MotoGP Group has named Carlos Ezpeleta as Deputy Chief Executive Officer, formalizing a role he has effectively been growing into for years. He’ll serve alongside his father, longtime CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta, who remains in his position atop the organization.
Carlos Ezpeleta’s appointment caps a path that started in 2007, when he joined Dorna Sports as an intern helping Race Control review TV footage of incidents. He moved into a full-time role in 2013, later coordinating the Medical Team and serving as a Safety Car driver before taking charge of the sports department in 2017. He became Managing Director in 2020 and Chief Sporting Officer in 2021, the post he held immediately before this promotion.
Carlos Ezpeleta’s Two-Decade Rise Through Dorna
As Chief Sporting Officer, Carlos Ezpeleta held direct responsibility for the Sporting and Technical areas of the championship, along with oversight of the Promoters, Operations, and Talent Promotion departments. Part of that role included serving as Dorna’s representative in reaching consensus with MotoGP’s other governing bodies, the FIM, IRTA, and MSMA, mediating within the Grand Prix Commission, and overseeing matters tied to the championship’s regulations.
Carlos Ezpeleta studied mechanical engineering and business at Universidad Europea de Madrid, and raced competitively during those years, winning the Spanish Endurance Championship in 2012 and back-to-back GSeries ice-racing titles in 2017 and 2019. That mix of paddock operations experience and hands-on racing background has shaped how he’s approached the sporting side of the championship.
What Carlos Ezpeleta Inherits From Carmelo and Liberty Media
Carmelo Ezpeleta’s own tenure runs even longer. He joined Dorna in 1991 as director of the motorsport department, shortly after the company acquired the television broadcast rights to the Grand Prix World Championship. He became CEO in 1994 and added the roles of Managing Director and shareholder in 1998, building the organization Carlos now helps run from a career that started in circuit management in Spain in the 1970s.
Carmelo Ezpeleta called his son’s leadership, vision, and passion for the sport the right combination to guide MotoGP into its next chapter. Liberty Media CEO Derek Chang framed the move as support for a transformation already underway, citing Carlos’s deep understanding of the sport. Carlos himself pointed to reaching new audiences and unlocking the sport’s full potential as his focus going forward.
Liberty Media’s stake in that future dates to April 2024, when it agreed to acquire 86 percent of Dorna in a deal valuing the MotoGP enterprise at €4.2 billion, with existing management retaining the remaining equity. Then-Liberty Media President and CEO Greg Maffei called it a chance to expand a great sporting spectacle to a wider global audience, and the agreement kept Dorna operating as an independent company within Liberty’s Formula One Group tracking stock, with Carmelo Ezpeleta’s management team staying in place in Madrid.
That continuity has held since. Dorna itself was renamed MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group earlier this year, a rebrand Carmelo Ezpeleta described as a statement of intent rather than a cosmetic change, arguing the sport had grown into a global entertainment property that happened to be built around racing.
This appointment is Liberty’s first major leadership move since the acquisition closed, and it reads as a bet on that same continuity rather than a clean break. Liberty Media isn’t bringing in outside executives to run the sport day-to-day; it’s formalizing the authority of the family that has run it since 1994, while leaning on that experience to chase the kind of commercial growth Liberty built with Formula 1.
MotoGP Group says further leadership additions are coming. What does it say about Liberty Media’s read on the sport that its first move post-acquisition wasn’t to bring in outside executives, but to elevate someone who has spent nearly two decades inside the organization his father built? The answer may depend on who joins Carlos Ezpeleta next.
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