Why a scenic field in Hampshire is home to the British Motocross Grand Prix
Motocross is one of the most exciting sports to watch, so it's no surprise that the British round of the World Championship is a hit with spectators Credit: Ray Archer
Round two of nineteen in the 2019 FIM MXGP Motocross World Championship drops into the shallow ‘bowl’ of Matterley Basin, Winchester this weekend. The large site is a mud-splat away from junction 9 of the M3 and has been home to the British Grand Prix for the last decade.
It draws fans from across the UK and Europe to a location used once a year for motorcycle racing and a summer music festival. A (so far) stable weather forecast should see more than 30,000 people converge close to England’s former capital city come Sunday. They will crowd around a jump-laden and spectacular course with vast viewing potential for spectators, permitting full appreciation of a violent and perilous form of motorsport with a vast and unseen grass roots following.
Matterley Basin is epic in scale over its forty-four acres and was inaugurated in 2006 for the Motocross of Nations (a ‘world cup’ of the sport): a fixture that was blighted by rain in the build-up but did not deter an official crowd figure of 89,000. Since then the ground has been mined for the Nations again (2017) and has become the stable British stop on the MXGP calendar thanks to originator and driving force Steve Dixon.
Principal of the Bike it DRT Kawasaki team (that competes in the MX2 class of the series), local resident Dixon took a crash course in event-planning and all the regulations and permits required to make a world championship race occur to establish Matterley Basin. The venue is virtually unique on the Grand Prix agenda (that visits sixteen countries) because long after the bikes have throttled the English soil the circuit grasses-over and remains a quaint part of the countryside until the following year.
“Making the grand prix involves a ten-day build but it is a smooth process now,” said Dixon who has dealt with a myriad of problems and issues through ten editions of the British Grand Prix, ranging from parking, access, weather, communications, security, ticketing: all the imaginable head-aches of a major international occasion. Aside from running a Grand Prix winning team Dixon is now a venerable bank of knowledge when it comes to a large scale sanctioned sporting gathering.
He persists with Matterley Basin and a place that can welcome over 400 competitors, factory teams and race transporters once the support classes have made their way through the gates. “It’s a green-field site so everything has to be brought in,” he reveals. “That includes 7km of fencing, water pipes and temporary water structures, generators and other infrastructure to create the paddock.”
Matterley has clear advantages: size, uninterrupted views and a track that is widely rated amongst the grand prix riders as one of the best on the schedule. But the ‘temporary’ nature of the Basin does create hassle. The simple question for Dixon and his small organisational team, flanked by volunteers and other people enamoured by the sport is: why?
“To run a grand prix you need a lot of space and the established motocross tracks we know in the UK simply don't have the requirements or the specifications,” he reveals. “We’ve invested into Matterley with underground structure, communication lines and detailed traffic planning and management and a ton of small details such as flat-parking for trucks and lorries. A road racing circuit would have the facilities, but the costs of creating a motocross track inside are so high because you essentially need to close down the circuit from it’s day-to-day use and transport all the dirt into the site. Good dirt in order to make a Grand Prix track is very expensive and then you cannot control the rain or the drainage. It needs to be kept dry.”
“So Matterley is hard work but it is also fairly cheap and more sustainable,” he adds. “You also have to think that the distances for the fans from the track at a place like Donington Park or Brands Hatch will also have an effect on the atmosphere and we’d like to try and preserve that the best we can.”
This year Dixon took a gamble. He made a request to championship overseers Youthstream for the British Grand Prix to shifted from a traditional summer berth to earlier on the slate. The March date skirts closer to disaster with the weather but for something that costs upwards of a quarter of a million pounds to run the timing also has financial benefits (as well as possibly fishing for extra fans hungry for MXGP after a long off-season). “By moving the race to March I’d say we’ve saved 25% of the budget on infrastructure costs – a metre of fencing is 8-9 pounds instead of 15 – as it would be in the summer. There is a lot more means of transport available. It is a ‘feast or famine’ scenario compared to the summer and the music festival period. Having the race in March means we can cherry-pick our prices more.”
Dixon’s obsession with the grand prix has involved a lot of personal and professional sacrifice. It began in 2005 as an enterprise to support the promotion of his team and DRT is the only Grand Prix squad from the UK still in existence from the last century. “It was important for my team and the sponsors and there was a time when the race wasn't going to happen; we didn't have one in 2003,” he says. “I’ve run a race team for thirty years now so I know I am doing something right there!”
The British Grand Prix survives largely thanks to Dixon and his relationship with the Matterley landowner, local sponsors and companies and the support of the fans that still make the journey to Winchester. Getting people onto the grass banking is not getting any easier and this is a preoccupation that any motorsport – or sport – promoter can relate to.
“I still cannot really give an answer as to why I do it,” he admits. “I think if people were not prepared to give their time and their knowledge for sporting events like this then they wouldn't exist and that goes for pretty much any sport I believe.”
“MXGP is easy to see on TV and there are many other distractions for people today,” he adds. “So we cater for the ‘hardcore’ and have to make it work right for them. Compared to music festival goers that will buy tickets in just a few hours and well-in-advance, race fans tend to decide maybe a week before or even on the day, so it means cash-flow can be tight and it can be a stressful time.”
“I think if anyone came into this just for the money then there are too many variables for it to work,” he stressed. “It has to be driven by passion to make it happen. I’m at the point now where I don't want to give up and be seen to fail with it. When the first race starts on Sunday I still get a good feeling: the hairs go up on my arms and I think ‘we did it again’.”
Friday, March 22, 2019 at 11:30AM 
