin movie, Tintin and the Blue Oranges (1964), in which Prof. Calculus invents a special orange that can solve world hunger — and this orange is, of course, blue.

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A cursory history of Curaçao

Anyway. Curaçao is a small island off the coast of Venezuela not far from Aruba. It was Columbused by the Spanish in 1499 who promptly enslaved the 2,000 or so native Coquetio tribespeople, shipping them off to Hispaniola. The European colonisers brought with them Valencia oranges, with the intention of starting some groves and nipping scurvy in the bud. Only the oranges didn't do so well in the dry climate and salty soil, evolving instead into a distinctly hard, bitter citrus known locally as the laraha. The laraha is orange, like a resentful lover. Larahahahaha.

But there was, quite literally, a bitter twist. The laraha isn't much good for juicing but it does give excellent peel — a quality noted by the Dutch, who came to "own" the island in 1634 under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company. Indeed, in another piece of cocktail-themed history, Curaçao was briefly administered by Peter Stuyvesant, who would go on to be the Director General of New Amsterdam, an island colony up in North America, which he would later swap with the British for nutmeg. As fond as I am of a grating of nutmeg over my Blue Mai Tais, I am not sure I would exchange it for all of Manhattan.

But I digress. Curaçao the liqueur is generally acknowledged to have been created by the venerable Bols company — founded in Amsterdam, 1575 — whose distillers exploited the delicious bitter rinds that the Dutch West India Company merchants were bringing back from the colonies in order to create a fine orange liqueur. And curaçao became popular. If you've spent much time perusing old time cocktail books (I mean the really old ones, like Jerry Thomas) you will surely have noticed that "orange liqueur" is always referred to as curaçao. (French triple sec came later — and Cointreau only really took hold in the 1920s.) Most of this "curaçao" was made in places like Amsterdam or Turin or Seville as opposed to Curaçao. Neverthless, a domestic market for this stuff developed too. The Senior & Co company — founded by one of many Sephardic Jewish families who settled on Curaçao — opened a commercial distillery near Willemstad in 1896, and to this day is the only company that makes true curaçao, i.e. curaçao from Curaçao using authentic laraha fruits cultivated on the island itself.

How did curaçao become blue?

It's worth noting that these early curaçaos would have been transparent or slightly orange. It was only later, as commercial food dyes became common, that curaçao would gain its lapis lazuli hue. Still, in the Café Royal book of 1937, curaçao is described as a "sweet digestive liqueur from the Dutch West Indies" that can be coloured, wait for it, red, white, blue, green and orange. It was only later — from the 1960s on, really — that blue gained pre-eminence, most likely because a) it has a tendency to make drinks look like a tropical lagoon and b) no other foodstuff is blue which makes it instantly stand out. And so from the 1960s on, the stuff became synonymous with holiday drinks: the Blue Hawaiian, the Blue Lagoon, the Swimming Pool, and so on. These are the sort of drinks that come with umbrellas and tiki mugs and gardenia blossoms and hopefully a friendly dolphin garnish like this one:

Nevertheless, with my pedant hat on, for all its tiki associations, BC is not an ingredient Don the Beachcomber or Trader Vic much used. In fact, the annals of actually venerable blue curaçao tiki cocktails are relatively small. It was really much more popular in the Disco era of the 1970s and 1980s through until the 1990s when it took hold and it took hold for precisely the same reason my five-year-old begs me for blue slushies at the ice cream van, i.e. it really looks like the sort of thing you should not drink.

It bears stating that as much as you and I like to think of cocktails as a sophisticated business, and the likes of Michters and Foursquare as the great standard bearers of our movement, I'm afraid this is not the case. The UK's fastest-growing alcohol brand is in fact the Swansea-based Au Vodka, and now that I've pointed this out you will notice their gold bottles and amusing glassware in Duty-Frees from Magaluf to Ayia Napa. These contain such "ultra premium" delights as Blue Raspberry vodka, (blue) Bubblegum vodka and, yes, Blue Hawaiian RTD (five-times distilled you understand).

So the thing about blue curaçao is, you have to make peace with the fact that it is the opposite of "authentic" and "hand-crafted" and "natural". Even the most "classic" blue cocktail, the Blue Hawaii, was commissioned by the Bols company in order to sell more blue curaçao. And while there is no earthly reason why blue curaçao cannot be well-made — there are some half-decent ones out there, including the Senior & Co. version — it is not in most cocktails because it tastes great. It is in most cocktails because it is blue. I have the semi-respectable Edmond Briottet version and it is approximately six times not as nice as the Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao and four times not as nice as Cointreau. But I haven't poured it down the sink! No. Because it looks cool — and it is not so offensive flavourwise as to upset the balance of most sweet drinks. I particularly like using it in slightly unexpected contexts such as, well, this:

I can see you shaking your head, Stanley Tucci, but the thing you must ask yourself is this: why do you think Campari is red, dum-dum? That stuff is full of food colouring too! And if you admire the futurist dash of the Carousel, then you should not turn up your nose at my Blue Raspberry Sgroppino (above). As much as I like my Martinis dry and my Negronis stirred, Stanley, I am fond of blue curaçao. It is at once populist and avant-garde; it is Love Island Futurism; it is Katy Perry Cosmism; it is electric surrealism. The cocktail has tides, like the ocean. Recipes below the line.

SOME MORE ESSAYS IN THIS AMUSING VEIN

~ THE KENTUCKY BUCK ~

Two strawberries
60ml bourbon
15ml lemon (or let's be real, lime) juice
10ml golden sugar syrup
Angostura bitters
~150ml ginger beer (I used Fentiman's)

Catch a strawberry, trap it in …

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What do we have here?

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No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: "Really I must buy a pencil," as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter-rambling the streets of London.

 The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, "Take it!" she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul-as travellers do. All this-Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul-rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. "The man's a devil!" said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

 But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.

 How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light-windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars-lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which—-She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?

But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only-the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers' shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists' windows.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter's night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we may ask, as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: "What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?"

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed. She needed their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling indulgently, had asked for shoes for "this lady" and the girl had pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our attention. Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which she was hot afraid of being looked at but positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting. Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The shop girl good-humouredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But, after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.

But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them, marched down the street. On they came with the unyielding yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them. As they passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers-by with the momentum of its silence, its directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed: the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it-all joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf's dance.

In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold beaters, accordion pleaters, cover buttons, or support life, with even greater fantasticality, upon a traffic in cups without saucers, china umbrella handles, and highly-coloured pictures of martyred saints. There they lodge, and it seems as if the lady in the sealskin jacket must find life tolerable, passing the time of day with the accordion pleater, or the man who covers buttons; life which is so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic. They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered.  Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone's throw from theatres, within hearing of barrel organs, almost, as night draws on, within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers. They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on doorsteps, of blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many coloured fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars' heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is sportive and generous; it creates; it adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and furnish them at one's will with sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But, having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to possess it; one can dismantle it in the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses. Or let us indulge ourselves at the antique jewellers, among the trays of rings and the hanging necklaces. Let us choose those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed. It becomes instantly between two and three in the morning; the lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of Mayfair. Only motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of airiness, of secluded gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps out onto a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping Mayfair. There are a few lights in the bedrooms of great peers returned from Court, of silk-stockinged footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the hands of statesmen. A cat creeps along the garden wall. Love-making is going on sibilantly, seductively in the darker places of the room behind thick green curtains. Strolling sedately as if he were promenading a terrace beneath which the shires and counties of England lie sun-bathed, the aged Prime Minister recounts to Lady So-and-So with the curls and the emeralds the true history of some great crisis in the affairs of the land. We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly, as we stand on the balcony watching the moonlit cat creep along Princess Mary's garden wall.

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter's evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with scepticism and solitude. When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller's wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. 0 no, they don't live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind's inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller's wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman's library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned untimely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and sententious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong industry stood in jagged column upon the floor. In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the gospels; scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fiction. Innumerable volumes tell how Arthur loved Laura and they were separated and they were unhappy and then they met and they were happy ever after, as was the way when Victoria ruled these islands.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime. It is about a woman called Kate that they are talking, how "I said to her quite straight last night … if you don't think I'm worth a penny stamp, I said …" But who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship that penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the warmth of their volubility; and here, at the street corner, another page of the volume of life is laid open by the sight of two men consulting under the lamp-post. They are spelling out the latest wire from Newmarket in the stop press news. Do they think, then, that fortune will ever convert their rags into fur and broadcloth, sling them with watch-chains, and plant diamond pins where there is now a ragged open shirt? But the main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too fast to let us ask such questions. They are wrapt, in this short passage from work to home, in some narcotic dream, now that they are free from the desk, and have the fresh air on their cheeks. They put on those bright clothes which they must hang up and lock the key upon all the rest of the day, and are great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need. Dreaming, gesticulating, often muttering a few words aloud, they sweep over the Strand and across Waterloo Bridge whence they will be slung in long rattling trains, to some prim little villa in Barnes or Surbiton where the sight of the clock in the hall and the smell of the supper in the basement puncture the dream.

But we have come to the Strand now, and as we hesitate on the curb, a little rod about the length of one's finger begins to lay its bar across the velocity and abundance of life. "Really I must-really I must"-that is it. Without investigating the demand, the mind cringes to the accustomed tyrant. One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil. But just as we are turning to obey the command, another self disputes the right of the tyrant to insist. The usual conflict comes about. Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames-wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person-and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then-calm, aloof, content? Let us try then. But the river is rougher and greyer than we remembered. The tide is running out to sea. It brings down with it a tug and two barges, whose load of straw is tightly bound down beneath tarpaulin covers. There is, too, close by us, a couple leaning over the balustrade with the curious lack of self-consciousness lovers have, as if the importance of the affair they are engaged on claims without question the indulgence of the human race. The sights we see and the sounds we hear now have none of the quality of the past; nor have we any share in the serenity of the person who, six months ago, stood precisely where we stand now. His is the happiness of death; ours the insecurity of life. He has no future; the future is even now invading our peace. It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace. As it is, we must turn, we must cross the Strand again, we must find a shop where, even at this hour, they will be ready to sell us a pencil.

It is always an adventure to enter a new room for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it, and directly we enter it we breast some new wave of emotion. Here, without a doubt, in the stationer's shop people had been quarrelling. Their anger shot through the air. They both stopped; the old woman-they were husband and wife evidently-retired to a back room; the old man whose rounded forehead and globular eyes would have looked well on the frontispiece of some Elizabethan folio, stayed to serve us. "A pencil, a pencil," he repeated, "certainly, certainly." He spoke with the distraction yet effusiveness of one whose emotions have been roused and checked in full flood. He began opening box after box and shutting them again. He said that it was very difficult to find things when they kept so many different articles. He launched into a story about some legal gentleman who had got into deep waters owing to the conduct of his wife. He had known him for years; he had been connected with the Temple for half a century, he said, as if he wished his wife in the back room to overhear him. He upset a box of rubber bands. At last, exasperated by his incompetence, he pushed the swing door open and called out roughly: "Where d'you keep the pencils?" as if his wife had hidden them. The old lady came in. Looking at nobody, she put her hand with a fine air of righteous severity upon the right box. There were pencils. How then could he do without her? Was she not indispensable to him? In order to keep them there, standing side by side in forced neutrality, one had to be particular in one's choice of pencils; this was too soft, that too hard. They stood silently looking on. The longer they stood there, the calmer they grew; their heat was going down, their anger disappearing. Now, without a word said on either side, the quarrel was made up. The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson's title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.

In these minutes in which a ghost has been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty. Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver. Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer's shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here-let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence-is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.

Penda's Fen by David Rudkin — A Davis-Poynter TV Script of a BBC Pebble Mill Production (excerpts)

Young Stephen, in the last summer of his boyhood, has somehow awakened a buried force in the landscape around him. It is trying to communicate some warning, a peril he is in; some secret knowledge; some choice he must make, some mission for which he is marked down.

First published in 1975 by Davis Poynter Limited.

Copyright © 1973 by David Rudkin.

All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance or reading should be made before rehearsal to Margaret Ramsay Limited, 14a Goodwin's Court, St. Martins Lane, London WC2, England. No performance may he given unless a licence has been obtained.

ISBN 0 7067 0187 9

Printed in Great Britain by Biddies Limited Guildford Surrey.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This represents the finalized shooting-script from which PENDA'S FEN was made. I say 'represents' because my very elaborate technical instructions (for camerawork, lighting, soundtrack, etc.) I have removed; instead, I have sought to convey the resultant effects expressively to the reader's inner eye and ear.

I cannot pay tribute enough to the unsparing self-commitment or the crew and actors to what proved an exhausting and at times quite frightening task: the film itself is their best testament. But I must, without being invidious, single out for particular gratitude the producer, David Rose, who, far from being daunted by my first synopsis, virtually insisted PENDA into existence, and quietly removed every administrative and financial barrier that might have fallen in it's way. I must try to thank also the director, Alan Clarke, for his deep stillness and moral integrity in its realization - a director gifted with that rarest and most significant director's gift of all, the gift of standing out of his own light.

D R

STEPHEN Spencer Banks, MRS FRANKLIN Georgine Anderson, THE REVEREND J FRANKLIN John Atkinson, JOEL Ron Smerczak, HEADMASTER John Richmond, ARNE Ian Hogg, MRS ARNE Jennie Heslewood, SIR NICHOLAS POLE John Scott, BROTT Roy Preston, HARRY Ian Gemmell, MRS GISBOURNE Joyce Grundy, COOKE Ivor Roberts, SIXTH FORMER Moray Black, HONEYBONE Christopher Douglas, COUNCIL WORKMAN Frank Veasey, NURSE Elizabeth Reville, JOEL'S GIRL Pat Bowker, SIR EDWARD Graham Leaman, MRS KINGS Helena McCarthy, THE LADY Joan Scott, THE MAN Ray Gatenby, KING PENDA Geoffrey Staines, DEMON Geoffrey Pennells & ANGEL Martin Reynolds.

Film Camerman: Michael Williams, Operator: Ken Morgan, Sound Recordist: John Gilbert, Sound Mixer: David Baumber, Film Editor: Henry Fowler, Costume: Joyce Hawkins, Make Up: Jan Nethercott, Special Effects: Clifford Gulley, Animation: Bernard Lodge, Radiophonic Sound: Paddy Kingsland, Design: Michael Edwards, Script Editor: Tara Prem, Producer: David Rose, Director: Alan Clarke.

First transmitted on Thursday, 21st March 1974 (as 'Play for Today') by BBC Television.

A loud crunching chord: strings break out, an ambling soaring open-country tune*. High summer. As though liberated, by his little victory, from the spell of COOKE, STEPHEN now, in shirt and jeans, pedals his old bicycle through the coloured landscapes of the Elgar country. The purple wrinkled hills of Malvern are now somewhat nearer, larger, more physically present than before. Slowly, slowly, as he pedals, handfree, whistling the glorious tune itself, the hills seem to turn towards him as, picture by picture, he crosses the landscape.

Now the music breaks up into rapid movement, gathering in excitement towards a climax. STEPHEN's shadow races along the surface of the lane. He freewheels down a steep tree-lined bank; hurtles wildly round a corner in a village, scuffing the dry road with his feet for a brake. The high hedges, flowered banks, arching treetops, streak past him in lines. The blind-hedged twisting and curving lane leaps towards the jumping racing handlebars. At the peak of the music, the violins leap up to a piercing high note like a shriek of lightning; up from the lane-surface, like an ascending diver from the floor of a pool, swoops the DEMON of STEPHEN's dream, his eyes, jaw, smile and mouth - The music vanishes; STEPHEN falls; his bicycle clatters riderless to the ground against a steep ditch; STEPHEN rolls onto the grass bank-edge, still, stunned. The bicycle lies, its wheel spinning: we hear its whirr and click. STEPHEN lies, unconscious.

* Again, from Elgar 'Introduction and Allegro': the reprise of the main 'second subject' theme, towards the principal climax of the piece.

Unnatural silence. Unnatural stillness. The light and colours are dry, a little too bright to be real. The bicycle: but it lies in a different posture and position; and not by the steep grass bank, but before a wooden five-bar gate - and on the surface of a road, its rear wheel still, silent. Far from it, and in the 'wrong' direction - where he could not possibly have landed - lies STEPHEN, stunned, unconscious: again, not by the bank, but on flat grass shoulder of a level road. A soft muttering: voice of JOFFER indistinctly grumbling to himself. STEPHEN is awake. He is raising his head. We are at the junction with the Pinvin road across the fen. There seems to be nothing surprising to STEPHEN in this.

Now he sees where the grumbling sound is coming from: the trestles, diversion board blocking the road. JOFFER, his back to us, is with dark deliberate action peeling away the pasted V from PINVIN. STEPHEN glances back over his left shoulder to the signpost. On signpost, no sack: its black letters spell PINFIN. STEPHEN looks toward diversion board again. JOFFER is moving away; board reads PINFIN, just as he had painted it. STEPHEN looks up toward signpost again. Is puzzled by what he sees. Signpost's white is unnaturally luminously bright. Black letters spell (plain English script) PENDEFEN. STEPHEN has turned toward road again. Trestles, diversion board have gone. Road leads away, unbarred, onto fen landscape, across which strange light-and-shadow plays.

Now STEPHEN stands. And suddenly we are that unseen presence again, rising behind him, taller than he; following him onto the open fen. Then we see STEPHEN coming forward, as drawn. His breathing becomes sexually deep, we hear it. Then a new sound: a muted chopping. It is coming from behind him. He turns.

Before him now, stone terraced steps lead up between ornamental lawns towards the black-and-white facade of a half-timbered manor house. STEPHEN is going up the steps. The house itself is like an extended version of the smaller half-timbered house before which JOEL's milkfloat killed the sparrow. STEPHEN finds himself in a wonderland of billiard-table lawns, topiary bushes and dark-green hedges of yew that seem cut velvet-smooth. Everywhere, lyrical gardenbird-song. The chopping sound seems to come from beyond one of these hedges.

STEPHEN comes round the hedge. A party of people, fine and healthy, as near to Eden innocence as is consonant with setting, children with them, are grouped in various relaxed poses upon the ancestral lawn, waiting their turn, happy, noisy-looking (yet no human sound), eyes bright as on brink of some redemption. STEPHEN looks where their fond expectant gazes are.

In middle of lawn, a large tree stump, sawn table-flat. An impeccably dressed man in middle age, in build and sartorial immaculacy rather like Hitchcock, is waiting for the next person to come to the stump. The stump drips with blood. He has a butcher's axe. No blood has spattered the AXEMAN at all. A MOTHER with a LITTLE GIRL come to him. AXEMAN gestures, with courtesy, a gentle little patient smile, 'Little girl first, please'. LITTLE GIRL obediently places hands on stump. MOTHER looks at her, proud, privileged. AXEMAN wields axe.

STEPHEN watches. He shows no emotion. Chop. Chop. Muted sound of little girl laughing. He watches, expressionless, the figure of the LITTLE GIRL run gaily off in her party frock, waving her stumps.

AXEMAN takes little severed hands, throws them down behind stump. He has a methodical unhurried address to his task: to him it is a sort of necessary social editing. MOTHER lays her own hands on stump, panting in anticipation.

STEPHEN stands paralyzed against the hedge. Emerging from the group, coming towards him, are the MAN and LADY of the newspaper-photograph he showed us during his speech at the school debate: the 'father and mother of England', who had succeeded in having the television 'Jesus' programme banned. They are coming for STEPHEN, their faces transfigured, their arms raised as in that photo, reaching in welcome to bring him to the stump. - STEPHEN is shaking his head, his lips trying to fashion the words No No! But no sound comes, and he cannot move.

Then the real, Worcestershire voice of JOEL is speaking:

JOEL (VOICE): You all right, squire? You all right?

(His features unclear in a blinding dazzle of sunlight, JOEL is looking anxiously down at us, his face questioning.

STEPHEN is coming to. JOEL's face is clearer now. We see that STEPHEN lies where he originally fell: by the steep grass bank. Now STEPHEN sees this. Nearby, rear wheel of bicycle still spins: wheel whirr. He sees, too, JOEL's milkfloat: it has braked sharply, skidding at an angle in mid-road. JOEL puts arms round STEPHEN's shoulder to help him up:)

JOEL: Come chargin' down that hill right into me.

(It suddenly dawns on STEPHEN whose arm this is. The old tension, guilt-panic awakens in him; he pulls to be desperately free. JOEL misunderstands, grips more tightly, personally:)

JOEL: Hey . . Hey . .

(He will not let STEPHEN go. STEPHEN becomes aware of his own hands touching JOEL's shoulder or arms. He leaves them there, using them to brace him as they stand. He commits himself to the contact, drawing his hands down a little, frankly toward his waist. JOEL now understands what STEPHEN's attitude is, has always been. It all makes sense. Hard, but not brutal, and not over-compassionate either, he removes STEPHEN's hands; yet does not thrust them from him.)

JOEL: Sorry. Just help you up, that's all.

(He looks STEPHEN straight in eye. STEPHEN, after hesitation, finds honesty in himself to do the same. It is not easy. It is done.)

JOEL: (Quite hard.) That's all.

(Their hands separate: a frank withdrawal.

A GIRL sits in passenger seat in float. Now she calls out:)

JOEL'S GIRL: Joel?

JOEL: (To her) He'm all right, dove. We 'a'n't killed him.

STEPHEN: (Rather strenuously, to her.) I'm all right:

JOEL: He'll get over it.

(He looks at STEPHEN: a mere brutal acceptance; no yielding. He goes back to float. STEPHEN watches. Engine sound. Float straightens, passes him. JOEL makes a quite objective formal gesture at him. STEPHEN waves back, his gesture incomplete. He feels a new acceptedness.)

Inside the church. It is plain, neither rich nor pretty. Sun-light through high windows. The West Door heavily of)cos towards us. STEPHEN conies quietly in; in shirt, jews. lie quietly shuts door behind him. He comes along aisle. He has a book with him. We hear his footfalls, the occasional creak here or there of beam or pew. He goes to the organ. He stands there before it a moment. He switches on the organ i light; and we see there, also, an organist's mirror - into which the player can glance while playing, to see what is happening in the service behind him in the church. Now STEPHEN swings his legs over the organist's bench, careful not to depress the long pedal-arms beneath. He switches the organ on: a deep, faint, almost inaudible droning hum. He rests the book before him on the music-rest. He has the look of someone about to try a long-pondered spell. He opens the book, presses the first two or three turned leaves flat against the music-rest, to lie there still and not to close again.

Before us now, the heading on the recto page: THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS, Edward Elgar. It is the 'vocal' score, with the orchestral parts arranged for keyboard. Above first staves of music the word 'Prelude'. Above first bars, pencilled capitals: 'Motif of Judgment'. The first few bars themselves have single minims and crotchets spaced along the lower stave, bound beneath one long curving slur.

STEPHEN considers these. He is working out in his head what colouring this opening music needs. He pulls a stop, another. Then slowly he begins to play. It is a solemn and lonely-sounding phrase, this 'motif of Judgment': deep-hued, veiled and plaintive tones that fall from a note, fall from it again, slowly rise up to it, then a step, another step above; then rest back onto that note again where they began. STEPHEN plays on; the music begins to arouse itself - but after two notes, he pauses; stops. Somewhere in the church, a creak. And always, that deep faint organ hum. Out of habit he glances into the mirror, but of course the church is empty.

We see what STEPHEN does not see. We look along the flat gravestones of the aisle, between the towering pew ends, toward the West Door.

STEPHEN turns the page, looking for the next passage he wants to play. He finds it. Large wide-spaced chords to be sustained, with shorter crotchet-phrases to he interjected during then: above these, the pencilled words 'His Cry'. Already STEPHEN is playing: the chords high, solemn and pleading, over their deep roots in the bass, and an off-beat heavy treading, figure stark within them. They soon roach a climax, and collapse in syncopated fragments downwards, into silence*.

Organ hum. Along the aisle toward the West Door, the light is darkening.

STEPHEN continues, In the score, the pleading chords of the 'Cry' are now repeated, but in a higher key, giving them more urgency. And, as his hands take the chords and treading-figure, and his feet on the pedals the deep roots in the bass, out of the organ suddenly conies a grand and powerful glorious tone: the boy's music resoundingly transfigured, to move us to tears and chill our spine. And STEPHEN too is moved. Again the climax, the disintegrating collapse, the echoing silence. But for the organ hum. In the aisle threatening to run the length of it to the far West Door, the beginning of a jagged veinlike crack has appeared.

STEPHEN pauses. He turns several pages, many. Then, far into the book, finds page lie seeks. Pencilled capitals 'Angel's Triumph'. Words, notes of vocal line: ' . . soul! For it is safe, consumed yet quickened by the Glance of God!' We hear from afar, as STEPHEN, smiling in recognition, hears in his head: the soaring and swooping Angel-song with which the play began. She comes to her great Alleluia, and our eyes are drawn in along the notes themselves, and in, in, in towards the printed symbol of the crowned towering top A itself. But here the voice and music fade, Organ hum. The crack along the aisle has visibly widened; it 'runs' before our eyes to the far West Door, and veinlike 'tributaries' appear.

Now STEPHEN, unaware of the unnatural darkening in the church around him, prepares to play the crescendo passage that builds toward the climax of the work. His foot takes a low A on the pedal, holds it down; the deep root- sound sustains. Quietly, his hands take the first chords: often clashing with that unchanging bass, these upper harmonies sound unnerving, intense. We hear in them a harsh evolution from that quiet. lonely phrase, the Motif of Judgment, with which STEPHEN began.' And as, louder and tauter, STEPHEN plays now, this evolution continues: the phrases mount and grow; the key changes, the deep pedalpoint falls; the chords pile up, massive and anguished; the key and pedalnote shift again. In the mirror is total blackness; the fissure in the aisle has widened to a chasm; STEPHEN has come to the music's peak.

The moment of terrible silence. His hands rise, fingers stretch, forming to take the keys that will make up the 'fearful dissonance'. The aisle yawns, a torn-edged black engulfing void . . With all the power he can produce from the instrument, he sounds the dissonance. But it is not enough. It is not enough. Suddenly STEPHEN has broken through even this: with hands and feet he adds every other note to the dissonance that he can reach. And holds them down. A piercing discord of unbelievable obscenity.

STEPHEN suddenly sees hellish inky blackness in organ-mirror. His hands quit keyboard in horror. The dissonance vanishes; only the lowest pedalnote remains, a deep C sharp, keeping all its clashing overtones alive in our heads, while through the actual silence a Voice speaks:

VOICE: Stephen … … …

VOICE: (STEPHEN bows head, he dare not turn.)

VOICE: Stephen Franklin

(STEPHEN slowly raises eyes to organ-mirror. Inky darkness there. Dimlit, like detail from Grünwald Crucifixion, the leprous Feet pierced with one ugly cruel nail. The Living Blood drips down.)

VOICE: Unbury me … . Free me from this tree … .

(STEPHEN transfixed. Suddenly pedal C sharp cuts off. Silence. The moment has passed. The aisle is as it was. The church is normal, the sunlight as before. There STEPHEN sits, on the organ-bench, his head bowed from us, arms loosely hanging, self and body drained.)

*This passage is found at rehearsal figure 9 in the score.

FINALE

The Malvern Hills themselves. Their slopes, ridges, lonely, primordial, in summer sunset from the further West. Soft thud and shock of evening wind.

A high ridge-top. Here STEPHEN sits, stone-still, gazing toward setting sun. It is as though he has been summoned here. He waits. His dark motionless form there, seated on the ridge-top, against the sunset sky.

Two forms slowly slowly ascend into view up the Western slope before him. The MAN and LADY. They walk, yet seem not to rise on the balls of their feet. Now they stand before him on the ridge-top, tall against the Western sky, the MAN to one side of him, LADY to he other.

LADY: (Shy, needful) Are you an English boy?

MAN: (Gentle, on brink of ecstasy.) Such a light in his eyes.

LADY: True English boy?

MAN: It is He. It is He. He has the Light.

(STEPHEN, as though under some influence, dumbly can merely look from one to other, daring hardly raise his eyes. MAN, LADY we now see some-what more clearly: the 'father and mother of us all' of Stephen's newspaper photo. They are transfigured with deep still irradiating joy.)

LADY: We knew the Child would come. He has been promised us so long. But that we should find him! It is too lovely to be true!

(MAN reaches out a loving hand to STEPHEN - )

LADY: (Tabu horror) No If we touch Him, He will vanish! (Turns to STEPHEN) It is written.

(STEPHEN terrified: every urge in him resists, compels to flight. He cannot move. He gazes up at MAN, LADY, animal-like in his dumb helplessness.)

MAN: The Child is innocent. He does not know His inheritance. Nor does He know the courage He will need, to exercise His Right in this dark world. Not that they put us to the fire any more. Oh Stephen, Stephen: think of that torment …

(MAN leans close to STEPHEN, consumed with a desperate love: he is like a sonless father, begging his unborn son who refuses to be born, 'Be born!')

MAN: … to be burned. Shackled to the mockery of a tree, and burned. Living, burned away … .

LADY: What torment is that? Through the flames we see Our Lord. He reaches out His Hand to bring us from the shadow of this world. We that were burned, we cried in joy. The Crosstians think we scream: we cry in joy! When we are burned, why, we are turned to Light!

(STEPHEN slowly shaking his head, trying to say No, to move. He cannot. MAN kneels before him, pointing west.) Look. Your Inheritance.

MAN: Look. Your inheritance.

(STEPHEN tries to dredge up the words of denial from within himself: he can only writhe his neck and head.)

MAN: The Kings of the earth, you can govern.

MAN: (Cont) They walk in their sleep. Yours is the Right, to inherit the Power: to will their will.

(LADY kneels close to STEPHEN, who now can merely writhe his head between them.)

MAN: Power, Stephen, to turn the rock of the world to wealth. Power: to fall, and not to die. Like Joan the Maid, to fall, and not to die.

(STEPHEN pauses: this rings some bell in him. It is beginning to steal through him in what mortal danger his soul now is. He still struggles to tear a sound or gesture of denial from himself. He can-not. MAN, LADY become more and more consumed with a desperation to bring him away with them: a passion with no erotic, but a terrifying parental-loving, element.)

LADY: You have to come with us. You are our Child of Light. You have to be born ill us. Then you become Pure Light.

(STEPHEN suddenly finds denial:)

STEPHEN: No! No! I am nothing pure!

(LADY cries out: refusal would he than she could bear, In a moment the will be weeping - )

STEPHEN: Nothing pure … My race is mixed, my sex is mixed, I am woman and man, and light with darkness, mixed, mixed! I am nothing special, nothing pure. I am mud and flame!

("Εγνωκεν αύτόν he has 'discovered himself'. No more now, can myth of being pure anything afflict him or cause him to afflict mankind. It is moment of his rupture, salvation from his false 'father and mother of us all'. And he finds the feet to stand, break from them, run away - )

LADY: (Desperate, afraid) If we cannot have him darkness must not. (Suddenly vicious) Run if you like!

(STEPHEN'S terrible organ-dissonance breaks shatteringly out; STEPHEN is running down the Eastern slope. LADY leaps to her feet, bringing up an instant-develop camera in her hand. She snaps fleeing figure of STEPHEN, one, two times, three. STEPHEN runs stumbling down the slope away from them, not daring look back. LADY rips instant-develop print of STEPHEN out from back of camera. She, MAN are racked with weeping now: knowing they must destroy their Angel rather than let him go to their Enemy. This knowledge breaks their hearts. Their viciousness, sick cruelty, evil shake with gleaming jewel-like tears as MAN brings cigarette-lighter to a lower corner of print; flicks flame; flame takes. The fearful dissonance grinds on. From STEPHEN's stumbling legs on the hillside smoke appears, threatening to burst into flame. The print of him in the LADY'S hand begins to blister. STEPHEN falls, writhing in the thickening smoke that comes from his own body now: he cries out, the sound lost in the dissonance, 'Help me! Help me!' The flame eats across the print, to STEPHEN's left side. STEPHEN himself, his left leg, arm, left side of head scorching, screams in pain. And suddenly, through the dissonance, we can see that his mouth is forming a cry to 'Penda . . ! Penda . . !'

A flash, a double scream: the MAN and LADY vanish in an explosion of flame; and in that same incandescence, amid their falling severed burning limbs, the ancient throned form of PENDA himself appears. And there is silence.)

KING PENDA: There you have seen your true dark enemies of England. Sick Father and Mother, who would have us children for ever.

(STEPHEN frowns, puzzled. He is totally unharmed, his clothes and body whole as before.)

STEPHEN: King Penda . . ?

KING PENDA: Stephen. Our land must live. This land we love must live. Her deep dark flame must never die.

(STEPHEN is nearer.)

KING PENDA: Night is falling. Your land and mine goes down into a darkness now; and I, and all the other guardians of her flame, are driven from our homes, up out into the wolf's jaw. But the flame still flickers in the fen. You are marked down to cherish that. Cherish the flame, till we can safely wake again.

(STEPHEN raises head to ask a question. STEHEN stands: alone, on all the hill. And now he looks back, across the land in shadow: that outer landscape of the earth, and inner landscape of the head, across which this, his journey has been made. It is the very physical reverse to that image of England with which we began: for now we look eastwards, from those hills themselves, And night is coming. No soft choir music on the soundtrack now, but the actual sounds of evening on the earth: a lapwing, a distant train, the pulse of a factory below. Onto that landscape now STEPHEN is walking slowly thoughtfully away from us down. He is fortunate. Early, and at the right time, he has been vouchsafed a meaning for that old question he once glibly asked himself: what is to happen to his soul? Which shall prevail? The Angel, or the Pandemonium; the sickness of power and obedience to power, or the sacred demon of ungovernableness.)

A group of experts has warned that the world faces a new food crisis and issued an urgent call for decisive and systemic measures to avoid mass starvation and societal instability.

The statement highlights a chain of shocks over the past five years, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, disruption to the Strait of Hormuz and the ongoing climate crisis, that have exposed the fragility of global food supply chains. Taken together, say the signatories, these shocks "constitute a systemic crisis that cannot be understood, let alone addressed, by looking at any factor in isolation."

The appeal urges municipal, state and national legislatures, together with the UN General Assembly, to convene specifically on the looming food crisis, and calls for:

• Dedicated international action to end the wars driving the crisis, including the conflict in Sudan, where 14 million people now face starvation, and a renewed commitment to peace as a precondition for food security
• Greater diversity and decentralisation of food production, with stronger tenure rights and political participation for smallholders, particularly women in low- and middle-income countries
• Diversification of the world's calorie sources to more of the 7,000 food sources already identified, given that just four crops — wheat, rice, corn and soy — supply 80% of global food calories
• Stronger local and South-South trade to reduce dependence on volatile world markets
• A transition of food systems away from fossil fuel dependency, given that renewable energy is now cheaper almost everywhere
• A shift from extractive to regenerative food production that rebuilds natural capital rather than depleting it.

The statement argues that regenerative, agroecological farming offers a proven alternative already practised by many small-scale farmers. However low commodity prices leave farmers little incentive to invest in the soil health, crop diversity and resilience that would protect them, and the world, from future shocks. Signatories urge courage and investment to implement such solutions, while challenging the agro-industry subsidies worth more than a million dollars a minute that continue to entrench the status quo.

Hunter Lovins, member of the Club of Rome and president of Natural Capitalism Solutions, said: "This is not a warning about some distant future. It is a warning about next year's harvest. We know what works: regenerative agriculture rebuilds the soil, the water and the communities that industrial farming has depleted, and it does so profitably. What we lack is not solutions, but the political will to invest in them before the crisis, rather than after. The window of opportunity is still open, but we must act now."

Signatories stress that the crisis is most acute in low- and middle-income countries but will ultimately affect everyone who depends on the global food system. "We can transform food systems now through modest, targeted investments," the statement concludes, "or we can wait, and be struck by the hammer of our own making."

The full text of the letter and list of signatories can be found here.

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How do you communicate a campaign message in Indonesia - a country with over 700 languages? What issues move Kenya's young keyboard warriors? What's the best way to spread a message in Malawi?

These are the kinds of questions that get answered when you bring a group of energetic early-stage communications professionals from around the world together to share their experiences - something that happens every year as part of the Club of Rome communications fellowship.

Since 2023, the Club of Rome has run a communications fellowship with the goal of increasing the diversity of voices covering sustainability issues and supporting early-career communications professionals from the majority of the world. To date, nine fellows from seven countries - Colombia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Zimbabwe - have spent seven months each embedded in the communications team, experiencing working in an international organisation, meeting members of the Club of Rome, receiving mentoring and providing valuable insights from their own experiences and contexts.

Fellows leave the programme keen to share their skills and experiences with their peers and other organisations locally, nationally and internationally. Previous fellows have gone on to host award-winning talk shows, win scholarships to prestigious study programmes, and work in sustainability organisations. Meanwhile, the Club of Rome communications team is continually enriched by the insights and skills that each cohort brings, widening our horizons and challenging our assumptions.

Its effects are felt beyond the team: inspired by the interest in the programme, which receives over 1,000 applications each year, it has branched out into a flourishing network of exchange and peer learning, the Systems Change Comms Network. This community of hundreds of communications professionals all over the world connects people working on aligned topics to share advice, tips and opportunities from the sector. And it doesn't just stay in the virtual world - we recently heard of the first national in-person meetup of the group, in Zimbabwe!

In just three years, it has become clear that the fellowship and network are meeting a real need and are truly mutually beneficial. Now, in 2026, the fellowship has seen its continuity secured thanks to a generous legacy gift. Late last year, we received the sad news of the passing of Keith Suter, a long-standing member of the Club of Rome and the president of its Australian chapter. We were honoured to have been included in his legacy, which enables us to continue the programme.

With Keith's expertise in and commitment to global affairs, it felt a fitting tribute to honour his legacy by securing the future of the communications fellowship, allowing the message and values of the Club of Rome to be transmitted further and further.

Thanks to Keith's legacy, we will be able to continue to welcome communications professionals from the majority of the world, share the experience and expertise of the Club of Rome, and learn from them, every year expanding our community of professionals committed to systems change. We are immensely grateful to Keith and his family for their generosity and support, and look forward to learning from, and with, future cohorts.

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Buenos Aires hosted the meeting 'Thought and action: the path to regeneration', which brought together over 200 global and regional leaders to address the polycrisis and promote new development agendas.

On 23 and 24 April, the conference organised by the Club of Rome and its Argentine Chapter gathered international experts, academics, decision-makers and organisational leaders to debate the challenges of the global polycrisis and explore concrete paths toward regeneration in Latin America.

The event marked an institutional milestone with the launch and consolidation of the Club of Rome's regional coordination space in Latin America, strengthening a network that seeks to link critical thinking, scientific evidence and territorial action.

Over the course of two days, the meeting proposed an integrated view of current challenges, approaching the crisis not as a collection of isolated problems, but as a systemic phenomenon that simultaneously impacts environmental, social, economic and cultural spheres.

Highlights included interventions from top-tier international figures, such as:

• Enrique Leff
• Mamphela Ramphele
• Johan Rockström (via audiovisual message)
• Eduardo Gudynas
• Carlo Ángeles
• Carlos Álvarez Pereira
• Eduard Müller
• Lucas Garibaldi
• Andrea Izquierdo (recent winner of the Frontiers Planet Prize)

These experts provided diverse perspectives on planetary boundaries, the socio-ecological transition and the strategic role of Latin America in a global context. A central theme was the urgent need to move beyond diagnosis toward concrete responses capable of articulating public policy, innovation and cultural transformation.

The second day focused specifically on applied experiences, solutions and proposals. Ongoing initiatives were presented regarding:

• Ecosystem restoration
• Regenerative agriculture, livestock and tourism
• Biodiversity
• Social and financial innovation

In this framework, the report from the National Engagement Program (NEP) of Earth4All in Argentina was presented. Driven by the Argentine Chapter of the Club of Rome alongside the Alimentaris Foundation, the report proposes scenarios and lines of action to address poverty, inequality and environmental degradation in an integrated manner toward 2050. The report emphasises that coordinating economic, social and environmental policies is essential for achieving sustained transformation.

The conference underscored that today's challenge is not merely to mitigate impacts, but to actively restore the systems that sustain life, incorporating regenerative approaches that integrate ecology with social and economic well-being.

The meeting also served as a platform to boost new institutional alliances. A major highlight was the signing of a cooperation agreement with the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) — an act featuring the virtual participation of its Secretary General, Mariano Jabonero, and the Co-President of the Club of Rome, Silvia Zimmermann del Castillo. This agreement aims to strengthen regional collaboration in science, research and public policy related to regeneration.

Furthermore, progress was made in coordinating with international organisations, academic networks and private sector actors to consolidate a common agenda for Latin America. Strategic partners and sponsors included the Cassará Foundation, La Ciudad Posible, Austral University, the Alimentaris Foundation, EcoNews (Media Partner), and Cervecería y Maltería Quilmes and Zafrán (Sponsors).

In conclusion, the meeting put forward a central idea: the current crisis is not only environmental, but civilisational. There was a resounding call to rethink development frameworks by incorporating new ways of understanding the relationship between society and nature.

The conference reaffirmed the need to build collective, comprehensive and long-term responses capable of addressing current complexities and paving the way toward a more just, resilient and regenerative future.

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By Adam Wheeler. Photos by MotoGP.com

Ai Ogura leans back in his chair. He looks reluctant: is this another interview about Aprilia, his astonishing second year in the MotoGP class, his decision to leave the burgeoning SuperFile Trackhouse team for a floundering Yamaha project? There is also the prospect of the on-the-record discourse in his second language; Ai's English is great but his calm, introverted demeanour means that he thinks carefully before he talks, picking and choosing the right words. His discourse is almost systematic, a little like his understated but fluid and incredibly efficient and economic riding style.

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By saying I want to chat about his background instead his eyes widen. It's a tact I learned in 2025 when we made an interview largely based around his passion for motocross. It was a way to tap into how he rides a motorcycle, and what he takes from his love of off-road to apply to the day-job. A leftfield approach sparked his interest. Today, at one point, he exasperatedly says: "I really like these kinds of interviews, and I know exactly what I want to say in Japanese…but I cannot find it in English!"

It's fair to say that a lot of people want to know more about Ai. He's a Moto2 World Champion but his rookie MotoGP season in 2025 was unspectacular, if encouraging in spells, and blighted with injury. In 2026 he has been arguably the series' most fascinating figure. Ogura has posted four podiums finishes, a maiden victory in the Netherlands (just the seventh of his career in all classes) and has yet to cross the line outside the top five from twelve rounds (he suffered a technical DNF in the USA, was penalised with a 3-position demotion in Catalunya for tagging Pedro Acosta in the final corner and his crash out of podium contention at Silverstone two weeks ago was the first major slip of the campaign). He has frequently outshone teammate Raul Fernandez even though the Spaniard has two more terms of experience with the RS-GP and three more in the class in total.

Ogura's Grand Prix origins have been peddled across MotoGP channels this year: his rise from pocketbike to the Asia Talent Cup and adoption by the Honda Asia programme for Moto3 (he finished 3rd in the championship in his second season in 2020) and then Moto2 (where he pushed Augusto Fernandez all the way to the title in 2022). Ai's choice to move out of Honda's gaze after 2023 led to a sensational year with the Spanish MT Helmets MSi team and he won the title in 2024; Japan's first in the Moto2 era.

At the end of 2024 Ai was one of a raft of world champions attending the FIM Awards ceremony in Mallorca. During the afternoon press call at the FIM hospitality rig, positioned on part of the coastal road in the capital city of Palma, he sat alone, undisturbed, seemingly content, possibly a little bored while the rest of the platform was packed with media talking to various motocross, Rally, Enduro athletes and hankering for time with Jorge Martin and Toprak Razgatlıoğlu. Ai was oblivious to the fuss.

By that point he had already spurned a MotoGP berth and a return to Honda colours for 2025 (the LCR Honda seat went to his friend and former flatmate Somkiat Chantra) and accepted Davide Brivio's offer to enter Trackhouse. The Italian had done his research and knew that Ogura's talent came with a zany degree of focus and unwavering commitment to the job.

Ai typically avoids any social media fanfare and fulfils requests from the team or MotoGP Group but does not engage in many other extracurricular activities, outside of some limited-edition merch or custom gear for his home Grand Prix. He's all about the job.

"To be honest, I knew almost knowing about him, just his name…but I enjoyed watching him ride," Giovanni Mattarollo, Ai's Crew Chief at Trackhouse told us during a Paddock Pass Podcast recording at the Grand Prix of Catalunya in May. "When we first met him in Misano - when he was still fighting for the Moto2 title- he was invited into the garage, we didn't understand anything from him because he didn't talk or even touch the bike! He was very focused on what he was doing at the time and, when I came to work with him and to know him, I understood this. He thinks about what is important in that moment."

Mattarollo spoke effusively about his charge. He even felt Ai could be a championship contender on the eve of round seven. It seemed a little far-fetched at the time but proved to be prophetic as Ogura made his way up to 2nd in the points table pre-Silverstone and was the head of press conference duties.

"He is not the guy that makes many journalists talk about him, due to his low profile and how he approaches things… and I don't think many people understood how hard his first year in MotoGP was with injuries, comeback, loss of confidence," Gio said. "He might be different to others with his mental approach. He always does 100%, or even more, to do his job in the best way. Like riding at Motegi last year with a broken hand."

"Ai's a really hard worker and is always studying what he is doing," he adds. "At the Sepang test he made more laps than anybody else. He is always focused mostly on himself and what he has. He never puts any doubt on the bike and, if he is struggling, his first question is always 'what am I doing wrong?'

The technician offers a story that sums up the rider. "We were in Qatar last year and he was going very well. It was before the first injury he had. He found a rider going slow on the line in qualifying. Sometimes we see other riders going mad about things like this and throwing up their hands. He continued to push, did another lap and went into Q2. Then at the end of the qualifying we did a summary, talked about what we'd do and heard his comments. I said to him I appreciated the fact that he kept focused and kept pushing. He then made a statement that gave me one of my best lessons in MotoGP. With the same straight face he always has, he said: 'emotions just make you slower'".

Back in the Trackhouse hospitality in Assen, Ai is not betraying too many emotions as we dip into some personal subjects. Slowly, he appears to semi-enjoy unveiling details of his trajectory.

I ask Ai about his family. His sister Karen also used to race and lives close to the family home in Kiyose; a district west of Tokyo. Ai's Dad is a truck driver and his mother works in admin department of a hospital. When he isn't at MotoGP, Ogura commutes from Japan and stays with his parents. From 2019 to 2025 he lived in Spain and his last residence was in Castelldefels; the beachside town close to Barcelona and next to the airport. "Spain never felt like home," he admits.

"When there is a week off between races I go back," he says. "I train in Japan and spend time in Japan. I live with my Dad and Mum. I have all my training bikes and I can train better there. The level of the riders that you spend time with on a track day is not high, not like it is in Spain, but it's OK. I just had one motocross bike in Spain and many times I wanted to go to a circuit but it was closed. I couldn't prepare like I wanted, so that's why I'm based in Japan."

"Until now the flights are not disturbing me," he says matter-of-factly.

What was it like growing up with an older sister who also raced?

We are completely different characters. She was faster than me, so she pushed me. [I think] if she didn't race then I would not be like I am today. Around pocketbike time she was important because she always went quicker and fought for the victory when I was P5-P6. She was always ahead…and I think it was important for me to have that person in the family. When I moved up to minibike I was better [than her]. It is probably also the last time I raced with her because then we split classes.

How is the family home? Do you have land?

[awkward smile] It's a normal house. MotoGP Group asked to film something at my home…but I said "no" because it's not something to show. Yes, it's private but I don't care about that…it's just that it's not what people might think! It's not huge, or something to show to the racing fans.

Your Dad must have been another fundamental person in your development. Was he tough on you? What kind of guidance did he give?

My Dad was a racer. When I was really small, pocketbike time, he was like that [tough]. Sometimes he kicked me! When I moved to minibike then he changed completely. He would say nothing to me. Sometimes [at tracks] I would ask: "what should I do?" and he'd say" think for yourself". It was interesting. He thought it was better for me. To train my brain and be more independent.

How old were you?

Seven…or eight? It was part of his strategy. If you always have a teacher saying to you "do this, this and that" then maybe in the next race you do very well but not ten races later. You have to think for yourself, especially if you get to GPs then you have to be aware. My father explained this to me only four-five years ago, and it is impressive to think he was already believing it was the way when I was so young.

Did you ever miss having a support network?

I was fine. I never joined a school or a team. My first proper team was when I went to JuniorGP! I'd always raced with my family, even if it was difficult for money. The most important thing that my parents gave me was to give me nothing. They kept me 'hungry' all the time. I don't want to say this to sound a certain way…but I never had a new bike, I never had new suits or a new helmet. And that kind of thing makes you a bit stronger, a bit hungry. I feel they gave me that.

Did you race to please your parents? To gain some approval?

Pocketbike time, yes. I just didn't want my dad to kick me! The biggest target of the day was that one. By minibike this thing had gone.

Were there other distractions as a kid?

I was only serious about motorsports. I liked to play football or basketball with friends in the evenings but it was never serious. The only thing I was serious about was motorcycle racing.

What about the feeling of missing out on other activities?

By middle school I was OK with it because I would always think 'if was them then I'd be jealous'. So, I said: "OK, I'm here right now [with my career] and I am super-lucky…" and I was fine. I never thought 'I want to be a normal student guy' or whatever.

And moving away from home and Japan?

I was completely OK with it.

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You don't have an entourage or a group. There was the Honda Asia set-up…but other than that you seem very understated in MotoGP. We don't see you elated or very frustrated…

I can think simple. It's easy. The race is a place to show what you have got and what you can do. If you finish P10 - no matter what - then you are a rider that finished in 10th position. That's it. I'm ready to accept this and I will be OK. If you are not happy with P10 then you need to work harder. That's all. I was never [banging the table]

What if P9 was one second ahead? Would you be frustrated?

Frustration, no. Because the guy went one second faster than you. To beat him you need to go 1.1 faster. That's all. Of course I think 'how…' but never [angrily].

When did motorcycle racing get serious for you?

When me and my Dad decided to go for Asia Talent Cup selection. It became very serious. Before then I was just racing and if I crashed I would just crash and nobody would be disappointed but me. When we got to Asia Talent Cup I thought 'this is not just for me anymore…it's also for others'.

Could you deal with that pressure?

Absolutely not!

So how did you learn that part?

Time. Experience. Even now sometimes I am not handling it very well. I've never thought 'I'm very good…' Wait! Yes! Probably when I won the championship because that says you are number one and nobody can say anything about that. Now if you win a race then there are 22. You might win 3. From 22. Hmm. But the championship? Yes.

What were the effects of winning the championship?

Of course, life goes back to normal but it [feeling of the title] stays here for ever [touches chest]. Again, I don't want to say this because people might go 'blah, blah' but when I won the Moto2 title I knew at that time, in that year, I was #1 in the world. This makes me…calm. It makes me OK. It gives me the feeling that I did something. That's everything to me. Of course, I am fighting for something important again in MotoGP but if something [adverse] happened tomorrow…then I would be OK.

What did you think of the scale of MotoGP? Of the extra scope of the premier class?

Hmmm. How happy I can be is related to how big the stage is. In training, this purely for me to enjoy riding a motorbike. But here? If somebody asked me: "do you enjoy riding here…?" Then, no, not really. I can explain much better in Japanese! Practice: for me to enjoy. Here: for others to enjoy. This is my understanding. Whatever. Next.

At what point did parents say they were proud of you?

You need to ask them. My mum sends me messages. After a good race, she'll say congratulations…

What is happiness to you?

It's related to the result. Yes.

It's that a bit risky. The results can't always be good…

Then I would be an unhappy guy.

How about the increased level of attention that comes with being successful in MotoGP?

I'm still learning that kind of thing…but I am doing my better than in the past.

What happened in the past?

Asia Talent Cup time was the worst. Every time before the race I was like "this if f**king important, this if f**king important, this if f**king important…" and it made me anxious. But, now it's quite OK.

Can you feel any fame in Japan?

You can only see it with this [points at phone]. You can't see it with your eyes or in the street.

Only in Motegi…

In Motegi yeah, but only because they are there to see a race. They know me, of course. But in normal life in my town or in Tokyo, you cannot see anything.

That's both good and bad…

Yes. In one point is good and one point is bad. Personally, it is fantastic! But for the sport probably not a good thing

Do you feel like you need to do more?

I start to feel [this]. It is also important to do this kind of thing. Not for me. don't need to be a different person but I need to accept many more things…while being myself. That would be nice.

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By Adam Wheeler. Photos by MotoGP.com

Kelly Brittain is trying to lead change in MotoGP. She doesn't have an influence on engine capacity, tyres or technical rules…but she does have the power to shape how people find or follow the championship or what they think about it. MotoGP Group are trying to steer where the series goes, and what it will look like on the track, but they are also considering the perception away from the grid. For the first time it feels like there is a concentrated and resourceful effort (specialists, money, campaigns) by the promoter to push MotoGP beyond hardcore subscription-paying audiences and her flowering team are standing on the first bricks of a long path with a promising Liberty Media wind at their backs.

Brittain, Madrid based for over a year with her family, and a veteran of DAZN (UK) and Red Bull Racing in F1, is one of very few non-Spanish senior management at MotoGP Group and is representative of the company's quest to be more global to become more global. Her hefty experience and CV was critical for the mammoth task of constructing a marketing department and subsequent activities, projects and workload to get the wheels rolling on the juggernaut and, in particular, to make the whole rig more attractive to lucrative audiences and markets in territories like the USA and the UK, where MotoGP has comparative anonymity to southern Asia, southern Europe and zones of the Americas.

From the calming environment of her compact office in the MotoGP Group workspace within the paddock, we tackled a range of topics…

One of the big, more visual impacts of MotoGP Group's marketing efforts has been the 'Wired Different' campaign. It's looks radical and less endemic. What was the thinking and is this where MotoGP is heading?

It is the start of something…but it was built on the research and the positioning work we did last year. The idea behind that was to really understand how fans and potential fans engage with the sport and to position the sport in a way that responds to that. What we saw was that they were bored with stuff that seemed manufactured and bored of feeling like their algorithm is being dictated elsewhere. They want something that really stands out and is impossible to turn away from. That's how we came up with this concept of 'magnetic defiance' and we tested that across multiple markets and frontier-and-growth markets for us in the UK and U.S. and it resonated strongly. So, we used it as a creative brief and then developed the Wired Different campaign from it. It's founded on brand positioning that we believe in and has been strength tested. That won't evolve because we know it speaks to core insight, but the activation will evolve and change. 2026 was our first year of this season-wide campaign and what you'll start to see over the following years is how it embeds itself into more touchpoints; so how does it really manifest in our content? In our physical fan activation? In our digital content that we provide to fans? I think we are learning that at the moment. The organisation is getting to grips with what that means and as we become more adept at implementation that you'll start to see more of it.

How has it been moulding a marketing department but then also directly catering to the expectations of Liberty?

I was bought onboard by MotoGP, or Dorna as it was then, and a company that already had growth ambitions before it was bought by Liberty. We'd had a set of really good discussions about the size of the marketing team and the ambitions for how that would evolve over time. Obviously with Liberty coming onboard that was something they were looking for as well…so it has been quite an easy process. What we want and need for MotoGP is what Liberty wants to see, so there hasn't been any clashes or a feeling that we had parallel plans. There are a lot of people looking from the outside in, and now we're under the Liberty umbrella they say to us "why don't you just do a 'Ride to Survive'?" I think it is what I have heard the most in marketing and it's absolutely something we were looking at before Liberty came onboard and what they are keen for us to explore. I don't think there is a point of conflict. They are looking at what worked for F1 - and they would be daft not to and we'd be daft not to listen - but we know that the sport has different roots and slightly different fandom and fan insight. What we need to do is make sure that we speak to that insight and not the F1 insight.

Will that be hard to do for MotoGP?

Not really because the main 'buckets' are the same. So, commercial development and media rights development: we know we need to focus there. Long-form content and serialised content: we need to focus there. The approach to that content will be the bit that's different. Maybe where you go to watch that content. Maybe we want it to be more (or less) accessible. There are lots of different ways to cut what you do in each of those buckets. I don't think anybody is denying that the timing for F1 was brilliant but they were in a position to capitalise on that. They did it brilliantly. We are existing in a different time…and we are from a 'different part of the world' So there are lots of points and difference to look at and how we can do it our way.

Will one of the main areas be sports rights and how-and-where people will fine MotoGP? If you look at F1's U.S. deal with Apple as an example of change…

Precisely, but it's a challenge that many sports rights holders are facing right now. We are all chasing the big bucks from a distribution and sports rights perspective, but it does feel that in 10-15 years the whole landscape will be turned on its head. It feels like the most successful entities will be those that can balance the shift as it happens as opposed to sticking their fingers in their ears and trying to make hay as the sun shines.

What percentage of your job so far has been internal organisation compared with external priorities and talking with the big companies to find more partners?

Great question. I would say we are still in a time of internal evolution right now. We are recruiting, bolstering the team. We have some great individuals in our marketing team but if we are to do more then we need more specialists. So, there is a focus on that at the moment and utilising the assets we have brought in. There is a much more sophisticated means of analysing the things we've done and using it to shake the things we are going to do. There is a bit of internal refocusing and as that settles and we build-out that team there will be more of an opportunity for looking outwards. All of the agencies and big companies that want to talk to us are really interesting, and we are really lucky that we already have a pipeline of organisations that want to take us to the next level or benefit from the scale we have already got. We're in a good place but we need to get that internal structure sorted to capitalise on it.

Have you seen a tangible increase of interest in MotoGP since you joined the championship?

Without a doubt, and Liberty's involvement has increased interest from agencies that want to work with us and brands that want to work with us. Also, talent. A lot of the talent we are talking to about appointments are very clear on the benefits that Liberty can bring to organisations, and that's really appealing to them. That's been really helpful.

Is there an 'ABC' plan, or a map, for marketing? Do you need a series, a social media campaign and so on…?

They [plans and projects] take a lot of time to develop, so you need to run a lot of them parallel. I would not say they are organic. There are plans in place. I am naturally a very impatient person and the time taken to get them live is very frustrating, but I know it will definitely be worth it. It would be a shame if you half-arsed a lot of this stuff, you rushed it or didn't do it properly because there will be no benefit downstream. You'll look like a 'me too' or a budget brand or it just won't shift any needles and that negative perception will do us active harm as opposed to helping us build.

So how do Liberty influence your work? Is it just a budget thing?

It's definitely not just a budget thing. It is much more collaborative than that. The kind of talent that exists on that board - Chase Carey and Sean Bratches - who have had the most incredible careers, as well as our CEO through Derek [Chang] and Marty [Patterson] they have built businesses and done deals in the kind of direction we want to go. Derek is very involved from a media rights perspective and also a commercial pipeline development perspective and he has been brilliant. Super-helpful. Opening doors and engaging in active conversations, so I think those teams [in MotoGP Group] have massively benefited. Also, for me with Sean Bratches, he has made himself incredibly available and he's introduced me to good people, some I've interviewed for roles and it's hugely collaborative. It's been nothing but beneficial and perspective-broadening actually but it's hard to….well, I think a lot of people don't want to hear that and have made up their mind already about what Liberty are going to do to the sport and how they are going to 'F1-it' and do X-Y-Z. Every little development that MotoGP is making, you've got to be careful not to read too far down the comments because you know what's coming.

Aiming for F1 boom with MotoGP can't be seen as a bad thing…?

If you look at how many fans are able to enjoy F1 - and do enjoy F1 - and have had the doors opened by one of the levers F1 has pulled in the last few years: that's people time and enjoyment. While the purists might feel that something has been detracted you cannot argue that a ten-times growth in fans and ten-times the people are able to enjoy a sport and turn on a TV or open an App or whatever and enjoy what they are seeing; how can you say this is a bad thing? And I'm not talking about the income being through the roof, I'm talking about people's time and enjoyment accessibility to the sport and that's ultimately what we are trying to do. Everyone thinks Liberty are here just to make money…but you do that by taking it to someone who is going to enjoy it. No money will be made if people don't love it and our job is to give people something that they love and that, to me, feels like something more altruistic and positive than just 'they want to make money from this'.

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The head of COTA, Bobby Epstein, said you just need to give Liberty time…and they are not in for the quick return…

Absolutely. I think they came onboard with F1 in 2016-2017 and nothing substantially moved until 2020-2021 so they are here for the long-term and are investing long-term and are supporting the business with a long-term view. It doesn't feel like an a-typical piggybacked industry where they will come in and rip a bunch of costs out of the business and bleed it hard and sell it off. That's not what they are looking to do at all.

Inside the paddock, does MotoGP need to be more business, commercial and promotion orientated rather than just focusing on racing? Do the blinkers need to come off?

I don't think it's blinkers because everybody has managed to build this sport; it's passion that has done this. It's not just MotoGP's Group's passion but the teams also. The same way that we are building our capability internally here, them being able to leverage the brands they have built and being able to capitalise on those brands, to me, we all need to do that. Them through their own brand 'worlds' because they are not just manufacturers or teams; they are brands, and I think they need to leverage that as much as we do. I know the old adage of 'win on Sunday and sell on Monday' should not just relate to two wheeled vehicles but relate to the profile of the riders and teams. Also, didn't Daniel Ricciardo prove this to all of us, it isn't just about winning. When Marco Bezzecchi was on stage at the MotoGP Forward event earlier this year and was asked about how he will build his personal brand, he said by winning; that's not the be-all-and-end-all. There is much more to a personal brand than that.

After 'Wired Different' is there anything else coming? What can MotoGP followers expect to see?

It's difficult to segment it down to just 'marketing'. For example, if you look at the Fan Zone then you'll see a step-change in how we present those. A step-change in our merchandise, the kinds of brand partnerships, a step-change in the kind of content we produce and particularly across our social channels as we continually try to diversify away from just track footage - which is what we are really good at producing. There is a whole ecosystem here, and marketing plays a part of that. For me - and this is so important and F1 will tell you - they don't do a lot of their marketing themselves; it comes through those that come onboard to work with them. So, as we proliferate the kinds of brands - and on a commercial basis as we bring in those non-endemic and lifestyle brands - you'll start to see those opportunities open up because we will never have enough time or money to grow a marketing team as big as we would need to grow globally. It would have to be through fans, broadcasters and through licences. We'll start to see growth in those areas.

Lastly, media rights and deals bring in so much income to the championship but is it also a shackle for bigger growth?

If you look at what a lot of brands have done, NFL, NBA etc, they have opened the doors a little bit around their footage. They have given footage to teams and athletes and you see a bit of a trend for what is going on there. I think it is definitely something we need to consider.

By Adam Wheeler. Photos by Ray Archer.

Arrive to most MXGP Grands Prix and they feel like busy, bustling events within a fecund sporting series with public interest and plenty of participation numbers. But, has MXGP been 'redlining' too long with more riders, more speed, and more potential for 'cracks' of an inflated championship? MXGP has not changed format (apart from a brief dalliance with a SuperFinal concept for the flyways) for 22 years and still wedges into circuits from the days when the sport was split into separate 125, 250 and 500cc championships; a scheme last used in 2000.

The European Championships, sanctioned by FIM Europe, have been part of the MXGP support programme since 2011. The advantages of this blend and from the abandonment of EMX as a separate calendar for Infront Motor Racing are numerous: young riders learning and using Grand Prix level tracks (with prep, infrastructure, medical facilities), proximity to factory teams and power-movers in the sport, a degree of promotional worth with larger crowds and TV exposure, increased professionalism. For Infront the entry fees for this high-standard platform of 10 races for EMX125 and 12 for EMX250 (with a qualification system in place) provide a decent amount of income per event and reduced costs by wedging more races into single locations.

There are disadvantages. The extra load of people and transport in paddock spaces put a strain on more traditional or condensed circuits. Tracks crews have less time for maintenance and circuit staff (mainly volunteers) have long days with sessions starting as early as 07:40 and running towards twilight in the spring months especially. For some the overbearing presence of EMX overshadows the Grand Prix motos themselves. Fans that are paying to enter the circuit gates may well welcome more action, but lines are being blurred for priority and relevance, especially for new eyeballs on the world championship.

This is best encapsulated by the respective start gates. Publicly, Infront have been unconcerned by filling all 40 MXGP and MX2 slots; preferring a 'quality rather than quantity' approach, orientated around the Officially Approved Teams [OAT] and those signed up for the full world championship calendar. In the first six European rounds of the series this year in Spain, Switzerland, Sardinia, Italy, France and Germany, MX2 moto1 finishers have numbered: 24, 30, 21, 29, 35, 35 respectively while EMX250 has had a full 40 quota in their respective five outings. This is partially to do with the different ethos of the categories (a more privateer, development story with EMX250 compared to the OAT nature of MX2) but with similar machinery and similar speeds, similar age groups (EMX250 has a 21-year age ceiling while MX2 is 23) there is an argument for a greater need for separatism.

Add five dates for the FIM Women's World Championship and one-off Grands Prix like Czechia where the European Two-Stroke, EMX65 and EMX85 classes will appear then MXGP is a bundle that comes close to the organisational limits of some venues.

The subjects of appropriate Grand Prix tracks, collaboration in the paddock, and their role as forceful custodians of the sport have brought the FIM under the spotlight recently. MXGP World Champion Romain Febvre's forthright comments and criticism in the wake of the French Grand Prix stirred emotions and turned the gaze on the sanctioning body.

The FIM has made irreputable steps with safety initiatives in MXGP. The helmet homologation tiers [ensuring racers have the latest tech for protection and rotational acceleration] pushed one of the biggest and most conservative product suppliers in motorcycling into action while mandatory chest protection and the openness towards airbags and ingredient brands like Mips are other commendable nods.

But what can be done to further hone the championship and allay concerns of teams (particularly those in the MX2 class) and racers for the future direction of Grand Prix? Much to his credit FIM CMS Director Antonio Alia Portela always has the door open and swiftly answers any enquiries. The Spaniard is at the centre of a political circle that involves the sports' promotional controllers, Infront Motor Racing, who also bring financial contributions to the FIM (any promoter pays for sanctioning rights, for MotoGP it is MotoGP Sport Entertainment Group) and FIM Europe as well as the MSMA that speaks for the manufacturers and teams. Alia Portela also deals with national federations and how they support their respective Grands Prix and the two-rider delegation that changes every round and should (in theory) speak for the riders regarding any issues they have.

What is your current view of the European Championships and its support role to the FIM World Championship?

It is the base of the pyramid that Infront have been building up and have been working on for many years, and we can see the results; some of the best riders have evolved into MX2 and MXGP eventually. Those classes sometimes put the whole system in a difficult position and stretch the limit of the capacity of some of the places…but Infront is able to cope with the facilities, and manages to persuade the organisers to provide more, time and time again. I listen to the organisers, and there should be a limit…because there is a physical limit of the venue. Sometimes the timetable is difficult, particularly for Saturday because we are aware that having people on the track for more than 12 hours in a day is complicated. People might volunteer for one event but unless the experience is satisfying in some way they will decline to come back. Which, at the same time, puts us in a difficult situation because we have to manage a group of 60-70 every single event, and that's very demanding for our officials and the organisers to provide resources or replacements for people who are flagging the races. All-in-all we have able to cope with this demand and accommodate the facilities. We, and Infront - who deal with this problem - have been able to do that with the venues in the best way. It is not perfect…but it is the best way.

The benefits are easy to see: the classes are oversubscribed and people want to race. It filters the best towards Grand Prix contention on world championship level circuits. It also saves costs for the promoters and makes them money. But…track preparation suffers and it could be said to water down the Grand Prix experience. How easy would it be to change the system? To scrub EMX250 and push riders straight into MX2? Or have some sort of rookie sub-category?

It could be very drastic. We could split the series' and just have MX2, MXGP and maybe WMX and then the Europeans on the other side but then they would not have the same level of exposure as they have right now. We put everything in a balance. Without these European series' then younger riders would be more obscured. They would be fighting in national championships and FIM Europe would have to organise its own series. The platform Infront is offering to FIM Europe to host their classes within the frame of MXGP is fantastic.

But is it too much?

It could be. If you see it here today [Trentino] then there are two classes and two groups in each class…so it is complicated. It stretches the manpower, the facilities and the way you have to work but at the same time you are offering the visibility and the possibility to attract more sponsors, spectators and attention. You have to widen the gaze to see the full picture and not just organisation on the track. In my opinion it is beneficial to the sport and beneficial to the small classes. The promotion they get back through the year is very important.

How would a change to EMX250 and MX2 happen?

Here we have three bodies. FIM Europe, FIM and Infront. As Infront holds all the rights for the promotion of motocross for both FIM and FIM Europe we simply have to adapt to how they organise themselves with those groups. They are limited to the number of days and events - which is 20 a year - because they also have to consider the cost of moving the circus around Europe for EMX. The furthest away from central Europe is Turkey, which is a bit more demanding.

So how much power does the FIM or FIM Europe have with Infront to say: 'we feel it's better to change the structure…'?

OK, so we have open conversations. But, as I said before, we deal with the sporting side and they deal with the organisational side of the events and we try not to interfere or hinder the progression. We are normally in contact or communicating to improve things but, as you can see, every time things are growing and growing. And it becomes more demanding. Not only for marshalling but also medical and other factors like water, electricity, paddock space, facilities, toilets, services. Everything is growing. Up until the moment that the organisers cannot cope with the demand…I think the system will stay in place.

Those ingredients of the event are important…but from an image perspective spectators can see an MX2 gate that is not full and an EMX gate that is overspilling. You, as the FIM, can you bang the table and say 'guys, this is not presenting the world championship in the best light…'?

Hmmm. There is the negative aspect: of less people on the grid…but then there is more room on the track. More options, more chances to pass or less chance of an incident and more space for medical teams. There are positive and negative aspects. Do we really want a full grid? They are prepared for it. We have to look at the figures also for incidents and accidents and the number of spectators on site and TV. We have to play with the balance.

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How would you like to see MXGP change?

So, in Spain this year we were able to set up our first TV Control Room and we have become a bit independent from the TV images and the TV compound. We still have the images they use for TV promotion so we cannot focus on one specific part of the track if there is an incident but we can register the images from the live for analysis. It's a great advantage. It means we can look and do things like rule on actions or apply penalties as soon as possible and if protests are logged or any appeal then we are better equipped. From another aspect there are many things we can still improved…but this [MXGP] is like a big dinosaur and it takes time to move and to implement any development. It takes time to decide when, how and how much. That's important. We are already asking organisers to provide, provide and provide and an example is the container, space and connection for the TV Control Room. From an organisational point of view, there are different opinions…but you have to put everything on the table and develop it as a whole, not just one side.

Riding gear and safety performance has been one area of focus for the FIM. What's your view on the progress and acceptance of airbags and then the new level of FIM helmet homologation?

With the airbags we are still in the early stages of development and the algorithm is getting better and better. Yesterday I spent the day scanning helmets to make sure the whole process was thorough because the scrutineers are in the process of checking and uploading all the new information into the platform. Also, we realised that we have more and more helmets in the European classes that are passing the standard, even though it is not compulsory until 2027. Through our controls we are also seeing more and more kids using airbags. That's good. The more people that use this kind of protection then the faster the evolution and the proper algorithm will be there sooner, and prices get a bit cheaper so it is affordable for everybody and not just the riders in the top classes. We also have to consider kids and different sizes of rider. All those things. We cannot make them mandatory because we need to look at the whole industry to ask if they [brands] are willing to provide this-and-that. That's an issue we had with helmets. We wanted to homologate but the industry had to be ready to go into production for all sizes. It's coming slowly. We expected them to be faster but there are more and more on track. The outcome of the tests run at the University of Zaragoza has shown the breakthrough of technology. Safety is a big issue in the Motocross Commission.

By Adam Wheeler. Photos by MotoGP.com/Adam Wheeler

The press call at Mugello for the announcement of an official link between MotoGP and the largest motorcycle show in the world was one of those small 'oh, of course…' moments at the Italian Grand Prix. The series had a short-lived involvement with the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK three years ago but, oddly, haven't carried much official presence at the Milan event.

EICMA is a big deal. The organisers claim annual attendance increases for the six-day gathering where there are more than 730 exhibitors, over 2000 brands and 43,000 trade professionals, spread throughout the halls of the Fiera expo centre. 2025 saw crowds of 600,000 bleep through the gates. Creating presence and pomp at EICMA has required each significant powered two-wheel brand in the industry to assign a hefty quota of their yearly marketing budget due to the fancy stands and showy set-ups.

MotoGP riders have frequently attended a portion of the show but the scheduling pf the Valencian Grand Prix has inhibited these obligations in recent years. When figures like Marc Marquez, Jorge Lorenzo and Andrea Dovizioso have gone to Milan then it's usually been at the behest of sponsors or employers rather than MotoGP itself.

Since the ratification of the Liberty Media takeover of Dorna Sports in 2025 there has been speculation about how the championship will change. A new visual identity (put into place before Liberty arrived), internal recruitment and alterations towards better corporate entertainment (organisation of the paddock, an extra pitbox space for guests) have been the only signs outside of confidential meetings between teams, the MSMA, MotoGP Group and Liberty for the next five-year contract window starting in 2027: the foundations of how the championship will eventually blossom.

Expansion and new audiences are the mantra of MotoGP as the championship morphs to be an 'entertainment brand' as much as a sport. 'Show' elements are increasingly eating into agenda of the riders - the stars names - across Grands Prix, and there may well be much more of a promotion emphasis moving forwards. This might be a chore to the establishment but it will soon become normality to the likes of David Alonso, Izan Guevara and the next generation of Grand Prix racers. Replacing Phillip Island for Adelaide Parklands is coincidental timing but the city centre location for the 2027 Australian Grand Prix is a fine example of the Liberty remit for a basic 'ABC' formula regarding more fan and public catchment.

Most followers might be resistant to change in fear of dilution of the traits that made them adore the championship in the first place. But MotoGP Group's commitment to EICMA means they are working on a 360-degree programme of promotion, rather than just nonendemic channels for more eyeballs. In Mugello, it felt abnormal that MotoGP hadn't taken advantage of the EICMA platform before or more regularly.

"It is kinda a surprise," CSO Carlos Ezpeleta smiled. "EICMA is a huge event. MotoGP and our fan base are much more than people who just ride bikes, having said that we still have work to do with people that do. Millions and millions of bikes are sold every day and the people buying them are not as engaged with MotoGP as we'd like them to be. It is a more targeted initiative than others that we do… but from a brand perspective EICMA is the best in the world at what they do and we're the best in the world in what we do, so it makes sense."

The association was reflected in the advertising campaign for the 83rd edition of the show featuring a partially covered sportsbike. It's not the most obvious gesture when the lion's share of contemporary interest in the motorcycle market revolves around scooters, electric mobility and convenience models like naked bikes, tourers and upmarket adventure products. MotoGP's push is to not only widen consideration for Grand Prix racing at EICMA but to work with the stakeholders and investors in the paddock.

"It's an event that you have to be part of; to inform that crowd and how the manufacturers that are in this paddock are a level above," Carlos added, exclusively. "We want to help with that and its important."

EICMA, running from November 5-8 for general public (with an extra two days for trade and an expected media attendance of 8000+), falls on the rescheduled Qatar Grand Prix date and, for now, is one of the only non-race commitments MotoGP has for this type of fixture. "I think we will definitely do more outside of the circuits with different audiences and different targets…but I don't think we'll look at many other automobile shows," Ezpeleta remarked.

What can EICMA attendees expect? The usual display paraphernalia of bikes, faces, merchandise and more but also some historical race machinery, partially borrowed from the new FIM Museum in Switzerland. The details will be announced across the weekend of the San Marino Grand Prix at Misano in September.

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As for MotoGP, is the gesture towards a predominantly motorcycling audience (and one embedded in hotspot country for the sport at that) one that MotoGP Group felt they needed to quell some of the consternation about future alterations of Grand Prix? At the very least, EICMA will allow an opportunity for connection and dialogue with a hefty sample of European followers.

"I don't think we need a gesture," Carlos underlines. "There is always scepticism and people that like to draw-and-divide, and we have been very vocal and clear that we don't feel we are making any choices between our fans. In this new era we come with a tremendous position of strength in that we don't need to change the sport to find new audiences. It's the best motorsport out there and we're continuously evolving it to be better, safer and more entertaining. A testament to this is the new regulations [from 2027]. To make this sport bigger from the grass-roots all the way up to MotoGP. We think it makes sense. We're definitely not forgetting about our more engaged fans and those that helped us build the sport up to what it is now."

By Adam Wheeler. Photos by Ray Archer

Honda and HRC formed their own 'compound' at the recent Grand Prix of Trentino. There were four trucks alone for the factory MXGP team; one of which being an elite VIP enclave. Shoes were left at the door. Paired with the new expansive and modern workshop in The Netherlands and a three-rider attack with the CRF450RW in the premier class (two of whom hold seven world championships) HRC has never been so well equipped and equipped to do well. The architect of this red empire is Italian Giacomo Gariboldi, who invests in and administers the platform for HRC's swelling hunger for motocross glory as Honda edge closer to former heights on both sides of the Atlantic. Thanks to a prosperous association with Tim Gajser between 2014-2025 that delivered five titles across both MX2 and MXGP classes, Honda has not been in the wilderness but the line-up of Jeffrey Herlings, Tom Vialle, Ruben Fernandez and Valerio Lata in MX2, not to mention a team of nearly 40 people and increasing interest in the series from Japan, means Gariboldi now oversees the most powerful and opulent team in the sport.

I first met Giacomo in 2008. He'd set-up an ambitious talent development squad in the European Championship (then a separate, distant contest from MXGP) and helped launch the careers of Christophe Charlier and Harri Kullas. Gariboldi's scope for racing caught the eye of Yamaha bosses and he was soon tempted to transition to Grand Prix. Budgets, priorities and politics meant a switch to Honda at a time when their 250 programme did not inspire confidence. It was a redirection for the Italian crew but Gariboldi snared Gajser from KTM's grasp in 2014. The teenage Slovenian was a champion-in-waiting, even though he had a complicated family dynamic, but the collusion of emerging star power and Japanese curiosity with the potential of the CRF250RW in 2015 led to quick results and the Gariboldi and HRC relationship began to flower, even to the point where he could consider his independent Honda-armed youth schemes once more, and spent his own cash to run Livia Lancelot's crew for three years; home of Hunter Lawrence's last MX2 season in 2018.

In 2026 there was plenty to discuss. The arrival of Herlings from a 16-year Red Bull KTM association was a coup. Bringing Tom Vialle over from the U.S. after two 250 SX crowns was also a statement. Managing to convince HRC to field three riders and retaining Ruben Fernandez (the 27-year-old is another Gariboldi project after two years in the MX2 'pipeline' and this season represents the fast but inconsistent Spaniard's fifth term in red) offers continuity after he'd started to shape the prototype CRF from the mid-points of 2025. Lata, and the new alliance with Marco Maddii's team for MX2 and starlets filtering from EMX, means the footprint is even deeper and scarlet.

It's hard to imagine HRC MXGP being any bigger or better than it is in 2026. Is this the dream?

Yes, with four riders, the new workshop, around 35 people working for the team…it's a lot of work - like running two teams - but this is what HRC deserves. They want to be top of the game in both classes. We are struggling with the 250 a little bit but we'll be there one day. With the 450 we have shown that we have three top riders that can go for the win every race. Everything has been built with the goal to win championships, and you need this to perform at the best level.

In the past you backed Livia and had your own 250 programme because you felt it was lacking for HRC…

Yeah, what we [HRC] were missing was a place for younger riders and this was why I started those teams in the past and this year we've made an agreement with Maddii to do this because in HRC we cannot take young riders from the European Championships and wait three years for them to perform at the highest level. We need riders that can already go for podiums. We tried in the last two seasons to take somebody from EMX but it [the development period] was too long. That's why we started with Maddii, and the idea is that they grow some of the young talent in their team and pass onto us because we need somebody for the 250 class. It's not easy because we don't have a two-stroke, so they always go through other manufacturers which then sign the best guys. It's possible to find decent riders but not always those that are ready to go for the win.

What are your thoughts on the EMX250 and MX2 situation at the moment? Is one class choking the other?

I think we miss riders in MX2 now and the top two-three in EMX250 can match the speed of the MX2. Honestly it is like a double class. I think you should either leave MX2 without a [age] limit and put a limit on EMX, like it is now. But having two classes limited in age is a double situation, like a copy. I would go for just one class but I don't know if it is in the interests of the federation to do that.

What do Honda say?

In the past they were not really interested in the 250. For them, the 'F1' of motocross was the 450 and they wanted to win there. But a couple of years ago they really started pushing for the 250, and the new bikes will come…I think they want a good performer on a 250, and they understand that to get a good 450 rider they need to try and work at a younger age to try and hook the next champion. This is how it worked with our riders like Gajser. I have always been pushing HRC for the 250.

Your teams always had a project; whether it was Christophe or Ruben or Tim. This year you went 'big' on recruitment. How was it to lure these top champions? It must have been a different experience for you and other management because Tim had been here for a decade…

We decided to turn the page. Our results were based on just one single rider in the past seasons, and we needed to show that we could win GPs and championships with more than just one. So, the choice was to go for two champions and, of course, it was not easy to find them! We were lucky because Jeffrey and Tom were at the end of their contracts. We jumped on the opportunity and after having worked so many years with top riders you know how to work [with this type of athlete] and what they need. So, it was not really complicated for us to put them in a condition where they could perform, even if we didn't know their personality and habits, but very quickly we knew what they needed. I have been with Jeffrey since day one to understand him, and that worked because I think we put him in a position where he could perform right away and the results have shown. Tom the same; from the first test. To put the best people around him and to make him feel at home. The crew did a god job.

Was it interesting to see Jeffrey up close after being a rival for so many years?

It was strange…even now, after a few GPs, when I see #84 on a Honda I think 'wow!'. It's a bit like dream because he was a rival and against us for so many seasons and we had to fight him every time and hoped he wouldn't perform well. Now to have him onboard it's the other way and it still feels a little strange…but I'm also excited every time I see him on a CRF. The same for Tom. I've seen him on a KTM his whole career and to now be on a Honda and performing so well…you cannot imagine.

How is he? Tom is one of the fastest learners in global motocross…

He is very shy. Very professional. Extremely focused on what he does. He's not afraid to be in a battle. He is used to that after the experiences with [Haiden] Deegan in the U.S. He's an admirable guy, as well as sweet. Jeffrey is somebody who is completely different to what I thought he would be…and Tom has also been a great discovery for the team and, looking at his career, he has needed only one season to adapt and then we would go for the title the next. So, we said: "this year, take it easy, we don't have goals…see where you are" and he is over-performing. Incredibly well. We expected to go for the title with him next year, not this one.

Tim Gajser: can you talk about the decision to part ways?

After twelve seasons we had won quite a lot; five titles and 50-something GPs. I think it was the right time. It is never a lifetime relationship between and team and a rider, and we already had a long time with him. How many others have lasted so long? Maybe only [Tony] Cairoli with [Claudio] De Carli. The decision was made after some disappointing results in the last two-three seasons. We expected…well, when you pay so much money for a rider…of course it [winning] is never easy but you expect to win titles and when this doesn't happen then it is like a disappointment. I think, and also it was felt in Japan, that it was time to go for a new experience and new champions.

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What exactly is your day-to-day role now?

I've never been as involved as much as I have been this year. I spoke about being with the riders but then also my involvement with top management in Japan about contracts and the future. I'm very pleased that they value my ideas. I try to give them an inside view of what is happening in the paddock and with the riders, so they have that feedback to make the decisions for the future of Honda [in MXGP]. I also try to put everyone in the team into a position where they can perform well and to have the right people in the right place but without interfering in their job because I don't want to be the one that does everything. I think if you hire one guy for one job then it's because you rely on him and you trust him. I think now we have the nicest group we've ever had in HRC. Everybody is happy to work. You see the enthusiasm of everyone in the team…and we are many. We have also had more visits from top management, and I think now they are passionate about motocross and that wasn't the case in the past, it was more MotoGP. This makes a huge difference and why we have four riders now instead of two, like in the past.

By Adam Wheeler

As I write this the music of MotoGP's first official 'Fan Fest' will be building up in Plaça Catalunya; the touristic and commercial hub of Barcelona. For two days before round six of the 2026 world championship, the five hectare square will contain all sorts of 'festival-esque' activities in promotion of the Grand Prix and is the first gathering of its kind, aping the F1 'Village' set-up that has accompanied the cars in recent editions and since the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, located 15 miles north of the centre of the metropolis, became the Spanish host of the championship from 2013.

The 35th Catalan MotoGP (not counting the 'Solidarity GP' at the end of 2024) comes less than three weeks after the Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez and follows hard upon the French Grand Prix at Le Mans (scheduling that could hit the attendance figures this weekend, as Barcelona lies just 100 miles from the border and tends to attract a large quota of French fans and motorcyclists). It is three-and-a-half months before the trip to Aragon and then Valencia is likely to wrap MotoGP for the last time come the end of November.

Last week Carmelo Ezpeleta was joined by political delegates from the Generalitat [the Catalan government], Montmelo (town of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya), district and circuit representatives to commemorate the 35th year in a row that the venue welcomes MotoGP. Fittingly, the press conference took place in the astonishing Gaudi-influenced Hospital Sant Pau Recinte Modernista; a 125-year-old institution, refurbished and restored, updated and unavoidable for any passerby or tourist. The 80-year-old spoke at length (in Catalan) about the significance and relevance of the country in the modern era of MotoGP. "In F1 they speak English [as the main language], in MotoGP it's Catalan," he said.

Ezpeleta explained how, as a five-year old, he was fascinated by watching cars barrel up Diagonal and the old Pedrables circuit (site of the 1951 F1 Grand Prix) and realised that Catalunya was a place where his motorsport predilection could be fostered and encouraged. Ezpeleta, of course, went on to become arguably the most influential figure in MotoGP history once Dorna Sports took over the commercial rights to Grand Prix racing in 1992. He was the head of the CdBC - which had been built as part of the same mammoth regeneration project to coincide with the 1992 Olympic Games and signed-off the first GP there that same year (tagged the European Grand Prix until 1996 when it gained its Catalan moniker).

Catalunya's influence and legacy is unescapable. From MotoGP Group's roots and operational base in Sant Just (a neighbourhood southwest of the city), to the bygone brands that used to compete (the Derbi factory was a short distance from the circuit), to the history of the Montjuic circuit and endurance motorcycle races that lapped the city's principal hillside park, to Alex Criville; Spain and Catalunya first premier class world champion, to the bases for teams like HRC, Ajo, Honda Asia, to the residence and training focus for countless riders, the proximity to Andorra and where half of the current MotoGP grid call 'home' to Monlau and other motorsport 'schools' for mechanics, technicians like the late Antonio Cobas, Crew Chiefs like Santi Hernandez. In 2026 four of the current 22 riders on the grid are Catalan: the Marquez brother, Alex Rins and Maverick Viñales.

The Catalan Grand Prix is exactly the model of event that ticks boxes for the future shape of the series under Liberty Media's watch: proximity to a major city, glamourous and modern (CdBC have been upgrading their facilities for the last three years, have aimed for better security and have invested more than a million euros in improvements to the medical centre for 2026). Monster Energy have seen fit to sponsor the event, choosing Barcelona's appeal over Le Mans and Silverstone where they had previous agreements and presence. Crowd figures have fluctuated; from more than 97,000 on race day in 2015 dropping to 60 in 2022 and the first GP after the pandemic. The Marquez influence helped to a surge back to 76k in 2024 and twelve months ago the official figure was 83,320 for an unusual September slot on the agenda.

Last year the Grand Prix was the third best attended from the four on the slate. Jerez drew over 101k, Valencia (benefiting from its position as the championship climax) generating over 93k while Aragon could only pull in 50. Valencia is due to shift in 2027 as Australia and Adelaide are expected to assume the finale role, so it will be curious to see if the event continues to sell-out. Crucially, Catalunya has a 5-year contract in place, running from 2027 to 2031 as does Jerez and Valencia, so Aragon - which is up this year - is sweating under the axe. As a side note: Balaton Park and Silverstone were the lesser attended European rounds in 2025.

"In the future it will be difficult…but well, like I said before, Catalunya is a 'birthplace'," Ezpeleta commented when asked about the wavering Iberian prevalence on the calendar. "I think from the beginning in 1949 and then our stage from 1991 we cannot dispute that is has grown exponentially. I hope the growth from now will be almost the same again. We cannot do more than 22 races due to safety and due to the contracts with the teams and the federation, and therefore four GPs in one nation will be tricky."

22 Grands Prix place huge demands on MotoGP Group for costs, staff and logistics but Ezpeleta intimated that the championship could - but won't - accommodate even more. "The prospects are really good. There is a huge interest for MotoGP, above all, from investors and people who want to be part of the teams and, for sure, from the 22 rounds we have, if we could rise to something like 27 then we'd have them. People have accepted the change really well and everyone involved is committed to making thing better."

"Liberty is a world leader and knows a lot about the entertainment business. They are going to fill the well, and should be very good for us," Carmelo added. The Spaniard said that MotoGP Group has "changed a lot" but initiatives like the Fan Fest in Barcelona was the sort of idea the company wanted to chase. Now, with Liberty's approval, the quest to take MotoGP away from the race circuits and into the faces of a bigger audience had been empowering. "There are a lot of things that we already wanted to do…but [needed] to have shareholders that agreed with these activities. Liberty's experience of having done it with Formula One - and their knowledge - is really important, in comparison to the previous shareholders and for that we're really happy and proud."

The Fan Fest is largely a circuit and city initiative with MotoGP Group's full involvement. It's a dummy-run for more schemes and follows the priority in 2025 and 2026 for big activations like the season Launch. It's also an example of the fresh demands that MotoGP Group are making of the 11 teams (more time, more marketing staff, more commitment, more promo motorcycles) in the protracted negotiations towards the new 5-year deal between promoters and players. Ezpeleta was also asked about this. He didn't seem worried about the delay or stated that there was a deadline. "The agreement is different than it was…and changes need time for negotiation," he admitted. "I don't like people that don't barter…because that tends to mean they won't fulfil [the contract]! So, it's normal that we discuss…but we'll reach an agreement for sure."

Also at the press conference was Miquel Sàmper, Minister of Business and Labour of the Generalitat, who stressed that the business spread of MotoGP covers "more than just 3 days" and the accumulative effort of the bikes and F1 contributes an "annual lever" of more than 500m euros for revenue and commercial interest in the region, city and country. Perhaps it's an important stat considering the public funding required for the Circuit to exist and to bring the Grands Prix to town. He also commented that for 2026 "the circuit leaves its current area and comes more into Barcelona" with reference to the promotion efforts.

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MotoGP gained even more traction in the eyes of the authorities when Madrid swooped to acquire the Spanish GP rights to F1. The five-year tie for the Catalan GP ensures that Barcelona won't have to sweat its Grand Prix status as it barrels up to the four-decade marker…and can instead dream of other ways to get an already mainstream sport into wider consciousness.

By Adam Wheeler. Photos by Polarity Photo/MotoGP.com

'April is the cruellest month…' so opens T.S. Eliot's seminal modernist poem 'The Wasteland' and Marc Marquez could well relate. The world champion's love-hate relationship with Jerez persists and was partly encapsulated in a 36-hour period. The 2026 Spanish Grand Prix could even be said to represent a snapshot of the Catalan's career: acclaim, adoration, speed, skill in the hardest of track conditions, improvisation, victory, controversy and then a disturber of gravel traps. For the second time in two years, his younger sibling jumbled Marc's emotions of annoyance, frustration but also pride and affection.

All this came after a heavy crash in a former fortress - the Circuit of the Americas - and a somewhat fortunate three week reprieve to recover after the rescheduling of the Qatar Grand Prix. April was testing for Marc. 'One must be so careful these days'.

There is plenty of poetic substance to the Spanish Grand Prix, and since the world championship found a spiritual home at Jerez. The frequent sun-kissed zeal for racing is immediately transparent through the repeatedly large attendance, the volume of the fans' reactions, the abundancy of apparel, the now-traditional pre-dawn light show of the congregation at Peluqui and hammered home by the banks of shimmery motorcycle metal in the stodged parking zones.

Marquez, 33 years old, was aware of the great stage on Saturday when he turned his last corner Sprint crash into a first win of 2026. "I say many times; sometimes the people remember more, or talk more, about the riders that create show than the riders that win a lot. So yeah, the most important [thing] is that the fans enjoy."

Alex, 30 over the weekend, and now a veteran of 250 Grand Prix starts as well as one of only three riders on the grid with world championships in the other two classes, also felt the indelibility of his mark. "This is something magical," he said of his second win in a row and being the first Spaniard to do so since his brother in 2018/2019 (before that it was Jorge Lorenzo in 2010/2011).

Jerez. Where the Don Pepe tower flanks the sounds of dance music, the echo of the tannoy, the pungent smell of 'lomo con queso' occasionally mixes with sunscreen and the crowd are still pouring through the gates less than an hour before the main race (perhaps jaded after a busy night on the Andaluce tiles). All the vibe, but, perhaps less of the verve…in 2026. The 25 laps on Sunday was a long watch compared to the freneticism of the weather-hit Saturday Sprint where Marquez senior reigned but sparked debate once again with his detour into the pitlane after falling in the Flag-to-Flag wet at Turn 13. Cue yet another revision of the MotoGP rulebook due to the exploits of MM93.

Sunday was instead a showcase for Alex's self-confessed "flow" and where he did not have to worry about the elements interrupting his pace in the lead, as it had done to the detriment of his spare parts catalogue on Saturday. The day was also, a window for the recovery trend and 'acumen' of Marco Bezzecchi after another iffy Saturday, and further consolidation that Fabio Di Giannantonio knows what he is doing with the finickity Ducati GP26 and when the Italian doesn't have to lose energy and focus on rehabbing from injury, as he did in 2025.

There were only three position changes in the top eight from lap 5 of 25 and two of those coming when a resilient Johann Zarco lost all performance from his Michelin rear tyre with five circulations remaining, and the smooth Ai Ogura took aim with his Aprilia against the French sitting duck. "Especially the last four or five laps, everybody struggled in [corner] entry," the understated Japanese said. "And in turn 8, I have so much grip compared to others, so that's where I catch them. But, until lap 4-5, everybody was okay."

Jerez was described as a 'kart circuit' by more than one rider for its short 4.4km layout, and is one of the few courses on the calendar where riders vocally complain of arm-pump. It's also diverse, justifying its use as a testing source. "Jerez is a complicated track because it's super-complete with fast corners, slow corners, hard braking," offered Bezzecchi.

MotoGP is shackled by tyre pressures, aerodynamics and ride height devices and even though Jerez provides at least three delicious overtaking opportunities, the machinery appears too unwieldy. "We have many tracks where you can only focus on the rear tire, basically, because it drops the most. Here is a bit different," Diggia explained. "I always suffer with the front here. I think it's a track that if you are really precise you can make up time on the rider in front, but if the track is smaller it's more difficult because you have to be super-precise. You have here a bigger track, longer track. You can gain and lose time here and there."

The static extended away from the race distance. The MotoGP paddock is neither a wasteland nor a no man's land; nothing near the gravitas or seriousness associated with those words…but, currently, there is a sense of stalemate, and the stench of impasse. Serious faces, endless meetings and the drip-feed of rumour and suggestion. The manufacturers, the teams, the MSMA organisation that represents them, MotoGP Sport Entertainment Group [namely Carmelo and Carlos Ezpeleta] and any semblance of a brief from championship owners Liberty Media are still not aligned. There is a vow of quiet among the MSMA members and they are not using the media to air any grievances or explicit details of how they'd like the next half-decade agreement with MotoGP's rights-holders to play out.

Some information has emerged however as the parties barter on remuneration (and therefore the amount of future investment, with at least two of the brands involved almost entirely reliant on motorcycle sales to fund or justify their MotoGP involvement), profit share, and other stipulations such as the buy/lease process of equipment and mandatory requirements for marketing and promotion. Meetings have been going on for months and not just with senior racing management figures but also CEOs of the respective motorcycle companies (most recently at the USGP).

Allegedly, the latest proposal from MotoGP Group was deemed unsuitable for the MSMA members in Jerez. Three companies did not send representation to the promoter's annual dinner for influential paddock personnel in the centre of Jerez on Friday evening, although the reasons for their absence could also be coincidental.

MotoGP, therefore, is still in a holding pattern before the hype can begin towards the new era for the championship in 2027 and all the speculative changes the transition entails.

There is some self-serving and forthrightness through the murk. Alex Rins is jobless for 2027 and had few qualms in informing the media on Thursday that Yamaha had decided against renewing his contract after two-and-a-half fruitless seasons (and a best result of 7th). His statement was as much an advertisement and alert as a direct response to an enquiry. Trackhouse Racing's Team Manager, Davide Brivio, decided to tell MotoGP TV reporter Jack Appleyard during Friday's sessions that Ai Ogura had informed the Aprilia satellite crew he would not be staying on the American RS-GP for a third term; essentially confirming his shuffle to Rins' saddle. Apart from contracts for Johann Zarco, Diogo Moreira and Toprak Razgatlıoğlu there have been little else in the way of confirmation until the teams cement their status with MSEG.

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Jerez was far from peaceful on Monday morning. The rustle of litter was the only audio from beyond the fences but MotoGP bikes were still howling underneath brilliant blue skies and with the abundance of post-race grip ready for sticky testing laps. KTM, Honda and Ducati were particularly eager to grab track time to fix their turning and grip issues respectively while Yamaha maintain their development course in a separate MotoGP sub-category. Oh! What a turnaround 2027 MotoGP could be if the Japanese are secretly fashioning the most potent 850.

2027 is likely to see a large pivot in the sport and Jerez, with its status as the European 'opener', will again be a barometer for MotoGP's conditioning. Fragmentation and isolation in the pack and among the tinted windowed hospitalities are only temporary themes in this championship. Eventual harmony carries great promise.

By Adam Wheeler. Photos by Ray Archer and JP Acevedo.

In the initial stages of the 2025 Grand Prix season, Spanish hopeful Oriol Oliver was stranded. He had a ride with a privateer MX2 team but when they lost their main sponsor he was asked to cough up cash to keep his saddle. The 23-year-old couldn't pay and was briefly unemployed. He was rescued by the private Gabriel SS24 KTM squad with partial support from the Austrian factory as part of their talent development scheme. Oliver turned heads with a 4th position overall in MX2 at the French Grand Prix and he gelled with the modest British set-up until illness derailed the later stages of the campaign.

Team Owner, Simon Gabriel, and Team Manager Shaun Simpson had seen enough. Their remit with KTM saw them providing Dutch teenager Gyan Doensen with a berth in 2026 EMX250 but they pushed for a stock KTM 450 SX-F for Oliver in his forced age-related move to MXGP and their first dabble in the premier class.

Oliver has subsequently turned heads. His rapid starts, attractive riding style and fearlessness has given him opportunities to run at the front of the field in two of the five rounds to-date. In Arco di Trento and the last outing for the world championship he posted his first top ten results with a P8 and P10 for 9th overall.

So far, so rookie. What's the big deal; you might think…? Well, the narrative falls squarely into that classic underdog role. Oliver finished ahead of nine former Grand Prix winners, a world champion and three championship runner-ups as well seven factory bikes In the first moto at Trentino.

The #83 says "I'm learning new things on a bike I'd never ridden before - such as the changes we're making to the suspension and the feeling I have - but the thing I like the most is that every race I feel the margin for improvement", but for all his open-mindedness to the task there is a natural blend with the bigger motorcycle, compared to what he had in MX2.

"I always thought the 450 would be a good fit for me because from the 125 days and even the 250s I liked to ride long gears," he told us. "On the 250 I could click into third and use that for a whole lap, especially for tricky places like Arco di Trento. I don't get on the gas too aggressively. I ride gently and with low revs. So, I suspected I could be fast but I also don't yet know how to push it fully, and I'm learning. For example, in Arco the track was different to anything I really ride or train on, so it was a good experience to use the motor and also make changes to the WP suspension to get more out of the bike. I think I'm a 'light' rider. I'm not a factory guy but I think I'm smart with what I do. I have a good base; which is important."

"I know that when some riders move to the 450s they ask their team to lower the power, in my case I feel the more the better!" he admits. "I haven't ridden a factory bike…but I like having the full possibilities of the engine because I can be fine with the throttle."

"In MX2 I was more preoccupied [about the bike]," he adds. "Going to the gate knowing that it was not at the level of the factory ones next to you did not give extra confidence. It didn't phase me…but it was on my mind. Now, I don't have that feeling. I have a competitive bike and that means I only have to worry about one thing: me. It helps a lot to know that I can start well and be right at the front and with the team we have trained and practice a lot for this. We've tried different things, and in Sardinia we figured out the way to start consistently good. My confidence is up."

Defending and seizing track positions from rivals with far more experience and silverware is not a daunting prospect. "It gives me even more motivation to work," he reveals. "I love motocross and I love being in this category."

The loss of his friend and fellow racer Enzo Badenas towards the end of 2025 after a training crash seems to have hardened a mental resolve. He took a podium finish at the Internazionali D'Italia on his 450 debut in Sardinia less than two months after the tragedy. He wrote on Instagram that he was 'happy but not satisfied' with 9th in Italy last week and for all his humility (and the dwarfing might and resources of his opposition) Oliver is aiming for bigger prizes, much in the same way that Simpson himself subverted the MXGP establishment and, to this day, is still the last winner from a privateer set-up with his effort at the 2015 Belgian Grand Prix (at Assen later that year he was steering a works KTM 450 SX-F).

Simpson says that Oliver is as fit as a fiddle, focused and (crucially) modest with his set-up and entourage. Ironically, for what was meant to be a team dedicated to the progressive steps of youngsters, Gabriel SS24 KTM is now moulding a flowering talent at the elite peak of the series, as well as vying for a British Championship. Oliver's story is one to watch. He dropped back into the clutches of the field during the Sardinian Grand Prix and the difficult sand of Riola Sardo for round four but was stubbornly resistant seven days later in Arco.

"Things had gone well at Riola but that's a hard track and I'm still in the 'process' with the 450," Oriol explained. "It was positive…but the results not so much because I got tired, honestly. It's one of the toughest tracks, together with Lommel. Starting at the front was a big lesson for me and I stayed there as long as I could by giving the maximum and not saving much energy. I sunk! But I concentrated on recovery after Sardinia. I hardly touched the bike and got ready for Arco, where my lap-times barely changed through the moto and I was happy about that. We're almost there and we can use these weeks without a GP now to work really hard and reach the next level."

MXGP might obsess with the title fight between Jeffrey Herlings, Lucas Coenen and Romain Febvre, or dwell on the rookie efforts of ex-world champs Tom Vialle, Kay de Wolf and Andrea Adamo, or chart the course of Ducati's second year…but there are also other stories of merit in the premier class and Oriol Oliver and Gabriel SS24 are doing all they can to grab glory as well as the cameras.

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By Adam Wheeler. Photos by Ray Archer.

During a gripping first MXGP moto at El Ciclamino there was a full-volume cry from the endlessly animated circuit commentary team: "la furia!" It was belted out in reaction to Jeffrey Herlings' race-winning charge from 5th and past teammate Tom Vialle and dumbstruck world champion Romain Febvre. Herlings somehow found a brace of laps four seconds faster than the Frenchman, and the moto was done. "I just got into a flow, and it got better and better," the five-times world champion said of his most emphatic performance yet on the works CRF, and only his ninth GP start on Japanese machinery. "I was in traffic all the time; I picked up lines and saw some good spots. I had to be creative but at one point I just had a really good flow."

Herlings' enduring ability to surprise MXGP fans and followers has been one of the characteristics of the series since the Dutchman's shock emergence as a Grand Prix-winning 15-year-old in 2010. Through an elongated, untimely sequence of comebacks, comeback charges, spats, crashes, injuries, debuts, wildcards…MXGP is rarely staid when the #84 is moving; except for 2018, where he won practically everything and filled Grand Prix with a withering sense of inevitability with every gate drop.

"It's so stacked right now and it's so good for the sport, for the GPs and for everyone," he said after his second overall victory from five rounds, elevating him to four points of a curiously 'off' Lucas Coenen ("I didn't have expectations because this track does not suit me," the 19-year-old offered after finishing 7th). "It will bring a lot of people. Back in the day when I was winning by over a minute with Tony [Cairoli] it was quite boring to watch. People always want to see some rivalry; maybe Haiden Deegan way is too much for the European side…but it's what people want to see and why they come to the races."

Or because they can witness a master in motion. On Saturday Jeffrey had dropped the Honda in the Qualification Heat but some rainfall on Sunday had helped slow and roughen the rocky Italian soil (optimistically mixed with sand and softer dirt by the circuit organisers) and he looked less 'lost' against the formidable speed of Coenen, who had soundly defeated Herlings and co seven days earlier in the Sardinian sand.

Coenen's error on the first lap caused a groan in the Red Bull KTM camp and continued the 'one-on, one-off' podium streak for the Belgian who somehow had to plot a route from outside the top 25 to 12th. Febvre himself was fortunate to be anywhere near the front after a technical issue on Saturday left him with the 39th gate choice, but a lucky open slot eight/nine places from the inside opened for the Kawasaki man, like the softest, fastest and most inviting rut. He was bumped back to reality and the outside for the second moto, and had to claw back to 12th.

People might speculate that Ciclamino is not a definitive Herlings circuit but the 31-year-old actually dominated the very first Grand Prix at the site in 2013 with a 1-1 in MX2 (Cairoli delivering the same results on the KTM 350 SX-F that day in MXGP). He logged another four visits to the top step since and his 1-2 on last Sunday meant six career triumphs at a course that Tim Gajser claimed is: "not easy at all on a 450". HRC teammate Vialle, who was 3rd overall described it as "a slow track. I think I rode the whole thing mainly in 2nd gear. I shifted to 3rd a couple of times. It's slow, very technical and small bumps. Pretty fun."

Herlings revelled in the billing that came with his furious charge (career win #114 and 13 above previous record holder Stefan Everts) and hinted that the pliability of the Honda helped. "It's hard to make big margins on this track; in practice there were four riders in 0.1 [of each other]. It's really close. I felt that the bike helped me a lot. On the KTM it was not the easiest track for me, so I feel like I gained on that. I'm super-motivated, I still love it. If I get a win I just get so hyped-up and it makes me train even harder the next week. If I get beat…it depends on how. In Sardinia I was not the fastest guy. I was beat and I was fine with it."

Ciclamino pulsed with vigour (any airhorns, flares and chainsaws left in the rest of Italy?) as Herlings chased and passed. The packed attendance cheered his every move and the display of efficient overtaking. This, in itself, was quite a role reversal. From 2017 to 2021 Herlings was the semi-perennial scourge of local hero Tony Cairoli. Last weekend he was the darling of the crowd; Tomac-esque.

Pietramurata is flanked by majestic grey 1000m mountainous peaks and it was fitting that the two monoliths of the series pressed their weight. Herlings and Gajser have claimed six of the last ten MXGP titles between them. They now also have six wins each at the venue. Ciclamino split the moto honours as the Slovenian profited from another Coenen slip to glide that fetching Alpinestars Valentino Rossi dedicatory gear into the lead during moto two and then defied Herlings' best attempts to pressurise. "I was pushing but he did not make a mistake," Jeffrey admitted. "He did a good job.'

Gajser's first success in Yamaha colours comes after an erratic start to the campaign in which he has totalled three podiums but also crashed and has yet to find holeshot potential. It's hard to know whether Tim is now set to challenge for 25 points regularly. His steady but unspectacular first moto run to 3rd was followed by some unspecified set-up changes for the second moto. "I was pushing way-more. I felt way-better," he said. That the 29-year-old found his way is already impressive as he dealt with the legacy of his fall in Sardinia. "I didn't expect a lot. I had that crash…and broke some ribs," he revealed. "I felt like the fans were giving me something to keep pushing," he added, in refence to the large, smoke-toting Slovenian contingent that make the short annual pilgrimage to the Dolomites.

Pietramurata feels so contradictory. For all the excellent attendance and dynamism of the fans it was also overly congested in the paddock (where the throughfares become hazardous lanes of bikes, pitbikes, cars, lorries and bicycles, even dogs), access tunnels and passages were rammed and the parking for public and campers outside of the single-road entry was an inventive exercise in logistical opportunism. Mobile phone coverage was a guess.

Also, for the tinted windows of the teams' goldfish bowl trailers (and factory bikes mounted on F1-style 360 dollies) and HRC's assembly of five truck trailers housing workstations, storage, and two for hospitality - the most impressive and comprehensive MXGP set-up I've ever seen in 25 years covering the sport - the rest of the paddock was disparate, with scant amenities for food, sanitation or promotion.

For the wholesome full start gates there were also 18-lap motos and gripes of backmarkers. If MXGP grows further, then what can be done about places like Pietramurata and all its stunning beauty? Do tickets become limited and priced higher? Can this GP become 'boutique' or does it give the impression of spilling over the edge, and dilutes the fan experience? If the crowds are filling the venue then there is clearly a vibe of 'not broken, so no fixing required'…but there is undoubtedly scope for more at this Grand Prix and Pietramurata is still a draw, even in the post-Cairoli era.

"It's not my favourite track but definitely my favourite race," Gajser said, unsurprisingly.

"There are some others like it; five-six other rounds that are also quite hyped up but Arco is usually the first big one," claimed Herlings.

This year MX2 is underwhelming compared to MXGP but Ciclamino was a fitting home for the 'Sacha Coenen Experience' and the irresistible start combination of Red Bull KTM 250 SX-F power and his diminutive frame.

Coenen's dedication and wilful abandon is admirable and his style is unusual: he commits to ruts and corners sometimes with blind faith, leaning off the front part of the bike to such a degree that the motorcycle won't be saved if it goes. Holeshots, speed and mistakes are part of the Sacha Coenen 'ride'. Precision is not yet part of his arsenal, neither is sustained focus, but once (if?) these rough edges are smoothened then he'll be unshakable. If he increases the percentages in the rest of the 2026 then MXGP could be in the unlikely position of two brothers, two twins, not only fronting their respective categories but also running towards the titles. His first victory of the season was a rout and puts him just four points behind a curiously lacklustre Simon Längenfelder.

MXGP is a long weekend. After Sunday press conferences the clock is nearing 7pm and this scheduling is partly because of the championship's willingness to pack European Championship support classes into the program. The relevance and role of EMX250, the last tier before MX2, seems more prevalent than ever, as the speed and ability of the riders narrows and European competition is more attractive and popular option compared to the world championship. It's a subject for a deeper dive - coming soon - and I spoke at length with the FIM and team reps at the weekend about it.

At the moment, the MXGP class is a powerful distraction. Yes, there are Triumphs and Ducatis on track but the big hitters are still making the big plays; that's four different moto winners now from the ten held so far, seven different podium finishers. "It will be a difficult year because it is not just Lucas; it is Tim, Romain, so many guys who can also be in between," Herlings assessed. "If you have a bad day…there are still many guys with GP wins or championships."

Less than 30 minutes and 20km south of Pietramurata lies Lake Garda; the largest stretch of water (52km in length) in Italy. The region is apparently one of the most seismic in the country. Depth and rumblings: perhaps MXGP is very much at home here.

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By Adam Wheeler. SardiniaGP photos by JP Acevedo.

Jeffrey Herlings made the dream start to his HRC career at the 2026 MXGP opener in Argentina but Lucas Coenen has since upped the ante, and with two conclusive sandy victories to boot. The 19-year-old Belgian is the Dutchman's heir apparent on the motorcycle that Herlings helped shape from the Red Bull KTM confines that he called 'home' from the end of 2009 up to 1st January this year. It's an elite duel that could shape the championship arc of 2026.

Coenen is in the ascendancy, but Herlings is hardly dragging his feet after his high-profile team and manufacturer switch and is the only athlete to have appeared on three podiums from the first four Grands Prix. He sits just 14 points behind Coenen, who is the third rider to have held the red plate already. This total equals the same amount from 2025 and is the most since the fabled 2021 title dispute…which Herlings conquered.

Lucas triumphed in the sand of Andalucia and Sardinia, and Jeffrey had to play runner-up on both occasions. Coenen's combined race-winning time in Spain was a hefty 30+ seconds. In Riola last Sunday it was just over 20, after he'd tripped up and crashed, resulting in a grandstand finale that was decided by just 1.2 at the flag. Put simply, Coenen has been largely without peer and has dealt with one of the best sand racers of all-time quite comprehensively.

In Spain Herlings graciously gave Coenen his dues during the post-race interview. In Sardinia he was equally as effusive as the strong winds rattled through the media centre and (figuratively?) through the Grand Prix paddock "He's on a level now…[and] even though I'm maybe Jett Lawrence's biggest fan; I don't think even Jett Lawrence would have stayed with the boy next to me," he said in the press conference Sunday afternoon. "I think currently he is one of the fastest in the world."

Coenen has looked stronger and more assured in 2026 so far compared to his record-breaking rookie term last year and his speed across the mind-bobbling bumps of Almonte and Riola (and also the ruts of Frauenfeld in Switzerland when he wasn't being limited by racing incidents) show that the youngster is hitting a stride. He is still prone to mistakes though, and while not as frequent or dramatic as his twin's in MX2, these lapses could be countered by the mental resilience that has long been formed in the heat of premier class competition by the likes of Jeffrey, Romain Febvre and Tim Gajser. Being simplistic for a moment, we could talk about the aged racing trade-off: youth, vigour and abandon against steel, consistency and weathered experience. Jeffrey Herlings, for so long MXGP's exponent of the former category, is now firmly into the latter but this is not to diminish his powers, nor to undercut the reenergising effect of trying to take Honda back to the top of the pile.

There was something invincible about Coenen in the Sardinian powder, however. Even Herlings' trademark final laps attack could not dislodge his peer in the second moto climax. "You have to be perfect everywhere," Coenen said of the sun-kissed sand.

To see Jeffrey outpaced in 'his' terrain in this way raises questions…but then we must remember that this is not the young man who once lapped up to 2nd place in the Lierop sand in MX2 or the animal that raced to victory in the Arnhem sand with a fractured shoulder. Even a superpower like Jeffrey Herlings has to bow to time, age, mileage, stiffness and pain, and his comments in recent years - in the wake of the momentary paralysis, broken necks, concussions, plates upon collarbone plates, shattered ankles and knee reconstructions - have recognised his powerlessness to fate and destiny while on track. The Herlings risk-minimalization strategy has still been enough to rack the GP wins.

Mitigations. There might be work ahead with the CRF (and this most certainly seems the case with Gajser and the factory YZ450F Yamaha) and Herlings' caution is well founded, considering he has completed only two interrupted seasons since his masterpiece in 2018. Sizeable injury setbacks coming into 2024 and 2025 mean he must be given some leeway for a steady build into 2026. Encouragingly, his feeling with the Honda was good enough to lead MXGP from the off, despite just two months of riding time his first non-Austrian steed. His starts have occasionally been a past vulnerability, but these have also improved in regularity with Honda trickery. Such is Herlings' might, his thirst, his experience and his pain-staked longevity that he simply cannot be ruled out of podium contention, and this means he will nudge Coenen and co all the way unless a doctor intervenes.

The bad news for Jeffrey (and the establishment) is that Coenen is at the front of a queue. #84 will know more about teammate Tom Vialle's rookie potential and will also have some insight into countryman Kay De Wolf's formation, even some of former teammate Andrea Adamo's slightly slower development, considering both the Dutchman and the Italian are steering the 450 SX-F basis that Herlings up until recently regarded as an extension of his anatomy. There have already been seven different riders on the four MXGP podiums of 2026 and two of those are debutants to the class. Herlings was not playing lip service in Sardinia when he said: "I don't feel ashamed. I feel that the competition is very strong here in MXGP. The top ten are all top, top riders in top teams with great bikes and great facilities so it is not a shame to be second but…second is the first loser."

"I was the best of the rest again," he added.

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De Wolf was particularly rampant, even with two injured thumbs, to make the podium for the first time with the Nestaan Husqvarna (and the team's first premier class trophy). "I was almost off 10 times but held on for dear life," he said endearingly in the press conference. "I don't have much to say. I just pinned it. This class is no joke, even P15 can be really fast. It's fun and a nice experience but I still need to work a lot to catch up to these two."

Tony Cairoli, Jorge Prado, Tim Gajser, Romain Febvre: Herlings has defeated some of the best and most successful Grand Prix riders in the modern era and Lucas Coenen is his latest challenge as he extends that all-time GP win haul up to 113 and counting. If anything, Lucas should be rubbing his hands in glee. 2026 is his chance to collect a distinguished set of scalps before the AMA beckons and they don't get much more decorated than a resistant Bullet's.

Popular for other uses, Rust isn't typically deployed for web development. That could change, however.

With AI here to do the heavy lifting, coders may want to consider the programming language, given its runtime performance and safety guarantees, suggested Carl Lerche, an Amazon Web Services principal engineer, speaking at ScyllaDB's 2026 P99 virtual conference last week.

Lerche was there to demonstrate his latest project, Topcoat, a framework for running web applications written in Rust.

Lerche is perhaps best known for creating Tokio, which is the most popular asynchronous Rust runtime in that ecosystem.

"Three years ago, had [I] gone out and said that Rust could be the best language for building web apps, you probably would have called me crazy," he told the virtual audience.

Web developers gravitate towards the languages they find most familiar. These days, that means JavaScript, or possibly Ruby.

A number of web frameworks already use Rust. Both Leptos and Dioxus compile Rust into WebAssembly, which most browsers run. This approach is great for heavy computational jobs, though the upfront loading time can be a real drag.

Topcoat compiles your Rust code into more web-friendly JavaScript. For Lerche, JavaScript remains the best way to interact with the browser's Document Object Model (DOM).

"Generally, the approach taken by any Rust framework can be traced back to another ecosystem, usually a very popular one. You can't really point to a single existing framework as [Topcoat's] main source of inspiration," noted frontend developer Ken Kohlman, in a summary video on his "Code to the Moon" YouTube channel.

Lerche admitted that Topcoat isn't for building complex applications, on the scale of, say, Figma, but it can easily be used for the run-of-the-mill, browser-based, database-driven applications, which is to say 90 percent of the web today.

Unlike most present-day JavaScript frameworks, Topcoat eschews the current definition of being reactive, where the program logic is dumped onto the browser when the session begins. Instead, most of the logic executes on the server, with only the results delivered to the browser (Developers can still write client-side logic using a subset of Rust, which Topcoat automatically compiles into JavaScript for the browser).

It's an old idea recast with better tech. Server-side rendering predates reactive programming (see Apache's server-side includes). With server-side rendering, Lerche admitted, "It might sound like we're going back to the old days of full page refreshes for every click [but] you can actually get almost all of what you think of as reactive with server-side rendering."

But server-side programming has been making a comeback lately, especially for those devs disgruntled with React and other frameworks. HTMX, Datastar, and Phoenix LiveView all render web pages on the server, sending them back to the browser nearly completed.

Topcoat is just tweaking their ideas to fit well with Rust, Lerche said. When a user smashes a button on a web page, the whole page isn't refreshed. Just the HTML snippet for that component is returned and refreshed by the server.

Topcoat saves load times by rendering all the components at once, rather than one by one. Also, data loading does not block the loading of the page. The server can send back a web page with placeholders into which the data will stream.

One big dollop of secret sauce that Topcoat has is that it provides a way for the component, which is already on the server, to speak directly to the database, thanks to an earlier project from Lerche called Toasty, a Rust-based asynchronous database object-relational mapper (which he spoke about at P99 2024).

"You can do your rendering right with the data immediately, so you don't have to figure out how to serialize it, send it to the client, deserialize it," he said.

By pushing data loading deep down into the page render, the server can send the head of the HTML template to the client immediately, allowing the browser to start preloading assets (like CSS or images) while the server renders the rest of the page.

"The simplicity is incredible, and it is something that we have been sorely missing in this space. I feel like someone who doesn't really know Rust could get off the ground pretty quickly with this thing," Kohlman said. He did agree with Lerche that Topcoat is best for smaller web projects, given that Topcoat only uses a subset of the Rust syntax.

"There's something to be said for having the full Rust syntax at your disposal," he said. ®

Suspected Chinese attackers chained PHP2Shell with a Linux kernel privilege-escalation exploit to root 25 servers, including Palo Alto Networks firewalls linked to US government-affiliated organizations, according to Dream researchers.

The snoops began exploiting these servers on October 23, targeting organizations across the US, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. The attackers also honed in on US government-affiliated firewalls.

"Within hours of compromising a US government-affiliated firewall, they had tunneled into the internal network, compromised a third server using the same PHP2Shell exploit, and launched a full Active Directory attack campaign - all through a chain that started with a single unauthenticated HTTPS request to a management interface that should never have been exposed to the internet," the Israeli AI cybersecurity startup said in a report.

Plus, the attackers "likely still" have persistent, remote access to compromised organizations' networks, Dream noted.

The attackers rooted the first US government-affiliated firewall on October 23, but the device crashed shortly afterward, possibly due to around 900 MB of exploit traffic. According to Dream, it remained unresponsive despite 240 automated checks over two hours. They successfully exploited the second firewall a day later, on October 24.

The compromised firewalls ran vulnerable versions of Palo Alto Networks' PAN-OS. Dream said it had been working with the vendor to investigate the compromises, and Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers independently verified the attacker's tooling and confirmed Dream's reported results.

To break into the firewalls, the attackers built a custom exploit chain that includes PHP2Shell and a Fragnesia kernel flaw, and ran about 40 custom post-exploitation scripts once they were inside the targeted organizations.

PHP2Shell, comprised of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, came to light early last week, along with fears that attackers would abuse the bugs to take down most of the internet. Despite "hundreds" of PHP2Shell proof-of-concept repositories on GitHub, the first reports of successful attacks didn't start until Saturday.

Both bugs have CVSS scores of 9.2 and can be exploited without authentication to run code on vulnerable PHP servers.

The PHP2Shell exploit recovered by Dream was not a copy of any known public exploit. It "appears to have been independently developed and tailored specifically for the targeted firewall platform," the researchers wrote.

The attackers combined PHP2Shell with Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300), a high-severity local privilege-escalation vulnerability affecting the Linux kernel's XFRM ESP-in-TCP subsystem. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added this Linux kernel bug to its catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities on Wednesday.

Both CISA and the FBI declined to comment.

The miscreants developed a four-stage PHP2Shell exploit that allowed them to execute commands without authentication on vulnerable Palo Alto Networks firewalls. They then used Fragnesia to escalate their privileges and gain root access. The attackers targeted PAN-OS 12.1 and 12.2, which run PHP 8.0.30 with a high memory limit that enabled the exploit's memory-corruption stages.

"The total chain - from unauthenticated HTTPS connection to persistent root webshell - completes in under 15 minutes," the Dream team wrote.

Here's how it works: First, they flood the servers with crafted multipart POST requests to corrupt PHP's memory, and force a predictable memory layout.

Then a second request forges the stale session ID length from the memory corruption part of the attack, forcing an out-of-bounds read and exposing the base address of libphp.so in the running process.

The attackers then exhaust PHP's memory again to force mod_data=NULL, creating a stale reference they can forge in the final stage to execute commands as the nobody user. They use Fragnesia to escalate to root and plant a web shell in a publicly accessible directory on the firewall.

After breaking in via the compromised firewalls, the attackers snooped around in Active Directory, stealing credentials and other sensitive information. With root access, the attackers also had the master key to decrypt the LDAP service account password, which they hardcoded into every subsequent script.

They also enumerated every user and group in the domain via LDAP queries, and sprayed passwords against every user account. Attackers also tried to create backdoor AD accounts and attempted SAML signing key extraction - but Dream doesn't know if these were successful.

"The attack results - whether the password spray found valid credentials, whether the backdoor accounts were created, whether SAML keys were extracted - stayed on the management server's local filesystem and were not among the artifacts we recovered," the researchers noted.

The investigation also uncovered evidence that the attackers used AI tools, but noted that this was not a fully autonomous attack.

The researchers found Anthropic's Claude Code installed, an AI-powered offensive security platform called aiscan configured with Chinese models DeepSeek and Kimi, and API keys for the FOFA reconnaissance service. FOFA is a Chinese internet asset search engine similar to Shodan. The attackers used it to identify about 19,000 internet-facing Palo Alto Networks firewalls worldwide.

"The persistent tunnel into the US government organization is likely still running," Dream warned. "And the attacker still has 19,000 fingerprinted targets they can revisit as they develop profiles for additional PAN-OS versions."®

XPENG recently launched sales of the new L05 in China and began shipments to global markets. Having seen a camouflaged prototype in Munich a few months ago, I had the impression that it was basically a longer L03. Looking at the production model, other than a few added features and ... [continued]

The post XPENG L05 Offers A Bit More appeared first on CleanTechnica.

'Pigeon Harp' by Bibio & Dorian Concept.

Taken from the beautiful collaborative album Answers, newly released on Warp Records — and a much-needed, gentle balm for whatever the hell is going on out there.

Nathan Gouker Claims Triple Crown Championship and Dominates WERA GNF at Barber Motorsports Park

Nathan Gouker delivered an outstanding performance at the 2026 WERA Grand National Finals (GNF) at Barber Motorsports Park, capturing the 400 Superstock Triple Crown Championship and collecting multiple victories across the weekend in both the 400cc and 600cc classes.

The weekend kicked off Friday with Nathan competing in the two-hour Ultralightweight Endurance race. Taking on the challenge as a solo rider, Nathan completed the entire two-hour race himself and came away with the victory, all while running used takeoff tires. It was an impressive display of consistency, endurance, and determination to open what would become an exceptional weekend.

Saturday brought Nathan's opportunity to compete aboard a 2008 Yamaha YZF-R6 with no electronic rider aids. In his opening 600cc race, Nathan quickly worked his way to the front, taking the lead on lap two before a broken shift rod unfortunately ended his race prematurely. Despite the setback, he bounced back to claim victories in his next two 600cc races.

Nathan continued improving his pace throughout the weekend, recording a new personal best lap time of 1:28.2 aboard the 2008 YZF-R6, an impressive accomplishment on an older-generation motorcycle without modern electronics.

The 400cc competition presented another challenge. Riding Dale Quarterley's stock Kawasaki 400, Nathan started the opening Triple Crown race from row 20 in the second wave, having registered the Monday before the event under WERA's registration-based gridding system.

Despite the starting position, Nathan immediately began working his way through the field. By the time the red flag came out with two laps remaining, he had closed the gap to the leaders, demonstrating impressive pace and racecraft.

Nathan went on to secure the 400 Superstock Triple Crown Championship, adding another title to his growing list of accomplishments.

Sunday was another dominant day, with Nathan sweeping both 400cc races aboard Dale's stock Kawasaki 400, along with winning all of his 600cc races.

Even more impressive, the Kawasaki 400 was running used Krämer takeoff tires from the MotoAmerica Talent Cup season. Despite the older tires and stock machinery, Nathan recorded a pace that would have been good enough for pole position in the 2023 MotoAmerica Junior Cup competition at Barber.

The weekend showcased Nathan's versatility, consistency, and ability to adapt between different motorcycles, delivering victories across endurance, lightweight, and middleweight competition.

A special thank you to Dale Quarterley and Bob Robbins for their continued support and belief in Nathan. Their commitment to providing him with the equipment, opportunities, and environment to continue developing as a rider has played an important role in his success. We are extremely grateful for everything Dale and Bob continue to do for Nathan and for the platform they've provided him to excel.

A Triple Crown Championship, a solo two-hour endurance victory, multiple sprint race wins, and a fantastic weekend at Barber Motorsports Park!

The post Gouker Earns WERA Triple Crown Championship At Barber GNF appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Make a squishy cow udder controller for your indie video game out of silicone and force-sensitive resistors, so players can squeeze teats to the beat!

The post Udderly Fantastic Game Controller appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

A few years ago, I was on a plane with my Kindle Paperwhite in my lap, and when I grabbed the seatbelt to strap in, the buckle hit the screen and cracked it. It was still usable, but the bright spot was distracting. — Read the rest

The post My Kindle cracked again, so I switched to a tiny Xteink e-reader appeared first on Boing Boing.

As you may know, The Streisand Effect was originally coined right here on Techdirt in 2005, though it referred back to an event from 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued Ken Adelman, because his project to map how erosion impacted the California coastline incidentally included a photo of Streisand's Malibu mansion.

Streisand demanded $50 million in damages ($10 million for each of five counts). It quickly came out that prior to the lawsuit, the photo had been accessed a grand total of six times, and two of them were by Streisand's lawyers. But after the lawsuit was filed, more than 420,000 people went to view the photo in the following month alone. California's anti-SLAPP law protected Adelman, and Streisand was eventually forced to pay $177,107.54 in legal fees, including $155,567.04 to Adelman.

The story is remembered for the effect I coined, in part because of the futility of trying to hide information, but in part because it's a reminder of the importance of free speech.

It's possible that story would go very differently in Germany today. We already know that Germany is much more sensitive to concerns about privacy and data collection, and when Google launched its useful "Street View" feature in Google Maps, some people in Germany insisted it was a violation of their privacy. I have difficulty seeing how a single static photograph of buildings taken from public streets can be a privacy violation, but German regulators and plenty of residents insisted otherwise, so Google now lets residents blur out their own house in street view (and, tellingly, fewer than 3% of German households actually bothered to do so).

But now there's a new story, again in Germany, with a court ruling that Google Earth, which gives you satellite imagery of the world, somehow is the equivalent of spying on people in their homes, because the photos were taken without notice.

The German court ruled that Google acquired the aerial images by "spying" on ordinary people because it does not inform property owners beforehand that their homes will be filmed and photographed. As a result, Google does not get their consent to publish aerial photos and information about their property on its Maps and Earth sites.

The German court determined that Google had violated the privacy of the man and his family by sharing aerial images of their property on Google Earth. It found that a person's right to privacy extends across their entire property, not just inside their home.

"Nobody must accept the worldwide publication of aerial images of their property without their consent, at least when concerning areas of a property hidden from public view," the court says in the ruling, according to DW.

A German source (Google translated) suggests that the issue is the 3D models of buildings, including things hidden from Street View:

The case concerned whether a property owner can demand that their inhabited property disappear from Google Earth and Google Maps or be blurred. The plaintiff lives with his family in a house in Frankfurt. At his request, his house had already been pixelated in Street View and Apple Look Around. However, in Google Earth and the 3D view of Google Maps, it remained visible as a three-dimensional model - including the rear portions of the property that are not visible from the street.

That same source notes that there is conflicting caselaw in Germany already though:

The Frankfurt ruling stands in stark contrast to an earlier decision. The Itzehoe Regional Court dismissed a similar lawsuit on June 11, 2020 (Case No. 10 O 84/20 ). At that time, the court primarily based its decision on property rights: According to Section 905, Sentence 2 of the German Civil Code (BGB) , the owner cannot prohibit overflights at the altitude from which such images are taken. The court deemed the information discernible in the images too unspecific to infringe on the right to privacy. We reported on this previously: Itzehoe Regional Court: No right to pixelate a property in Google Earth .

The Frankfurt am Main Regional Court takes a different approach. It does not ask whether the overflight itself can be prohibited, but rather whether the worldwide publication of the images violates the general right of personality . For the injunction, it bases its claim on Section 823 Paragraph 1 of the German Civil Code (BGB) and Section 1004 Paragraph 1 of the BGB by analogy. Since 2020, the technology has changed: flat satellite images have become detailed 3D models that can be linked with other data. The Frankfurt ruling addresses this change.

Neither ruling is precedential until there are higher court rulings.

The court also brushed aside Google's argument that it was democratizing access to knowledge, admitting that was important, but saying that the privacy rights outweigh the access to information claims. Though the report notes Google may still appeal.

Maybe this is just cultural differences, but I find the whole thing bizarre. The court tries to limit this to parts of a property 'hidden from public view,' but that's what an overhead photo is: a periodically updated snapshot of what anyone in a plane could see. Ongoing or real-time surveillance might be a different story. A static image from the sky is not that.

But, I guess Barbra should have moved to Frankfurt if she wanted to keep aerial photos of her home off the internet.