Ask the likes of Wayne Gardner, Mick Doohan, Troy Bayliss and Case Stoner and they'll all tell you that they were/are paid to ride on the world scene and were able to get a paid ride in their early days as a racer.  Ask any of the Australian riders trying to make their way into the world scene now and its a completely different story. To be blunt, if you dont have personal sponsorship to take with you to a team, you will be more than just a little fortunate to get a ride.  The analysis of why this is will uncover more than just the global financial crisis as the governing factor, although it is inevitably what is being blamed 9 times out of 10.  You also have to consider the expectation from riders that if they ride well they can go to the world scene and earn big money, without taking into consideration what they have to do beyond ride the bike.  Surely you can ride hard, win races and the team and their sponsors will take care of the PR.  Well not any more.  You can ride as hard as you like, but if your not with a good team on a good bike, you are not going to beat a rider with similar ability in a good team with a good bike.  So how do you get into a good team.  I think the English and the Spanish started the trend of riders fronting up the good teams and saying, "take me instead of him and I'll bring money into the team instead of you paying me.  I'll just take the prize money and bonuses from my Sponsors".  This has back fired on the riders as now the expectation from the teams is exactly that scenario.  Bring us money, or no ride!  How do you get the money?  Personal Sponsorship.  It's never been more important that you promote yourself and learn to build up your own sponsor base with the full knowledge of what you need to do to get sponsosrhip and take them with you all the way to the top.  Now people might just start to see why it is important that in the MRRDA we allocate MAC points and why when we put the series on TV we gave the audience an insight into the personalities.  If you want to ride at the top level, you now either need to be able to market yourself, or have good people on your team that you will listen too and are able to make the PR happen for you.  In the early days of World Championships you took your own bike, your mates were your team and you took off in your transit van to live off prize money.  So to some extent we've gone full circle.  Now however the sponsors dollar replace your own bike and that transit van, while the licenced teams replace just turning up and having a race.