Bikewriter.com

'Bricking' explained by the Times

2012-03-03T06:21:00.000-08:00

I spotted an interesting story in the New York Times this morning, about a Tesla that had been allowed to sit while its battery completely drained, and then sit some more, unused, while chemical changes in the flat battery rendered it permanently incapable of being recharged.

The event, which Tesla has been unwilling to cover under warranty, means that the owner's EV now requires a $40,000 replacement battery. Tesla claims that most of its products have a set of fail-safes which will prevent this from happening (or at least reduce the risk of it happening) in other models.

Still, it's an example of the kind of problem that can only really become known as the number of EVs in circulation gets large enough to make oddball problems apparent.

It makes me wonder, though, whether the much smaller batteries in EV motorcycles are even more subject to flattening by parasitic power drainage, if left unattended. I have enough trouble keeping my ICE motorcycle batteries charged, and have been frustrated a few times that 'modern' gel batteries seem less capable of being deep-cycled.

Anyway, if you want to read more on the Tesla problem, check it out hereon today's NYT site...

Magazines. It gets worse...

2012-02-29T19:08:00.001-08:00

So, I was listening to NPR the other day (just trying to hear Mitt Romney's gaffe-of-the-day, or maybe get the latest Comintern update) when they broadcast a report on human slavery in the U.S. Given the subject, I expect to hear stories of human trafficking related to the sex trade or farm labor, but the 'industry' they seemed to talk about the most was door-to-door magazine sales.

Although the life of the slave's been romanticized in movies...

...the actual history of slavery's less attractive. And in fact, it's possible that a modern slave, working on a magazine sales crew, might pass essentially undetected in suburbia.

Since I used to work for motorcycle magazines here in the U.S. (full disclosure: I still do write a column for the UK magazine Classic Bike) I know that many subscription deals are essentially loss leaders -- the amount of money, if any, that comes back to the magazine is less than the cost of mailing out the magazines, but the nominal increase in 'subscribers' boosts the advertising rate base.

I also used to work in the ad business, so don't get me started on the advertising value of a subscriber who pays "pennies an issue!" for your magazine. What evidence can magazines present to advertisers that such subscribers care about the magazine's contents or can even be bothered to flip through it?

But, I digress... I thought, how fucking desperate is the magazine that does business with these sleazeballs?

I should have guessed that something was up with those 'sales crews'. The only time I ever encountered one, it came in the form of an inner-city teenaged girl who claimed to go to a local school (impossible, given my address) and who became abusive when I politely told her that I was not interested.

I never got to the point in that transaction where I really looked at what magazines she was offering me. So I don't know whether any of the 'big' U.S. motorcycle mags were on her list. Although they should know better, major publishers do actually let real fucking scammers sell subs for them. Typically, publishing execs plead ignorance, when it comes to which 'clearing houses' they use to sell subs and how those clearing houses recruit sales crews. I certainly don't have any contacts high enough in the business hierarchies of Bonnier Corp., which owns Cycle World or Source Interlink (Motorcyclist) to find out whether they are selling subs this way. And my contacts on the Editorial side of those mags certainly wouldn't know.

But maybe some Backmarker reader does know. Has anyone out there answered their door, and been subjected to a high-pressure/BS sales pitch for a magazine subscription, and had the menu of magazines on offer include motorcycle magazines? If so, please contact me, eh?

Wish they all could be Chernobyl girls…

2012-02-27T14:48:00.001-08:00

It's been a few weeks now that my posting rate's been below par here on Bikewriter.com. Trust me, I've got a good excuse or two -- I'm distracted by a couple of big projects in development, and hope to have a an interesting announcement or two soon.

In the meantime, I'm going to recycle the odd story that seems worthwhile, including a few that may be old enough to have been genuinely forgotten by long-time readers, or which new readers may never have encountered. Once such story is that of Elena Filatova. I first encountered that name a few years ago. I say “encountered that name” because I haven’t encountered her in the flesh. Nor has anyone I know. But I was suddenly reminded of her the other day when, as I was searching through some old emails for an unrelated reason, I came across one with this photo attached...

Her looks didn't hurt my desire to believe that Filatova's story was authentic. I desperately wanted Motorcyclist, where I worked in 2004, to assign me a feature story about her, that would involve going for a ride with her. Those were the days when a big motorcycle magazine might, conceivably, have actually had the budget to send a writer half-way around the world. Seems like so long ago... .

Filatova was curiously famous–an internet phenomenon before the heyday of YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. In 2004 her website generated millions of hits. It told the story of a thirty-something woman who lived in the Ukraine and who rode her Kawasaki ZX-11 around on the deserted roads of the “dead zone” around Chernobyl.

Very early in the morning of April 26, 1986 the nuclear power station in Chernobyl in the Soviet Socialist Republic of the Ukraine blew up. A massive radioactive cloud drifted over the western part of the USSR and much of Europe. Several hundred thousand people were evacuated from parts of the Ukraine and Belarus. The official Soviet death toll was only 31 people–mostly firefighters and helicopter crews who heroically attempted to limit the release of radiation in the days after the explosion. Later estimates, however, suggest that about ten thousand people have died (or will die) of cancers caused by their exposure to Chernobyl’s fallout.

Officially, the zone where the fallout was worst, about 20 miles in all directions from the reactor, was permanently evacuated and remains largely empty. According to her blog, Elana Filatova first visited the zone in the early ’90s. She was drawn to return by the area’s air of mystery and by the deserted roads, where she could ride her motorcycle as fast as she wanted. She wrote that regardless of the official statements, there are thousands of abandoned towns, as far as 150 miles from the reactor site.

Call me an incurable romantic, but the idea of this dark beauty riding a fast bike through those ghostly, deserted forests and empty towns totally fascinated me. She wrote of wolves and wild boar crossing the roads, paying no attention to her at all as they’d lived their whole lives without humans to fear. And of visiting the abandoned motorcycle shop in Pripyat, the city nearest the reactor. I was not surprised that millions of people visited her website. When I first heard about her, I was working for Motorcyclist Magazine and I tried to reach for an interview her, at the very least. Not so secretly, I hoped that the editor might even approve a trip over there so I could go for a ride on, er make that 'with' her. But I never got a reply to my emails.

Like a lot of people, I started to wonder whether she was real. On her own website she admitted that many people believed she was a figment of someone’s imagination. Why would a Ukrainian write in English–and conspicuously good English at that? The story was almost too good to be true.

On the other hand, why go to all that trouble? There were no ads on the site, no requests for money; if it was a piece of anti-nuclear activism, it’s probably too subtle to be effective. The site’s not even copyrighted; the author openly invites anyone to reproduce the content. No one seems to be making any money on it. Somehow the loving, detailed description of her motorcycle and the way she modded it made me think she was for real.

So what was her story? After my emails went unanswered, I wrote to the snail mail address on her site and never had a reply. If you trust Wikipedia, her myth's essentially been busted; the consensus seems to be that she is a real person, but that the lone, high-speed motorcycle rides through the Chernobyl death zone were fictional. According to a Chernobyl tour guide (which is, in itself, quite a thought) she took a bus tour through the zone, and posed for pictures.

What about Fukushima, I wonder? Are there any Japanese versions of Filatova riding those roads?

A la recherche de motos perdus, Part deux...

2012-02-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago, I left you in the rain, as the horde of fans and swap meet treasure hunters abandoned the Circuit Linas-Montlhéry in the face of an advancing rainstorm.

I retreated to Eric Saul’s huge tent. Saul, who won a couple of Grands Prix back in the day, occasionally promotes classic races based mostly on the rugged Yamaha 250 and 350 twins that filled GP grids in the 1970s. The day before, Eric had highsided his Bimota 250 and broken his collarbone, for the nth time. I learned that the French word for “highside” is pronounced, “eye-side”.

“I think,” said Saul with a one-sided shrug, “that there might have been oil on the track. Have a glass of champagne.” Hundreds of people were packed in with us, the hard core that didn’t want to leave, even though the Coupes Moto-Légende was over. Eric’s girlfriend, also a racer, was playing the accordion. Some song that was so French it hurt. She was tall enough, pretty enough (and fast enough by the way) that it looked and sounded good on her. I thought about pushing through the crowd to say hello to Giacomo Agostini, but I stayed on the fringes.

It’s not an accident that the expression “joie de vivre” is French. Eventually though, all things must end. The party fell quiet and the last of us filtered out, leaving the great track silent once and for all–if by “all” you mean, the public.

What does the future hold for Montlhéry? The land belongs to the government. Decades ago, the track and associated buildings were basically handed over to UTAC, a company which provides testing and consulting services to the car industry. UTAC, in turn, is controlled by Renault and Peugot/Citroen. This tangled ownership always made it easy to duck responsibility. When Montlhéry locals complained about noise and traffic, the administration said, “What can we do? The land belongs to the government; they’re the ones who made it a national monument; we’re sort of obliged to open it to the citizens every now and then.”

At the same time, when 40,000 Coupes fans got up in arms over the impending closure of their favorite track the administration said, “Well, it’s not us that want to close the circuit.”

But in fact it was them. UTAC never wanted the public on the site. They do almost all their physical testing in modern buildings built outside the track, and more and more of their business is in computer simulations. The company’s web site doesn’t even mention the legendary oval.

The road course was occasionally rented out to car clubs, but the owners said the use they got from it, and the revenue it generated, didn’t justify the cost of basic annual upkeep.

A few years ago, they got the perfect excuse to close it: the French government being, well, French has a committee that exists for the sole purpose of homologating the country’s race tracks. Every track needs a valid certificate to stage events. For Montlhéry’s certificate to be renewed in 2004, someone would have had to spend $15 million repairing cracks in the concrete and repaving the whole thing.

“15 million!” UTAC’s spokesmen acted suitably taken aback, and sputtered, “Who’s got that kind of money? We’ll have to stop holding public events.”

Without a showcase event like Coupes Moto Légende, le Circuit de Linas-Montlhéry faces continued neglect, and slow decay. Eventually, it will be unusable, and the owners will be glad to padlock it once and for all. Weeds will push up through the cracked asphalt and vines will slowly overtake the concrete banking.

Motorcycling itself only goes back a hundred years; and Grand Prix racing barely goes back 50. So until now, as motorcyclists, the most interesting parts of our past have been held in our collective living memory. As a historian of our sport, I have always liked the idea that I could talk directly to the people who made our history - that I could see their motorcycles run, and hear them.

No one would have thought – riding like we did, half the time without helmets – that we’d even last long enough to reach this point. But as time marches on, motorcycling’s history is starting to reach back past living memory. Into history history. That would be what? Dead memory?

It’s funny. I went to the Circuit de Linas-Montlhéry for the bikes. Because it might’ve been my last chance to see and hear a bike like that Norton kneeler in its original context. I thought that hearing it would somehow make that memory my own; real, not just a historical note beside a static display.

Then I went back a second time for the empty track. I was prevented from seeing it, not because there was any secret testing going on there that I might photograph, just because a typical, emasculated French petty functionary relished the opportunity to say “no.”

I never expected to be so interested in the track in the first place. There was a certain, melancholy poetry to being denied a final visit, not that there’s any great philosophical conclusion to draw from it. Except that while it’s worth it to keep our history alive, it’s also important to remember the things we’ve lost.

A la recherche de motos perdus, Part un.

2012-02-13T17:39:00.000-08:00

Last week, I noticed that the hipsters over at Hell For Leather posted a video of a pack of scooters circulating on the rooftop test-track of the old Fiat building in Turin, Italy. That building was one of the defining products of the Futurist movement; Fiat cars were assembled on an assembly line that spiraled up through the enormous building. The assembly line ended on the roof of the building, where cars were tested on the parabolically-banked oval. Fiat stopped using the building as a factory in the early '80s, but the building survives as a shopping center.

That reminded me of another famous track that was also an architectural monument -- the fantastic oval outside Paris at Linas-Montlhéry, which was one of the touchstones of the school of architecture that came to be known as 'brutalism'.

My thoughts on Montlhéry were first posted on the old Road Racer X web site about five years ago, based on a few visits to the track that had taken place a couple of years before that. But since that post's long vanished from the interweb, I thought I'd repost the essay here...

A couple of months ago, I did something every journalist should do every few years: I (re)read A.J. Liebling. He was a brilliant essayist and war correspondent, a funny guy, and an insightful observer of subjects as diverse as the sport of boxing and French cuisine. He’s best remembered for his long stint at the New Yorker, a magazine so respected by writers that it is called the[ital] New Yorker, not “New Yorker.”

Liebling wrote eloquently about returning to Paris when the city was liberated in ’44, and described spending the last night before liberation in Linas-Montlhéry. He was bemused by the town’s gigantic race-track, but didn’t pay it much attention. Instead, he climbed to the top of hill and looked, through a spotting scope, at Paris. That was on his mind. But reading Liebling’s reminiscence of Montlhéry took me back to my own visits there, about 60 years later...

The first time I went there, it was to write a story about an event. Afterwards, I realized the real story was about the track itself. So I went back to see the track again a few weeks later.

That first time, I got a ride with Patrick Bodden; going back alone was more involved. I had to decode French train schedules, walk for hours after miscalculating the distance from the nearest station; a whole day was shot. When I finally got there, I innocently asked permission take some pictures of the empty circuit. I was told, “Fous-moi le camp! No one’s allowed in, and even if you were allowed in, photography is strictly forbidden.” To that, the jobsworth added, “And it’s never going to be open to the public again!”

* (Asterisk indicates that a brief musical interlude goes here. I suggest Edith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien.”)

For the previous 11 years, “Coupes Moto Légende,” Europe’s biggest vintage motorcycle meet had been held at “Le Circuit de Linas-Montlhéry” on the southern outskirts of Paris. That Spring, I went because I’d heard that the 2003 version of the “Coupes” was to be the final motorcycle event ever held at “Montlhéry”. The event always drew an amazing array of rare bikes. I wanted to see them, and especially hear them, in their natural habitat.

The Montlhéry circuit had remained virtually unchanged since its construction in 1924, making it a perfect setting for a vintage event. When the circuit was built it was in the countryside, but inevitably Parisian suburbs spread south and population density increased around it. More and more, local residents opposed the roar of open megaphone exhausts and the traffic snarls caused by legions of fans. By the time of the 2003 event they’d gotten their wish – the locals were promised, “No more.”

But oh, what a track it was. Although the layout allowed for road courses of up to 12 kilometers in length, Montlhéry was famous for its 2-1/2 kilometer parabolic oval. Way up at the top, the banking was a real old “wall of death.” If you had the guts and suspension for it, you could ride any motorcycle ever made all the way ‘round absolutely wide open. You think I’m exaggerating? Raymond Jamin, who engineered the track, calculated the rising slope so that up at the guardrail, a motorcycle could run through the turns at 220 k.p.h. with completely neutral steering. To build the banking up high enough, and make it strong enough to absorb the g-forces generated by the massive speed-record automobiles of the day, Jamin used 8000 cubic meters of concrete, reinforced with 1000 tons of steel.

Fame eluded Jamin, but his race track is a monument to the modernist style that appropriately became known as “brutalism.” In fact, it is listed in the official register of French historic sites and monuments.

The bowl was an ideal place to set speed and endurance records, and they were set here, by the hand-written, leather-bound book-full. Five years after the track was built, Herb Le Vack rode a Brough Superior to the world’s first closed-course lap of over 200 k.p.h. That bike, a 1927 model SS100 Pendine had been tweaked by Freddie Dixon. Before Le Vack rode, it was raced by George Brough himself. It’s currently owned by Peter Lancaster, a collector – like everyone here at the Coupes – who understands that even precious bikes need to run to live.

In 1952, Norton’s race engineer Joe Craig was staggered by the speed of the Gilera four-cylinder Grand Prix bikes. He responded by building the Norton ‘kneeler’, trying to make up with streamlining what the single-cylinder Manx engine gave up in horsepower. English GP ace Ray Amm, aided by Eric Oliver, set a total of 41 records on that Norton when they brought it here in the Fall of 1953.

The noise they made!

Norton, blaat.

Brough, MV, roaring (the twin pitched flat, the four on song.)

Honda six, Guzzi eight. I winced when they were revved. Partly due to the earsplitting sound, and partly because I couldn’t ignore the potential for mechanical mayhem within those irreplaceable crankcases.

At a certain moment, it occurred to me that, yeah, I was getting an echo off the banking, but the parabolic shape was in fact directing the bulk of the sound straight up into the heavens. High flying birds, at least, must’ve wondered “What the?..”

By Sunday, we had bounced too many shock waves into the clouds, and it started to rain. Thousands of people; most of the riders, exhibitors, and swap meet traders had been bivouacked under the infield trees. Handwritten signs dissolved into papier maché. “For Sale”, “Wanted”, “I’ll sell you this rolling chassis, or buy a motor if you have one to fit it”. (Either way at least someone could leave with a whole motorcycle.) One sign taped to a frame simply asked, “Does anyone know what this is?”

In the rain, anything being sold under an awning suddenly got a lot more interesting. I lined up for some ‘frites’, behind a couple in their late fifties or early sixties. She was wearing a tweed suit, white blouse; a brooch, little gloves. As though she’d just come back from mass. He was holding something made of black plastic: the air filter housing for a Suzuki GT750. “You see, here’s where the filter goes,” he said, pointing inside. “And is that something,” she asked, “which will have to be cleaned?”

They had both been faking this conversation since Suzuki introduced the GT. She was pretending that she cared, and he was pretending to believe her. Both were visibly relieved when I leaned in to ask, “Did they call GT750s ‘kettles’ here in France?” That way he could start talking to me instead.

That year as always, the actual “coupes” – the cups – were awarded by a jury. There were classes for absolutely everything, from utilitarian mopeds to bona-fide works GP bikes. Such bikes are often ridden by the men who originally raced them. Kenny Roberts made the pilgrimage in 2002; Agostini came to Montlhéry almost every year. In total, about a thousand machines took their laps during each event.

Although the promoter sternly warned, “This is not a race!” putting riders like this on vintage race iron could only lead to one thing: racing! Even Sammy Miller – otherwise seemingly immune to the effects of time – lowsided, earning a ride back in the pace car, looking as close to embarrassed as a member of the Pantheon can look.

Finally, it poured. In the infield, people folded wet tents, stuffed damp sleeping bags into sacks. “That’s the part that I would hate,” my friend said, as we slogged past a vendor loading his inventory of cycle parts – now wet, and even rustier - back onto a trailer. Vehicles inched out on muddy tracks.

I hope you don’t mind if I leave you here, in the rain, for a couple of days. It’ll do you good. Build character. Me? I’m heading over to a large tent, where I can hear an accordion and tinkling champagne glasses, but I’ll be back here on Thursday to conclude this essay.

Au revoir, Marc

Notes from the edge

2012-02-04T12:31:00.001-08:00

Last Saturday, during a very busy period at the grocery store, I had a line of about four carts waiting at my cash register when this harried black woman appeared in front of my register with her two kids. Each kid had a bag of frozen corn, and each one bought it as its own individual transaction.

I think this was because, since the didn't want their purchase bagged, they were eligible to enter in the weekly draw for a $20 gift certificate; each customer who doesn't require us to use a new bag gets to enter.

Then, she opened up a small backpack and pulled out four navel oranges that, she said, her husband had purchased and that she wanted to return, in exchange for a bag of lemons.

"I'm buying these because they have seeds in them," she said of the lemons. She leaned in as she spoke with me, wide-eyed and intense. "I'm returning these because they don't have seeds in them, and I won't eat citrus without seeds."

Finally, by way of further explanation, she added, "Because, that's science."

I gathered that what she meant by science was 'genetically modified.'

The return was no skin off my nose, and the store was far too busy for me to take the time to explain that navel oranges were seedless as the result of simple plant breeding, propagated by grafting, and had been so long before GMOs. There'd'a been no point at all in trying to explain that no matter where you are on the GMO-skepticism scale, 'science', per se, is neither good nor bad.

The store's about equidistant from some of Kansas City's most privileged and most desperate neighborhoods. I've had customers come in and ask in a drawl, "Can you buy red wine on EBT?"

The other day, someone bought about ten cans of tuna and, as I was ringing it up she said, "EBT won't pay for cat food, so I buy them tuna." I once had a woman at the other end of the wealth spectrum tell me that the can of crab she was buying ($11.80) was a treat for her cat, too.

Most of the customers fall much closer to the middle of that spectrum. I note the prevalence with which white, apparently middle-class customers buy food with credit cards. Some of them are probably just running debit cards as credit transactions for reasons of security, and others probably pay their balance off every month and are running up travel points, or whatever. But many of them are splitting transactions between cards, and declines are frequent enough. I think, It's food; you don't want to be paying interest charges on it long after it's been pooped out.

Yesterday, a dad came through the line with two girls about seven or eight years old. One of them was in a full halo rig (an external fixator holding her head in fixed position over her shoulders.) As an ex-motorcycle racer, I'm acutely aware of what that piece of medical equipment means.

When she walked away, I could see a surgical scar high up on the back of her neck. She'd had a high cervical fracture. Except that she had no neck mobility at all, she was walking normally and the scar was well healed; it had to be about time to remove the halo. She was going to be OK.

But just seeing it made me shudder; a kid that young who'd obviously been that close to spending the rest of her life as a quadriplegic.

Within an hour of seeing that, a young woman came through my line. She was bald, and her face was swollen with chemo drugs. There was a band-aid holding down some kind of IV shunt in her arm.

She was pushing a little tiny baby in a stroller. A kid that couldn't have been more than a few months old. The woman seemed cheerful enough. I didn't ask any of the obvious questions.

What was she being treated for? Was it some cancer that she knew she had while pregnant? Had she waited to have her baby before getting chemo? Surely you can't have chemo when you're pregnant. Or had her cancer been discovered after she gave birth? What was her prognosis? I tried to imagine having a tiny baby and knowing there was a good chance you'd never see it grow up.

When I applied for a twelve-buck-an-hour job at a grocery store, a big part of my motivation was the knowledge that, at my age, no one would hire me back into the ad industry and that the writing was on the wall for, well, writing about motorcycles for money. Half the reasoning behind taking such a menial job was simply that $12/hour was better than nothing. But another big part of it was that the work I'd done for the last decade was, mostly, pretty lonely. Although there were occasional days that were really fun and stimulating, the reality of life as a freelance writer is long consecutive days spent whacking away at a computer keyboard with no social interaction at all. I was lonely.

I was also along way from the edges of the lives of strangers.

In a slightly different universe, for motorcycle journalists...

2012-01-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

Farmer smacked the side of his scratched crash helmet, and his cellphone earbuds cut back in. He talked as he rode, on a freeway clogged with motorcycles of all sizes and shapes. Every now and the bikes would filter around a slow-moving car, and the thought occurred to him that even though his commute to work would take longer in such a vehicle, it’d be warm and cozy, and it would turn his commute into a bit of rolling office time.

Although he had a day job at Marketer Mike’s, a hip grocery store, he thought of himself as a screenwriter. In the narrow niche of movie fans, he was actually pretty well known for it, and once, while he was working the cash register at Marketer Mike’s, a couple of customers came through his checkout line in movie club jackets and, recognizing him, had asked him for an autograph.

The whole movie business had been going away for years though, decimated by the Internet. That’s why he’d taken the grocery store job in the first place.

Farmer wanted to keep working as a writer, and in desperation tried pitching a feature story to one of the last places you could still make really good money at the keyboard: motorcycle magazines. He had a good story angle, that leveraged his film knowledge.

The problem, he soon learned, was that just having a great feature idea and solid writing chops was no guarantee that a motorcycle magazine editor would ever even see your story. Oh sure, if you could get a high-powered agent, that guy could maybe get one of the top handful of test-riders to look at your story. If a major motorcycle star agreed to appear in your story, then the chickenshit magazine editors all wanted a piece of you. But as Farmer had learned, in Orange County if someone said, “I’ll read it,” what they really meant was, I’ll toss it on the huge pile of stories my intern will flip through.

He’d pretty much given up actually. That explained the grocery store job. But now that there seemed to be a real chance he'd become the next writer-du-jour, editors weren't just calling back, they seemed eager to bend his ear. Mudlen, in particular, was a real talker.

He drove and listened as Mudlen described the ongoing negotiations with Cycle Pages magazine for his breakout motorcycle feature. Actually, they weren't even negotiating for the feature yet; Mudlen and two other independent editors were still negotiating their respective roles and shares of the fees the story would generate, through a bunch of high-priced Orange County lawyers.

"I'm more than just an agent," Mudlen complained. "All I want is the same Associate Editor status on the story that Henfartt will get. I mean, you and I worked together on the query, and all Henfartt did was make one phone call."

Mudlen wanted to talk about two or three other features that Farmer had shown him, but the truth was that Farmer was desperate to close his first feature-story deal before committing to subsequent stories. He wanted to shout, For fuck's sake, you guys get your shit together and agree on your own contracts before Cycle Pages loses interest! But he couldn't. After all, without Mudlen none of this would be happening.

His own lawyer had agreed to negotiate the story deal for a 5% contingency fee. The total amount of money involved would, inevitably, depend on the final word count, but his lawyer was going to try to negotiate a deal with floor price for the feature of about $150k. "To get that floor price," his lawyer had said, "We'll have to be willing to let them also put in a ceiling. I'll try to get that set at half a million."

Half a million bucks would do Farmer a world of good, and really he didn't begrudge the three layers of editors between him and publication their share of money. He didn't even mind that all of them, even if they'd only made a single phone call to pitch the feature, would make more money than he would on the deal.

"Look, I've got to get off the phone, I'm getting to work," said Farmer, as he stopped in the far corner of the parking lot, at the grocery store where he was a $12/hour clerk.

“Yeah, sure,” said Mudlen in a tone of voice that made Farmer think, really he thinks I’m just trying to get off the phone. That just came from the time Mudlen had spent working with editors and publishers, who were always looking over your shoulder to see if there was someone more powerful they should be paying attention to, or checking their Rimberries to check newsstand sales.

As he walked across the parking lot, Farmer mused for the nth time about his career's timing. He'd been a successful ad agency Creative Director, and come up through the ranks as an amateur film-maker, before pitching it in to devote himself to his real passion, writing for the screen. When he'd made that choice, he knew that he'd basically be taking a '0' off his income. But his timing had sucked; as the internet had thrown the movie business into a tailspin, it became harder and harder to make a decent living writing screenplays. The years he'd spent building up his screenwriting career were years in which screenwriter's fees had dropped; if you weren't totally established in one of the few remaining studios, a salary was out of the question. And increasingly, the big movie websites had embraced the 'Movie 2.0' model in which users provided content for free.

Farmer had managed to make a living as a freelancer but in the last couple of years, even the studios that used to pay reasonable freelance rates had cut them in half or worse. Filmist Studios had gone bankrupt and emerged from it, but Farmer had heard they'd cut writers' rates in half. And Movie World, which had been an old boys club for years had been sold and moved to lower-rent digs. After being asked to write for movie tickets and popcorn, he realized that he needed to take desperate action if he was to make a living at all.

He'd always had an interest in motorcycles, and being an expert in movies and film history, he'd written a spec story for motorcycle magazines, about the influence of movies on the sport of motorcycling. It had been turned down by every magazine he'd shown it to, but when Mudlen discovered it online, he thought it had potential as a feature story.

Mudlen had an acquaintance who'd edited one major feature story, and he arranged for the three of them to meet out in L.A. The editor, a cat named Clint Marqwardt, had initially been skeptical about Farmer's idea for a feature, but he'd agreed that if Farmer rewrote the idea, he'd pitch it. Marqwardt made it clear that all Farmer was really writing was the query for the story.

"If they want to produce it as a major feature story, they'll hire an 'A' list motorcycle journalist to write it," he said.

That was fine as far as Farmer was concerned. Just getting a deal for a story like that could open a whole new career door in motorcycle journalism. That was a field that would add two zeros to his salary as a screenwriter. Maybe, for once, his timing was right.

By the time that thought had crossed his mind, he'd crossed into the grocery store. As day jobs went, it was a pretty good one. They knew and even seemed to respect the successes he'd had as a film-maker and liked the idea that he was a successful screenwriter. They nicknamed him 'Movie Mark'.

As he was clocking in, Christina, one of the other clerks, came up and asked him if there was any news on his deal. He hadn’t told most of the employees that he was that close to negotiating a deal that would make him a real motojournalist. He was sorry that he’d let it slip at all, really. He didn’t want the store management to find out, as they’d obviously know that if the deal came through, he’d be quitting. Until then, he needed all the hours he could get.

During his lunch break, Farmer walked up to Starbucks and called his lawyer, Nate Aaron, to ask whether Mudlen, Marqwardt and Rand Creditt (the third independent editor they’d enlisted to pitch the feature) had finally worked out their own differences.

“They’ve all agreed to the contract,” Aaron told him. “But, Marqwardt wants his lawyer to look it over, and his lawyer won’t get back from Wheeldance until tomorrow.”

Wheeldance was a huge independent motojournalism festival held out in Tooele, Utah. It had been organized decades ago by Peter Egan, one of the grand old men of motojournalism, as a forum for independent motojournalists to show their work and market it to major motorcycle magazines. Gradually, it had become a huge deal itself, and now most truly indy writers couldn’t even hope to get their work on program there.

“I hate that these guys couldn’t get their shit together so we could actually start negotiating with the magazine,” Farmer complained. “I mean, what if Cycle Pages sees something they like more at Wheeldance? We’ll be fucked.”

Aaron was also representing Mudlen in the editors’ deal, and he told Farmer that the independent editors’ contract was basically hammered out; each one would negotiate his up front placement fee with the magazine on his own, but they’d agree to identical ‘back end’ payments; if the feature was really successful that was where the money was. They’d thrown in a bunch of clauses like, if one of them got interviewed by Orange County Reporter, the gossip magazine about the motojournalism business, the other two had to be present.

“If I lose this deal because guys were fighting over who’ll get quoted in a gossip magazine...” Farmer started to say, but the lawyer told him that he’d heard Cycle Pages was still interested in negotiating.

“They’re calling me every day,” said Nate, “asking when we’ll be ready to come to the table.”

Farmer had to get back to work. He got off the phone and checked his email quickly. He still had a couple of regular screenwriting gigs, providing a couple of screenplays a month to the last few clients he had that paid reliably. There wasn’t much time left over for those gigs, but he had to keep them going. Those two monthly deals and the fees he made from people who streamed his own film on Netflix paid about the same amount of money every month as he made at the grocery store. All together, it was just enough to live on.

To be continued...

What actual rocket scientists think about e-moto racing

2012-01-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

My friend Lennon Rodgers - who was an actual rocket scientist before he returned to MIT to lead a team that fielded a bike in last year's TT Zero race - just sent me a draft version of a paper that he co-authored with Radu Gogoana and Thomas German. Their paper, entitled, Designing an electric motorcycle for the Isle of Man TT Zero race, and how electric vehicle racing could be used to spur innovation will be presented in Los Angeles in May.

Since I'm always on the lookout for an interesting story - especially one that I can just cut-and-paste into this blog - I immediately asked him if I could excerpt it. He said that I could, and in the next few weeks, I'll get into a more detailed look at the MIT team's simulations and data captured during the event. Lennon tells me that some of the material they're presenting will put numbers to and provide explanations for the things that I've felt while actually riding electric motorcycles.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to preview this part of their paper which was primarily written by Tom German, who worked at Penske on both NASCAR and IndyCar projects. German, who is now a fellow at MIT's Sloan School of Management, looks at the role racing might play in the development of EV technology as a whole.

The cliche is, 'Racing improves the breed.' I was interested to get the authors' take on a role for racing that is not just about improving individual bikes or selling a brand, but is about driving pure research improving consumer confidence in whole categories of vehicle.

Electric Racing

The Isle of Man TT Zero is an example of a new breed of “zero emission” races. The aim of these races is to spur innovation that will reduce the environmental impact of consumer vehicles. Racing has historically been a catalyst for innovation, particularly in the early years of motorcycles and automobiles [8]. New concepts were tested on the track, and the desire to win drove companies to produce superior technology. Consumer demand for better performance motivated companies to transfer the technology from the race track to the mass market.

The fundamental question is whether or not zero emission racing will yield the desired outcome. With the goal of contributing to the success of zero emission racing, this section outlines a set of guidelines for designing zero emission races that will yield relevant innovation. In this paper innovation is defined as the act of generating a product or service that (1) reduces the environmental impact of vehicles and (2) consumers want to purchase.

Drive technology

Many diverse participants, including inventors, academia, and corporate research labs, contribute to generating and developing innovative ideas. Consumer-focused companies choose relevant developments, refine them, and promote them to the consumer market. Identifying which ideas will succeed is a challenge facing all vehicle companies. Resources are often not available to invest in multiple emerging technologies. For example, it is costly for an automobile company to invest in batteries, fuel cells, and super capacitors simultaneously. Racing competitions should be structured to accelerate the transition from ideas to mass production and simultaneously facilitate the development of multiple technologies.

Provide valued entertainment

Any repeated event that the public finds entertaining will draw a large number of spectators both in person and through the media (e.g. internet, TV, etc.). Spectators and media drive advertising, which creates an influx of funds through team, rider and event sponsorship. These funds help finance the teams, who in turn develop the technology. Thus, valued entertainment is drawing in extra research and development funds that would otherwise not be available for that purpose (Figure 24). For example, an energy drink manufacturer might be indirectly funding battery research. This could translate into millions of dollars spent on zero emission innovation [9].

The influx of available sponsorship also reduces the risk that the team with the most personal wealth will win. In other words, sponsorships are typically chosen based on which team is likely to win; if the teams generating the most innovative vehicles are more likely to win, these teams would be rewarded through sponsorship funds to develop even better technology.

Figure 24: Valued entertainment can produce millions of dollars in research and development funds.

Consider the historical context

Gasoline vehicle racing has evolved dramatically over the last 100 years. Because of this, caution should be used when copying a modern gasoline race with a zero emission equivalent. Zero emission racing might require a different approach, and lessons may be learned from looking back into the beginnings of gasoline racing.

Patience will also be required when directly comparing modern gasoline and zero emission racing. It is easy to forget that it took decades for gasoline engines to make dramatic improvements. For example, it took 50 years for the first gasoline motorcycle to reach a 100 mph average lap at the TT. The electric motorcycles will likely reach the same milestone within 5 years.

Utilize the power of regulation

Regulations should be used as the fundamental tool to engineer a race for a desired outcome. For example, assume that consumers want to refuel their vehicle quickly; if winning a zero emission race is dependent on fast refueling, then the regulations are successfully guiding development. A successful racing innovation platform must focus on technology relevant to the consumer market.

Inspire consumer demand

It is critical that the races inspire consumers to purchase the technology that is found superior on the race track. Otherwise, true innovation will not be achieved through racing, and the objective of reducing the environmental impact of vehicles will not be achieved. One way this can be accomplished is through styling, and ensuring that the race vehicle has brand identity. For example, a motorcycle company should use styling that is distinct and that connects their race vehicle to their commercially available vehicles.

Secondly, inspiration can be found through education. The race should strive to inform the consumer of the environmental affects and implications of the various technologies.

Finally, races can inspire consumer demand by building confidence in new technologies. For example, racing could prove that rapid charging is feasible, which might convince the skeptical consumer that the technology will satisfy their needs.

It's clear that the organization and evolution of EV racing is, like EV technology itself, still in flux. Right now, there's a little too much posturing and rock-pissing going on, and not quite enough effort to actually create a racing series (or series, plural) that provide a rational forum for both competition and R&D.

What we need are rational rules and a comprehensible 'ladder' from local series through a World Championship. Small-scale innovators need a place to prove concepts, and major sponsors need a potential return on investment. To the extent that proving the merits of EV motorcycles as practical road machines are one racing goal, the TT course remains a very relevant test - but it will never be recognized as such by the FIM or other international organizers.

That said, what Lennon et al learned on the TT course was more relevant than anything that they could have learned on some short circuit. I'll delve into that in more detail in coming weeks.

Meeting Steve, 10 years on...

2012-01-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

Although it's in the 20s here this morning, so far, this has been the winter that wasn't, in Kansas City. All of us motorcyclists are still riding. So it doesn't feel like the middle of January. Maybe that helps to explain the mild surprise I felt the other day when I realized it was ten years ago that I moved to the Isle of Man, with the goal of qualifying for and riding in the TT.

Last night, Mary and I had dinner with two friends, Jim Carns and Bill Jeffreys, who were on the Island with me when I raced there. We ate in a KC brew pub. I had a beer and fish & chips; sat in crowded booth with good company; left after dark in the cold. It brought back some memories.

Getting to know the Island; learning (or at least scratching the surface of) the Mountain Course; racing in the TT... in many ways the first half of 2002 served as a (the?) major milestone in my life. Whatever my experiences on the Isle of Man might have been, they were shaped by one person more than any other -- Steve Hodgson.

This is how I described meeting Steve, in Riding Man...

On the spur of the moment, I wander into the Padgett’s shop in Douglas. It’s a quiet day. There are a couple of guys clattering around a dank workshop, but there’s no one at all in the showroom. Up on the wall, a TV endlessly replays a highlight tape from the 1999 TT races. There’s a little office, off to the side of the entrance. I introduce myself, and Steve Hodgson, the manager of the business, does the same. We start talking, and for whatever reason, my story (“Here I am. I quit my job, sold everything I owned, and moved here to ride the TT,”) strikes him as rational. He’s laid-back. (In the end, I will get to know him well before I ever see flashes of the young Steve–a brain-out two-stroke racer, with a room full of trophies and Barry Sheene in his sights.) He first came to the Isle of Man as a fan, with his friend Phil Mellor. They stood in the front garden of a house on Bray Hill, right at the spot where a sidecar crash came to its gruesome, fatal conclusion. “That’s it!” Mellor said, “I’m never going to race here!”

Steve didn’t want to race here, either. He thought of himself as a circuit specialist. He did come back and race in the Manx Grand Prix, under pressure from his sponsors. The plan was to quickly qualify for a TT berth the following year. That all ended with a massive crash at Aintree, broken femurs, and a sudden desire to get a regular job. Still, like so many motorcyclists, he knew once he’d been here that it was his spiritual home. Mellor eventually rode here and stayed too–he killed himself at Doran’s Bend in 1989. He was fast, no question about that, but the way he rode, everyone had seen it coming.

All this comes out in a long, rambling conversation, uninterrupted by even a single paying customer. Padgett’s main shops are in Yorkshire, where they do enough business to bankroll a major race team. At one point, Steve interrupts his train of thought to point to the television. “Are you really sure you want to do this?” he asks, adding “Just watch.” The video shows a motorcycle (ridden by a guy named Paul Orritt) accelerating down Bray Hill. At well over a hundred miles an hour the handlebars suddenly begin to shake, violently throwing the machine and rider to the road. Orritt’s like a rag doll. We both laugh, rather cruelly.

I ask if Padgett’s still leases bikes for the TT. “Sure,” says Steve. In fact, they have a race-prepped R6 down in the shop right now. “Some American guy leased it in 2000 but he didn’t qualify.” I tell him that I’ve got my heart set on a Honda. We call Clive Padgett, who runs the racing side of the business. Clive tells me I can lease the brand new CBR that they have in the showroom here on the Island, break it in on the road–which will help me learn the course–then we’ll pull off the lights and race it. This’ll cost me £3,000. I could wait and see if anything materializes at Motorcyclist, but I realize that this uncertainty just weighs too much. I put £1,500 on each of my two credit cards, and in two minutes, I’ve got a deal. Although I’m spending money I don’t really have, it’s a huge relief to think that the bike issue has been resolved.

That's Steve at right. The other two guys are Paul Smith, my Canadian mechanic and my nephew Kris Gardiner. Peter Riddihough, who shot the documentary film One Man's Island, took this photo when we were out on a deserted stretch of Manx road, trying to figure out how to bring the CBR's handling under control. We never did resolve it; we didn't have the right shock spring; we didn't have the right tires; we didn't have right fork mods. Any one or maybe two of those problems could've been over-ridden if we'd had the right rider, but I was stuck with me.

Over the course of the next few months, there was scarcely a day that I didn't drop into the Padgett's shop for a coffee; hardly a day that Steve and I didn't go to The Terminus for a beer after he closed up the shop. Steve was my guide and interpreter, my sponsor, and my friend. We lapped the TT course on motorcycles, and he even accompanied me on a bicycle lap that was nearly the death of him (but his doggedness in completing that lap gave me some real insight into the competitive fires that had burned in him as a racer.)

After I'd gotten to know Steve, I realized that he could be utterly brusque in dismissing people looking for favors. I saw a couple of guys rub him the wrong way, and he just about throw them out into the street. On one of those days I told him, "Wow, you really have your New York head on today," which made him laugh. But it made me realize that on a different day, I might have got that treatment, and my time on the Isle of Man would have been totally different.

I think that at some level we were drawn to each other because -- while we were both in the only place we really wanted to be -- we were both lonely. Both of us were, at the time, in relationships that failed. I'd overthrown my career. Steve's quit his job at Padgett's a few times, but always come back after a couple of weeks and the Padgetts always take him back; they love to hate each other.

Since leaving the Isle of Man, I met and married the right wife. Steve's divorced, met someone new and, in his fifties, now has two new kids. I hope they keep him young. I know that I'm infinitely happier in my home life, and I think he is, too.

Every motorcyclist who makes the pilgrimage to the TT will find that the Isle of Man is his spiritual home. Some, like Steve, will find a way to stay there forever. Most, like me, will leave but be reminded of the place every day of their lives. I'll be on some little stretch of road that reminds me of part of the TT course, or I'll eat fish & chips, or I'll step out into the cold (especially if it's drizzly, too) and I'll be transported back there. And whenever that happens, I wonder how my friend Steve is.

It wouldn't have been the same without you, man.

Motorcycles are dangerous. Especially the Iranian ones

2012-01-11T07:58:00.000-08:00

Your mom was right of course, motorcycles are dangerous. But according to this CBC news report, if your mom is Iranian, what she probably means is, they're dangerous even if you're not on them.

Tehran's traffic is notoriously snarled almost all the time, so it's easy to imagine Mossad whacking a target in his car -- a sitting duck. The Farsi word for gridlock like this is 'Sholouq.'

Yesterday, an Iranian scientist involved in that country's nuclear program was stuck in Tehran's notoriously bad traffic when a motorcyclist pulled up beside his Peugot 405 car. A passenger on the bike attached two magnetic bombs to the car. The motorcycle sped away - disappearing into traffic - and the ensuing explosion killed the scientist, injuring two other passengers in the car. The Iranians pretty much came out and said, it was Mossad's handiwork.

That was worthy of minor note, but the article reminded me that in the last couple of years, there have been two other assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists that involved motorcycles. In one, a bomb-laden motorcycle parked near the target exploded, and in the other, a passenger on a motorcycle shot the victim who was, again, stuck in traffic.

I guess there's some Mossad hit man who realizes what millions of third-world up-and-comers also know: motorcycles provide mobility in traffic that brings cars to a halt. I wonder if he's a real biker? What does he ride at home? Is he staying in Iran between hits, and if so, is a motorcycle part of his cover?

Iran has a pretty substantial domestic automotive industry. Over 8 million motorcycles are currently registered in the country, with new registrations increasing that total by about 1,500/day, so tracing the hit man's motorcycle will be difficult. The situation is further clouded, literally, by the fact that motorcycles produce about a third of Tehran's equally noxious air pollution. If there's a Backmarker reader with any direct experience of motorcycling in Iran, please contact me. I'd love to know what bikes are popular and/or domestically produced.

My advice to surviving Iranian nuclear scientists: I suppose it might be time to consider a new line of employment, perhaps in another country under an alias. I'm guessing that the CIA will put you in some kind of witness-protection program.

But, if you insist on staying in your current job, get your own motorcycle! At least that way, you'll be a moving target.

Bubba Stewart, idiot savant of physics

2012-01-10T12:18:00.000-08:00

Red Bull just released a promotional video of Bubba Stewart. It's the sort of hi-def, ultra-slo-mo stuff you'd expect. Bubba narrates it, providing a pretty bland and dull commentary. What interests me about it is his discussion of his greatest contribution to motocross, the 'Bubba Scrub'.

The scrub move gave Bubba a huge advantage coming up as a motocross racer. In the long travel suspension/SX era, speed over jumps is an important factor in race success, especially in SX races. Course designers make the challenge harder, by contouring landing areas or locating corners in places that make it more complicated than just hitting the takeoff ramp at a higher speed, flying further and higher, and landing with a higher retained speed.

I remember watching Bubba as a young 125 racer, and he was so much faster through the air than other riders that it seemed as if a different set of laws of physics applied to him. Time after time, he'd pass people in mid-air, on a visibly lower and faster trajectory.

While no one really seemed to know just how Bubba's trick on the takeoff ramps worked, all his rivals quickly realized that it did work, and before long it was part of every motocrosser or supercrosser's arsenal. On a big outdoor track, the scrub allows riders to hit takeoff ramps at higher speed without launching themselves into space; they get back to the ground faster, where their rear wheel can again begin transmitting power. On a supercross track, where landing areas are typically tighter, they can hit the jump harder without over-jumping.

The Red Bull video doesn't really have great shots of the key moment in the scrub -- which is when the rider essentially does a whip on the takeoff ramp, virtually crashing his bike into the ramp at the moment when it goes ballistic. But there are any number of great videos illustrating the technique, such as this one...

Bubba's own narration makes it clear that he has no idea how it works. He claims that it works by reducing aerodynamic drag in mid-air. That's why he's a motorcycle racer and I'm a frustrated genius. (Trust me, Bubba, you'd rather be you. Geniuses don't have groupies who'll boink them in their motorhomes. In fact, we don't even rate motorhomes. Put that way, I'd rather be you, too.)

But, the Scrub's got nothing to do with aerodynamic drag, for several reasons not the least of which is that with average SX lap speeds of about 30 mph, drag's minimal and that there's no reason why drag would be lower with the bike horizontal compared to vertical. If you watch the video clip above, you'll see that in fact during the mid-air recovery phase, his bike's turned broadside to the direction of travel, for maximum aero drag.

So why does the scrub actually work? It's all about getting a lower trajectory off any given launch ramp.

As noted, all else being equal, lower trajectory is faster for two reasons: It will get you back on the ground, with your rear wheel driving forward, ASAP. And/or, it will allow you to hit a jump faster without over jumping the landing area.

Pre-Bubba, motocross racers pretty much always ran up the launch ramp with their bikes straight up and down (or as straight as they could get 'em.) That meant that their bikes' center of mass left the jump on a trajectory parallel (and a couple of feet above) the angle of the launch ramp. (I'm simplifying ever so slightly here, and describing a sharp-edged ramp. It's more complex but the same principles apply over a jump with a rounded profile. Also, amateur physicists please note that I'm using the term 'bike's center of mass' but really mean, 'combined bike and rider center of mass.') (God, can I get one more parenthetical comment into this paragraph?)

Bubba himself accidentally gets part of the scrub explanation right in the Red Bull video when he says that you have to crash the bike as you leave the jump, and have faith that you can gather it back up and land on the wheels. That's pretty much what happens.

When a rider does the scrub, he's basically pushing his bike's center of mass down towards the track at the moment that he breaks contact with the ground and takes to the air. The path that the center of mass is taking through space at that moment defines the bike's ballistic trajectory in the air.

It's critical to understand that if the rider grossly mis-timed his scrub, and scrubbed well before the takeoff lip, he'd simply crash his bike into the ground. I've seen videos in which riders actually drag their cases off the jump. IE, at the moment they go ballistic, their bike's center of mass is at least a foot lower than it would be in the normal riding position. Considering that that one-foot drop happens on the launch ramp -- and as long as it's in progress at the moment the bike goes ballistic -- it effectively reduces the ramp angle by several degrees.

Anyone who remembers the days when Bubba first rode the 125 class (often posting times as fast or faster than the best 250 riders!) will recall seeing him pass many riders in mid-air; going a gear faster while magically traveling on a much lower trajectory.

Given Bubba's tendency to over-ride his bike, I imagine that this technique was simply discovered when he realized that he was on a takeoff ramp and committed to the jump, while traveling at a speed much too high for the situation. Either he'd carried too much speed out of the last corner and was still turning the bike on takeoff ramp, or he realized he was about to over jump a landing area followed by a corner and attempted to start turning the following corner before even leaving the jump. Regardless, he basically low-sided at high speed over the lip of the jump. Once in mid-air, his instincts took over; he'd already landed hundreds of show-offy whips, and this was no different. The Bubba Scrub was born.

Now, I presume that Bubba knows that, sometimes, you can break the law and just get away with it. I guess that's what he was hoping would happen last year, when he was arrested after impersonating a police officer and attempting to pull over... a real cop.

But the laws of physics are not like the law. You not only never get away with breaking them, you just can't break them, period. The flight trajectories of things like motorcycles -- with no appreciable lift or motive power in the air, it's a projectile -- are clearly defined by simple equations that can be found in any high-school physics text. The rider can do things that will adjust the bike's pitch, roll, and yaw in mid-air, but there is nothing he can do to prevent the motorcycle's center of mass from following a ballistic trajectory that is defined by simple physics.

Bubba can't break those laws any more than I can, but he did (probably accidentally) find a way to redefine his launch trajectory. Until he came along, motocross racers had always launched off a jump on a trajectory defined by the jump itself.

Realizing that he'd found a way to change that trajectory was Bubba's genius. I guess it doesn't matter whether he knows why it works or not.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

2012-01-09T09:55:00.000-08:00

My wife forwarded this interesting video to me, which shows work in progress on a gyro-balanced, fully enclosed electric motorcycle made by an upstart company called Lit, in the Bay Area. They call this model the C1.

I think it's pretty cool, although whether it should be thought of as a motorcycle or not is one of the questions that go unanswered in the video. It's sort of a cross between a Segway, a BMW C1 and a Quasar, tweaked to run on batteries.

20-some Quasars were built in the 1970s in England.

The bodywork for the BMW C1 was built by Bertone. Users commented that they'd have liked a more enclosed design for improved weather protection.

Unlike either the C1 or Quasar of course, it's fully enclosed. The female model's seen hopping out of it sans helmet. BMW had originally hoped that countries that homologated the C1 would allow riders to operate it without a helmet, too. The C1 'bubble' was actually a pretty strong roll cage that BMW claimed provided protection comparable to most ultra-compact cars, and C1 riders sat in car-like seat equipped with a four-point seat belt.

Some countries did allow C1 users to go without helmets, although one reason it 'failed' was that one key market, the UK, maintained that it was a motorcycle and as such users needed a helmet. In fact, there was some concern voiced about the weight of a crash helmet exacerbating whiplash injuries in frontal or side collisions, assuming the operator was tightly strapped in. Sweden ruled that C1 users did have to wear crash helmets but didn't need to use the seat belts.

I've read that BMW sold about 20,000 C1s (there were two versions, one with a 125cc Rotax single and a nominal '200' that actually displaced 176cc.) I'm not sure what the years of production were, but the run was short (2-3 years) and ended in the very early 2000s. That made it a failure by BMW standards, although of course 20,000 units would be a wild success for any existing e-bike manufacturer.

If there's a cautionary tale for Lit here, it's got less to do with helmet regulations than the pitfalls of trying to market a vehicle that's neither car nor motorcycle. (And that it's highly unlikely they'll bring their vehicle to market as the 'C-1', a trademark that BMW will surely challenge, since it harbors its own ambitions for an electric version.)

The whole is-it-a-car-or-a-motorcycle question isn't just a marketing pitfall. One reason there are as many e-bike startups as e-car startups in the U.S., despite the fact that the car market offers vastly more commercial potential, is that motorcycles face far fewer regulatory hurdles. While Lit chose to show us a 'fender bender' which its virtual C-1 survives unscathed, the fact is that as a motorcycle it won't need to undergo a multimillion dollar crash test prior to U.S. homologation. That's a huge advantage for an upstart company, but it comes with an offsetting disadvantage, which is that only a tiny fraction of U.S. commuters are licensed to ride motorcycles.

There are plenty of motorcyclists who might be talked into (literally) a fully enclosed vehicle, although few motorcyclists will be swayed by Lit's gyro stabilization system. We already know that falling over, per se, isn't the problem. (Though I suppose that a combination of full enclosure and gyro stabilization might add up to a two wheeler that was practical on snowy winter roads.)

I note that the prototype is fitted with a steering wheel and not a handlebar. It's not that obvious to me whether the Lit C-1 would need to be countersteered like a motorcycle or simply steered like a car. In the slalom portion of the video, it seems to handling like a motorcycle. But their little proof-of-concept seems to be fit with two gyros. That, along with the C-1's spinning wheels, would mean that it presumably has gyros spinning on the x, y, and z axes.

They wouldn't need to spin all the time; motorcyclists keep their bikes on two wheels with no trouble at all once underway. But the gyros would inevitably have a spin-up delay that's not visible in the crash simulation, which leads me to think that Lit intends that the gyros will run all the time. If they do spin all the time, then, I don't really know why the C-1 needs to lean into turns.

Does anyone from Lit care to get in touch with me and explain the Lit system in more detail?

Until then, I have to say that - style wise, anyway - the vehicle's kind'a cool and aerodynamic. I've argued to 'bring back the dustbin' before, as a way to differentiate between Superbikes and MotoGP bikes. Oh well. As MotoGP moves towards production motorcycles, I guess I'm really a lone voice in the wilderness arguing that MotoGP designers should at least have the option of fielding bikes that are fully enclosed/streamlined. Longer, lower feet-forward designs would inevitably face cornering clearance issues, but throwing a few gyros into the equation might reduce cornering lean angles, or even eliminate them.

Advertising makes it happen. Now, who's got the 'nads to write the check?

2011-12-19T09:27:00.000-08:00

I had occasion to revisit the nexus of my two previous lives -- motorcycles and advertising -- the other day, when I found myself writing about the nadir of motorcyclists' image in U.S. pop culture, in the early 'sixties.

Motorcycles were bad news after the breathless coverage of the Hollister ‘motorcycle riot’ in 1947. Those greatly exaggerated tales inspired The Wild One in 1954. Then, Hunter S. Thompson published ‘Hells Angels: The strange and terrible saga of outlaw motorcycle gangs’. It’s likely that Thompson’s account of life with the Hells Angels was almost as apocryphal as press accounts of Hollister had been, but by the mid-‘60s, the image of motorcycling in the U.S. could hardly have sunk any lower.

The American Motorcyclist Association wrung its hands and plaintively painted the outlaw crowd as ‘one percenters’, claiming that 99% of riders were regular folks, but the media sure weren’t buying it -- probably because that story didn’t sell newspapers.

It wasn’t the AMA that set motorcycles back on the road to respectability, it was Honda. Hollywood and the media had knocked motorcycles down, and Honda’s ad agency, Grey Advertising, knew that Hollywood had a role to play in redeeming them, too. Grey conceived the “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” ad campaign and pitched an audacious media plan to Kihicharo Kawashima, the head of American Honda.

Grey proposed running a pair of television commercials during the 1964 Academy Awards telecast. That would put two 90-second ‘nicest people’ ads in front of more than two-thirds of the U.S. television audience. Buying the two spots cost $300,000, which was enough to give Kawashima pause; it was the equivalent of the gross revenues -- not the profit mind you, the gross revenues -- on the sale of about 1,200 Honda 50s.

This is not the original, 90-second, 'You meet the nicest people on a Honda' ad. The original is not available on YouTube and in the spirit of full disclosure I should admit that while I've seen the campaign's print executions, I've never watched the original commercial. (Please, please, American Honda, scour your archives, digitize a copy, and post it!)

The truth is, most people in the ad business felt that Grey Advertising was well-named. The agency had a reputation for safe, middle-of-the-road creative. That said, the strategic thinking behind the 'nicest people' campaign was worthy of Don Draper (and in one Mad Men episode, the fictional Sterling Cooper agency actually pitches the non-fictional Honda company business!) Overall, the real campaign played to Grey Advertising's strengths and Grey's tendency towards insipid creative was OK; the campaign was, after all, aimed at the middle of the bell curve.

About a decade later, Grey was still at it. This ad, featuring a young John Travolta, acknowledges the first -- 1973 -- Arab oil embargo/price shock and the ensuing recession; the short-arsed motorcycle cop is probably a tip of the (half) helmet to Robert Blake in 'Electra Glide in Blue.'

Kawashima needn’t have worried. That ad campaign didn’t just plant Honda in the minds of millions of hitherto non-riding consumers, it helped convince the country’s media that it was not in their commercial interest to alienate the entire motorcycle industry. Life Magazine ran a famous photo of a drunken biker at Hollister in 1947 (the ethically questionable shot was set up days after the actual ‘riot’.) When Honda started buying full page ads in the ‘60s, Life’s editors stopped running negative motorcycle stories.

That $300,000 advertising investment really gave me pause, too. That was the equivalent of about $2,000,000 in 2011 dollars. I don't know, offhand, what American Honda's best-selling (current) motorcycle is, but if the company spent 1,200 x that model's revenues on a single night's advertising, it would amount to a lot more than two million bucks.

American Honda won't spend that much this year. Hell will freeze over before we'll see a breakout motorcycle ad in this year's Academy Awards or Superbowl. I get occasional press releases from manufacturers claiming year-over-year sales growth, and it's possible we've seen the worst of the post-2008 meltdown/housing bubble. But don't kid yourself; the motorcycle business is in the fucking toilet. Why is it that there's no chance American Honda will show that kind of leadership today?

Mister, we could use a man like Kawashima today.

I stole this pic from Honda's 'history' site. It's captioned as follows: Holding up the You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda. poster are Kihachiro Kawashima (then general manager of American Honda), left, and Takeo Fujisawa (then senior managing director of Honda Motor), second from right. I'm guessing the tall guy is from Grey Advertising.

For a slightly different take on Honda's rise in the U.S. (and a look at one of the 'nicest people' print executions) you can read this blog post by FrogDesign's Adam Richardson.

The Blind Man - an excerpt from Riding Man

2011-12-05T10:20:00.001-08:00

There’s a natural evolution in motorcycle racing. Almost all racers have families and friends who race. Most amateur racers are their own mechanics; they start early, by borrowing their dads’ tools. Whether they should be mechanics is debatable (I suspect that my inability with tools may have improved my results; at least I never hurt my bikes’ performance.)

Over time, the typical clique of racing friends shrinks, as guys get tired of being injured or broke or backmarkers or some permutation of those three. Those left gradually coalesce into two groups: riders and mechanics. Sometimes, the mechanics are the handful of guys who are honest with themselves and ready to admit they don’t have the speed to get to the next level. Sometimes they run out of money to race, but can’t give up the scene. More rarely, they have a gift for it. The French have a great expression for this: they call it having “les doigts de fee,” which literally means “a fairy’s fingers”. The first mechanic I ever knew went a long way towards making me believe that a mechanic’s skill with tools was almost a magic power.

When I was a kid, my dad worked for a big international company. The company moved our family from Canada to Switzerland, so he could run their Geneva office. Our home was in Tannay, an agricultural village that looked down over orchards and vineyards to a big lake. Under Swiss law, at 14 I was allowed to ride a 50cc moped. In surrounding countries, mopeds had three-speed transmissions, but in Switzerland, models sold to teenagers had the top gear removed from the box. Thus, in theory, they were limited to 30 kilometers an hour. Trust the Swiss to take the fun out of everything.

I counted the days down to my fourteenth birthday anyway. My parents bought me the Cadillac of mopeds: a Puch Condor. To start it, I pedaled it like a bicycle. The pedals came in handy for assisting the motor on steep hills, or when we were racing out of slow turns (though digging the inside pedal into the pavement at maximum lean was definitely to be avoided!)

All the kids I knew had similarly restricted bikes, and we endlessly attempted to eke out a little more power. Since every single time any other kid went faster was a serious personal insult, our own neighborhood ‘arms race’ made the U.S.-Soviet debacle seem like an episode of Chip and Dale.

One night, mulling over the possibilities of increased compression, we decided to skim our cylinder heads. Unencumbered by knowledge of milling machines, we cast about for a suitable tool. We found it in a neighbor’s basement: a belt sander. Not one of us waited to see if it worked for anyone else first. We’d have got better results skimming our own stupid heads. Over the next few nights, quite a few local mopeds (which were often left parked outside front gates, in the convenient shadows of stone walls and overgrown hedges) lost their heads.

At every gas station; there was always a special premix pump for motorbikes only. We’d decide how much fuel we were going to buy, which was never much. We told the attendant how much fuel – and what percentage of premix oil – we wanted.

Knobs were set, and a handle was pulled down, sort of like the handle on an expresso machine. The customer was reassured to see a little spurt of oil sprayed onto the inner wall of the glass ‘fishbowl’ on top of the pump. Then a second handle released the gasoline, which swirled in after the oil, dissolving it. It was a special mixture – different than buying gas for a car – that may as well have been a magic potion. All of us idiots concluded that by reducing the percentage of oil to 2% from the recommended 3%, we could get 1% more gasoline, with a concomitant increase in horsepower.

Of course, nothing we did had any impact on performance at all, except to occasionally make it much worse. The top speed of every bike was pretty much determined by the luck of the draw, though since I was the smallest rider, I could pull taller gearing

While the bikes were simple and generally pretty rugged, we were awfully hard on them. We rode without helmets, so it’s amazing we didn’t find ways to kill ourselves, even at sorely restricted speeds. Low-siding on cow shit was a common excuse; once, I took to the ditch at full speed when a tractor and trailer laden with 200 bushels of apples emerged from a hedgerow in front of me. Damage from such wipeouts had to be repaired at the local shop. If my bike would still roll, it was an easy push; just up the street from my house.

The mechanic’s shop was basically a two-bay garage, which along with a tiny beauty salon, made up the ground floor of a two-story house. He worked on bicycles and mopeds, while his wife was the beautician. In general, his customers were not spoiled foreign children, they were real Swiss; farmers, cops, shopkeepers and like, who relied on motorbikes for day-to-day transportation. The wives and girlfriends of those guys were the customers for the mechanic’s wife. All of them were xenophobes, and their treatment of foreigners usually ranged from outright scorn to something resembling the Amish concept of ‘shunning’, unless money was changing hands.

If I was pushing in the bike, or walking in to pick it up, I’d always make a little noise, sort of like throat clearing, to warn him of my arrival. He was an intimidating character for a 14-year-old to deal with. He was old. 60 or 70. Tall and gaunt. Shaking his hand was like grabbing a bunch of walnuts. When he talked to me, he’d walk up to the sound of my voice, but stare straight out over my head. That was because cataracts had, long since rendered him completely blind. Hiscorneas were as opaque as a boiled trout’s.

He did everything by feel. Routine maintenance, stuff like fitting a new inner tube and tire, was absolutely no problem; sighted mechanics could do that with their eyes closed too, maybe. But he rebuilt top ends, replaced brake shoes; stuff that utterly baffled me. A few hours a week, he had a sighted assistant that came in, but usually he was alone. When I went there, there was always some little thing he’d borrow my eyes for, like having me read the tiny numbers on a carb jet.

Occasionally, I’d stop by his shop just to fill up my tires. (The Condor actually came with a bicycle pump for the purpose, but you had to pump like a madman to overcome leakage in the pump itself. He had a pump powered by a foot treadle that allowed me to run the rock-hard tires I preferred for minimal rolling resistance.) When I asked if I could borrow his pump, he always sternly warned me to replace it exactly – exactly – where I’d found it.

Luckily for him, the bikes he worked on were simple. They were all piston-port two-strokes, whose basic design hadn’t changed since the introduction of the NSU ‘Quickly’ in about 1947. When my bike arrived at his shop for the first time, though, he was fascinated. Until then, most Swiss-market mopeds were sold with rigid front forks, like a bicycle. Mine had an inch or two of suspension travel, thanks to a bogus leading-link arrangement in which a little block of rubber served as both spring and damper. He spent a long time ‘looking’ at it, stroking and probing the workings with his fingers, memorizing the arrangement of the parts. It was not long before he got the chance to repair those forks.

He had a name of course, but we just called him ‘the blind man’. By the time I was old enough to get a moped, my family had lived in Switzerland for several years, and I spoke fluent French. Other foreign families came and went every year or two, so I occasionally introduced new customers to the blind man, and acted as a translator. Since his ability was so extraordinary, I sort of ‘showed him off’, I guess. He always took the work. He and his wife were making their living about five bucks at a time, so there was no turning away paying jobs.

After Switzerland, my family moved back to Canada, to Calgary. Out west. Cowboy country. It seemed good, for me, because I could have a bigger bike. I ended up getting a finicky, disc-valve Kawasaki. While it ran, it was just fast enough to illustrate the fact that despite my intense desire, I was incapable of intuiting just how people rode motorcycles really quickly. My inability to keep it going was one of the reasons I ended up giving up motorcycles for a long time.

Intolerance is un-American

2011-12-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, the manager of the grocery store where I work (on my day job, obviously. I don't practice motorcycle journalism in grocery stores -- that's what Starbucks is for) took me aside. He told me that someone in North Carolina had written an email to the store, complaining about the contents of some of my blog posts. Why would that particular fucktard write my employer and not me? Well, obviously, to harass me by encouraging my employer to fire me, or at least lean on me to silence me.

I didn't see the letter, so I have no way of knowing whether it was my liberal political bias that infuriated the writer, or whether it was the generally atheist and foul-mouthed nature of some of my 'rantier' columns that triggered this cowardly and un-American personal attack.

The manager of the store where I work seemed a little unsettled by even having to raise the subject. I got the feeling that this was something that had been discussed at the head office, and that maybe corporate counsel had weighed in. If that was the case, they'd certainly realize that there's nothing in this blog that could possibly be interpreted as hate speech, or seditious. Although Missouri (the state in which I reside and work) is a so-called right-to-work state (it would more accurately be called a employer's-right-to-fire state) and the company could legally have fired me on the spot, I imagine that the company realizes that firing an employee for exercising his right to free speech is not going to generate a wave of positive press.

I should point out that I've written some highly-politicized posts, and I've written posts in which I named my employer, but that my employer was never cited in any of those volatile posts. Nothing I've written about my employer could be interpreted as particularly negative.

So the fucktard in North Carolina had to read some post that infuriated him, and then dig through the blog to find some other post in which I mentioned my employer by name. Then, said fucktard had to figure out how to contact my employer and craft a letter which had the intent, obviously of either silencing me or punishing me for my views by getting me fired.

Nice, eh?

I should say that, thus far, my employer has been careful not to say "Don't write any more of that stuff," or "You're on report," or anything like that. In fact, the only thing I was told was, "You're entitled to your opinion."

I volunteered to remove any direct reference to my employer by name, and in fact have gone back through earlier posts and redacted the company's name. That makes it hard to even write about working, but then I had a brainstorm. Obviously, I have a bit of a potty keyboard when I'm writing here on Bikewriter.com; I figure, joke you if you can't take a fuck.

But when I used to make a living writing for other sites and pubs, if I had to insert swearing (for example as part of a direct quote) I used to replace the offending words with symbols drawn from math or other alphabets, the way comic book artists sometimes fill a speech bubble with swirls, exclamation points and daggers to indicate a character is swearing without running afoul of censors.

For example, I'd insert fake words like 'Ƒü©≮' or '$#!+'. People knew that those character strings meant 'insert swear word here' but had no idea they specifically meant 'fuck' or 'shit'.

It occurred to me that I could do the same thing vis-a-vis the name of my employer. If I insert this character string - ₮Ʀ@Ƌ’⋲® √⦰⋲$ - in place of my employer's name, people will know they should insert the name of some grocery store in there, but won't have any idea which specific business I'm referring to. I mean, those characters aren't even part of the regular English alphabet.

Let me make this clear: I love ₮Ʀ@Ƌ’⋲® √⦰⋲$. It's a great company that's built a great business by making grocery shopping fun and providing solid values to customers. Really, it's a shame I have to keep their name a secret now. I have a smile on my face every day that I walk in there. I work my ass off, even when assigned the most thankless tasks in the store, from processing spoiled food to cleaning the toilets. I have huge respect and admiration for the brand they've built, and am constantly fascinated by what I learn from them. I like my co-workers and enjoy my customer encounters. I have every reason to think that most of my customers support my employment and enjoy dealing with me.

That said, the writer in me is sorry that ₮Ʀ@Ƌ’⋲® √⦰⋲$ didn't actually just fire me once they'd mentioned the letter complaining about this blog. I mean, every now and then I write a motorcycle-related post read by several thousand people, but my political rants are typically read only be a few hundred people. Firing me for the content of this blog would be a public relations dream come true for me, and guarantee many thousands of new readers for my non-motorcycle writing. I guess, strategically, if the company was going to fire me, it 'should' have fired me for some other reason and never mentioned the letter, since now that I know about it, it opens up a host of First Amendment issues, to say nothing of a possible suit for libel (or do I mean slander?) against the sender. But I have no reason to think the company will fire me, or even really disagrees with what I've written. Why should they? It's all true.

Who is the North Carolina fucktard anyway? That's the interesting question. I'll definitely take legal steps to get the letter - if ever/as soon as - the fucktard gets the 'satisfaction' of getting me fired. I highly doubt that I'm the only target of this fucktard, and I imagine many similar letters have been sent. I imagine that even if the sender's information was redacted, I could eventually identify the sender by finding matching letters elsewhere on the web.

I doubt, in fact, that the North Carolina fucktard is really an individual fucktard. I'm too good at arithmetic and probability to think that amongst the few dozen readers of my typical political posts - many or most of whom agree with me - there's some individual reader who disagrees so violently that they'd go to that much trouble to silence me. It's possible, I grant you, but not likely.

It's more probable that some group like the Koch brothers have funded a group of kochsuckers who, using tools like Google Alerts, are searching the web for people like me, and then engaging in an organized harassment effort. If you were going to conduct such an effort, North Carolina would be a good place to base it, since it is an American Taliban stronghold.

Either way though, whether that letter was written by a lone nut job, or whether it was part of an organized fatwah, my only real comment is this...

Intolerance is un-American.

Oh, and by the way, Ƒü©≮ you.

For shame

2011-11-27T11:27:00.000-08:00

With the onset of winter (and a certain degree of media fatigue) the Occupy movement has either cooled off, gone into hibernation, or is entering a new phase; pick one, depending on your point of view. But, before winter set in, I watched video footage of what might have been the movement's defining moment.

I write of the pepper-spraying of UC Davis students. The clip below begins with a striking image, of a portly cop casually spraying mace, with about as much apparent emotional involvement as you'd expect to see if he was spraying his roses for aphids. When it gets really compelling though, is when a large group of students surround the UC Davis police chanting "Shame on you!" The students first surround and then put the cops to rout armed with... camera phones.

As defining moments go, getting pepper sprayed while at an Occupy sit-in doesn't really compare with being shot at Kent State, but in today's far-more-mediated culture, that may be all it takes.

Moron helmet-cams. Oops, I meant 'More on' helmet cams

That footage, a recent op-ed piece from the L.A. Times, and the funny clip I posted the other day of the wild turkey attacking a motorcyclist, reminded me that I've been meaning to write about Anthony Graber, a Maryland motorcyclist who was busted for speeding by a gun-wielding off-duty cop. Whatever punishment Graber actually got for speeding and reckless driving was probably justified, because he certainly was riding like a fucking moron.

But.

It would not have made the news but for one thing: he was wearing a helmet camera, which recorded the bust. When he posted the video on YouTube, Maryland prostitutes, oops, I meant 'prosecutors' obtained a grand jury indictment against Graber on felony wiretap charges. He could go to jail for up to 16 years.

Here's (some of) Graber's video, which is still available on YouTube...

There's a lot that I find interesting about this. First, let me say again, Graber (who, at least prior to this incident was a U.S. military serviceman) was riding like a complete moron. Did he deserve to get pulled over? Hell yes. Did he deserve a monster ticket and/or loss of license? Definitely.

But what else is happening in the video? Enough to keep Sigmund Freud busy for a second career. First we see Graber speeding and wheelying through traffic. Let's be honest about motorcycles as phallic symbols; maybe that's not always the case but the whole wheelying-in-traffic thing... "Look at what I have between my legs, LOOK AT ME, WATCH, I can make it STAND UP."

God damn it, that's tiring.

When he takes that off ramp after his speeding and wheelying session and comes to stopped traffic, he just stops too even though he clearly had space on the shoulder to filter forward. Really?!? After breaking every traffic law you can think of, you just stop when you reach the first congestion point? Graber wasn't just riding like a moron, he obviously actually is a moron because one of the cars he passed was the off-duty cop we later see busting him, and it's obvious that on-duty cops were also on his tail, because there's a marked car visible a minute or two into the stop.

So far into the video, the universe is unfolding about as it should, but let's now dissect the behavior of the second moron to make an appearance in Graber's video, the off-duty cop who busts him.

Freud himself once apparently said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," and I guess sometimes a motorcycle's just a motorcycle, but pulling a big wheely as you pass a cop is basically challenging a guy who is more than likely an ex playground bully to a pissing contest (and let's not get into the high probability that the cop's already on a hair trigger thanks to 'roid rage' - an investigation into one New Jersey doctor found that he'd prescribed steroids and HGH to two thousand cops.)

The cop, who was just effectively cuckolded while driving his anonymous, effeminate car jumps out to confront Graber, who is still straddling his own giant, powerful substitute dick.

So what does the cop do? He pulls out his own substitute dick! Yes, he draws his gun on Graber.

OK, let's think this through for a second. Cops and the media have gone to great lengths to convince us all that they operate in a deadly maelstrom of violence almost all the time, and that amongst other things any traffic stop can become a life-and-death confrontation at any moment. Nothing could be further from the truth, in point of fact. Being a cop is nowhere near as dangerous as, for example, being a farmer. By far the largest danger in a traffic stop is, in fact, simply traffic -- something we motorcyclists deal with every time we ride.

But even if you grant cops the infinitesimally small chance the guy they're pulling over might pull a gun on them, IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN THE GUY'S ON A FUCKING SPORT BIKE!!!

This is not the first time I've heard of stunters being arrested by cops with drawn guns, and it's total bullshit. Have you looked at a modern sport bike? They're so densely packaged you'd be hard pressed to find a spot to carry a pen-knife, and if you could find one, it would take 10 minutes and, probably, an allen wrench to get to it. There was absolutely no chance Graber was sitting on a .45.

So what was the message sent by the drawn gun, if it wasn't a dick comparison? Was it, "If you pop the clutch and take off, I'll put one in your back"?

If all this wasn't pathetic - two morons who deserve each other - it would be pretty funny. I love the moment where the cop says, "Show me your hands." Hey, idiot, he's on a motorcycle. You can SEE his hands. He's not rooting around in the dark recesses of his car. Graber, hilariously, responds by taking off his gloves.

"My hands. Uh, sure, you can see my hands."

And now, the third moron enters the picture (figuratively speaking.) Yes, the Maryland prosecutor who charged Graber with operating an illegal wiretap.

You're fucking kidding, right? Wrong.

So what are the facts here?

1.) Graber's camera was ON HIS HELMET, IN PLAIN SIGHT
2.) He was videotaping in a public place
3.) U.S. courts have, over and over, upheld citizens' rights to videotape police actions
4.) You can be sure the Maryland prosecutors will happily use Graber's tape as evidence against HIM.

As Jonathan Turley, the law professor who wrote that L.A. Times op-ed piece noted, without a videotape Rodney King would have been just another guy with a prior record claiming that the LAPD had abused him. Cameras have become the public's best weapon against police excess.

To Graber, and that idiot cop, and the Maryland prosecutors who maliciously persecuted Graber in order to deflect criticism of the gun-wielding arrest, to all three I have this to say...

Shame on you.
Shame on you.
Shame on you.

Thanksgiving wrap-up, Part 1

2011-11-25T07:16:00.000-08:00

For those Backmarker readers who think turkeys and motorcycles don't mix, I offer up this video to confirm the feelings you already have...

This helmet-cam footage reminds me that I've been meaning to write about another issue that involves helmet cam use -- the incident in which a U.S. serviceman living in Maryland was pulled over by the cops for speeding. When he posted helmet-cam footage of his arrest on YouTube, he was charged under state wiretap laws, which is total bullshit but not something I've got time to go into in the 15 minutes I have at the computer before I must head back into work. (Yes, in retail, Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday... at best.)

In the meantime though, I noted another vidclip of motorcycles playing a role in the continuing 'Arab Spring' uprisings... This one shows motorcycles being used as makeshift ambulances to transfer the injured from Tahrir Square in Egypt, when things turned violent there again (earlier this week.) While I doubt motorcycle transport is the best way to move anyone severely injured, bikes are what they have at their disposal, and can maneuver better in crowded quarters.

That at least shows motorcycles being used by the side in the right. It can be contrasted by this video from the Denver Occupy Wall Street scene, in which a motorcycle cop gets pushed over by a protester.

It didn't take much of a shove to bring this hog to its knees, which suggests that a.) a thousand-pound Harley may not be the best bike to ride on wet grass, or that b.) this cop is probably not the one who the Denver PD should send to represent its motor pool at this competition...

Oops, gotta' go. I've got much more to write, but you might have to wait until Sunday to find out what I did on my own Thanksgiving, or to read the text of a speech, which was leaked to me, that President Obama will be making in a rare 'do-over' of a Presidential Thanksgiving Address...

Reading the 'E' leaves...

2011-11-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

There was quite a buzz around the all-electric KTM Freeride trail bike launched at the recent EICMA show. I'm sure, given the high level of resolution displayed in most KTM products (and given KTM's long heritage in off-road motorcycling) that the Freeride will enter the market as the best thought-out and put-together entry in the nascent EV-dirtbike category. That said, in pursuit of light weight they've admitted that battery life could be as short as 20 minutes, under an expert rider. This puts the Freeride into the 'backyard use' category. There's not enough battery life to ride even a few miles to your off-road rec area, nor is there enough battery life to justify transporting the bike any distance.

By contrast, the 300cc ICE-powered Freeride will, I think, turn out to be a gangbusting success; I bet it will offer far superior off-road capability than competing bikes like the Yamaha 250, and it will really be that machine you can ride to the trails and back. It will be five or ten years before improvements in battery energy density give us a 200-pound motorcycle with that kind of range, so ICE it is. But surely taking the pickup truck out of the equation not only makes this a far more affordable solution, but a greener one, too?

EICMA's thunder (or should I write 'lightning'?) was stolen on the EV side though, by the release of pics of a Honda electric sport bike, the RC-E which will be unveiled to the public at the Tokyo show.

Wow, eh?

Months back, my friend James Parker, who designed the latest iteration of the Mission electric sport bike, told me that soon, a major OEM was going to enter the electric sphere, and when they did, it would be with amachine that no upstart company could compete with.

That was in a conversation in which I suggested that Mission really had backed away from its initial strategy to actually become a motorcycle manufacturer. At the time we talked, Mission had already done some work on a Honda-backed R&D project involving a hybrid race car. I interpreted James' comment as meaning that in his opinion, small companies like Mission, Brammo, or MotoCzysz were about to be steamrolled by Honda.

I wondered, "Does James know, or has he seen, a Honda project involving some of Mission's technology?" I didn't ask him, because I knew that if he had seen it, he'd have been sworn to secrecy, and I didn't want to put him on the spot. Anyway, we'll presumably learn more at the Tokyo show, about how close the RC-E is to turning a wheel.

Which brings me to my last point...

Another thing you read here first was that there would be no TT Zero race in 2012. Well, that was wrong. My friend Steve Hodgson recently cited (on his Facebook page) a Manx Radio report that there will be a race for EV bikes at the 2012 TT.

In my limited defense, I wrote that there would not be another TT Zero race unless and/or until a major OEM showed interest. Now, I wonder if Honda looked at last year's disappointing results and realized it has a chance to introduce the RC-E with a historic first, by lapping the TT course at over 100 miles an hour. Amateur Honda historians, like me, will already have noted that the 'RC' nomenclature assigned to this bike is what Honda gives to a 'homologation' bike -- a bike built for racing purposes, and then minimally adapted for road use.

Is this the first zero-emissions vehicle to lap the TT course at over 100 miles an hour? Uh-huh.

Wrapping up #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday

2011-11-11T13:38:00.000-08:00

Well, it's Friday and a work week's come and gone since #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday. That's not very long, but it is already quite a bit longer than the amount of time it took motorcyclists all over the world to conceive of a global event, carry it out, and move on.

Almost ten thousand people read the post in which I originally suggested that not just MotoGP riders but all of us should rev our bikes as a way of both commemorating Marco Simoncelli and drawing our community together. That was, by a wide margin, the most-read post ever on Backmarker.

I originally posted that suggestion last Tuesday. Overnight, someone re-tweeting a link to that post created our Twitter hashtag, and late last week we got some support from motorcycle media (including the Cycle World and Ultimate Motorcycling web sites, Motorcycle-USA.com, and even some mainstream media (The Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K.)

The #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday Facebook page drew nearly 1000 members in just a few days, and now dozens of people have uploaded videos of themselves, alone and in groups, revving their bikes. #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday -- a search term that didn't exist at all on Google until last week, now brings up many pages of links related to the event.

In the end, it didn't matter that the MotoGP riders just stood by their bikes and watched fireworks. What was important was that ordinary motorcyclists all over the world had a way of showing their own solidarity with a fallen comrade.

So here's one more Note from the Dept. of Modest Suggestions: let's make 10:30 in the morning on the first Sunday in November the official day of mourning for fallen motorcyclists. It's well timed for it. It's the end of most racing seasons, the date's about half-way between the Day of the Dead and Rembrance Day (in the Commonwealth) or Veteran's Day (here in the U.S.) In much of the Northern Hemisphere, it's about the time bikes are put up for the winter.

Sure whenever May 20 rolls around, someone writes an essay about the crash that killed Jarno Saarinen and Renzo Pasolini in one fell swoop; we remember Joey Dunlop on the anniversary of his death; those guys will never be forgotten. But as a group, we tend to acknowledge the deaths of other riders but briefly and then move on, usually after concocting some story about how that can't happen to us.

But I'll keep saying this: While we don't ride or race motorcycles in order to take risks, risk gives the decision to ride or race meaning. If it was completely safe, or even pretty safe, it would be a completely different sport.

When I was a club racer, I was at some social function where someone introduced me to a stranger by saying, "This is my friend Mark. He's a motorcycle racer."

The guy shook my hand and said, "So you're a motorcycle racer. Golf's my game."

I smiled and said, "That's nice."

But what I thought was, "You idiot; do you really think those two things can be equated? Imagine the most intense pressure situation in all of golf. What would that be? A playoff hole at the Masters, and you can hole a 6 foot putt for the win? A putt you should make, right? But just long enough that you might not. You'd get some pretty bad butterflies alright. And you know what? If you missed it, you might -- for a moment -- wish you were dead. But you wouldn't ever actually be dead. As a motorcycle racer, you live with the realization that cost of any error in judgement can be catastrophic."

So yes, risk gives our sport meaning. That's why most people don't do it; why no matter how many people ever watch MotoGP, motorcycle racing will never be a mass-participation pastime. And why despite the fact that the risks are obvious, every now and then, we have to be reminded that even with continuous improvements in track safety and gear, and all the precautions we take to avoid tragedy, tragedy lurks around every corner. If it didn't; if the sport of motorcycle racing could ever be made completely safe, it would just be another game.

So when a Simoncelli dies out there on the track, his death gives your sport a depth that a mere game will never have.

Shakespeare (as usual) totally got the idea that risk imparts meaning to reward. He makes a great case for this idea in Henry V's epic "Crispen's Day" speech.

We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'

The strangest thing happened as I finished up this post. I thought I'd look up the day of St. Crispian's feast. It's October 25. Marco Simoncelli died on the 23rd -- the closest race day to Saint Crispian's.

All for now, MG

Her diary, his diary

2011-11-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

Kudos to whoever wrote this! Thanks for making me laugh, and I hope you don't mind me sharing it -- Mark

Monday morning crew chief: Hayes' shot? Not. But, he gets the job done

2011-11-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

In a tumultuous couple of weeks in MotoGP racing, one of the bright spots was Josh Hayes' job subbing for Colin Edwards.

The final race of the 2011 season could have been a non-event for Yamaha. Lorenzo was scrubbed -- still nursing a flayed finger, and there had to have been a question mark about Spies' health, after he was withdrawn in Sepang. Colin Edwards would not be racing for Tech 3, either; he proved to have been more injured than he'd looked at first, after the Simoncelli incident. And the whole weekend was, of course, colored by the fact that it was the first one after #58's death. All in all, the cold and rainy weather was apropos.

Cue Josh Hayes, who had been scheduled to 'test' a Yamaha M1 after the race at Valencia. This started out as a lark, really -- just a way for Yamaha USA to eke out a little more publicity from their AMA Superbike Championship. Suddenly, though, with not one but two riders out of commission, Hayes was invited to actually race.

There are those who described Hayes' opportunity as 'his shot' which, sadly, it was not. At 36, no one is seriously going to consider hiring Hayes as a MotoGP regular. People hoped that maybe Hayes would set the cat amongst the pigeons, the way Troy Bayliss did at the end of the '06 season. That was not going to happen because Bayliss had three big advantages over Hayes: he'd already ridden the track, he'd already tested the bike, and he was, after all, Troy Bayliss.

The powers-that-be in MotoGP don't want to give fans the impression that there are a bunch of guys pushing 40, languishing in national series around the world, who are just as fast as 'real' MotoGP riders. When a national rider like Josh Hayes is parachuted into the World Championship, they want to see him right at the bottom of the time sheets. Will they bring him back for a few more (U.S.) races in 2012? They'll be balancing the risk of embarrassment if he does too well, against Hayes' popularity in the U.S.

People set, as a goal for Hayes, at a minimum finishing above Cal Crutchlow; that would have been totally unrealistic under the circumstances -- unless, maybe, it had snowed. In fact, over the course of the race, Crutchlow eked out an advantage of about one second per lap.

That's no insult to Hayes, who handled his first MotoGP race weekend perfectly. In shitty practice conditions, he kept the bike rubber-side-down and put in plenty of laps. Just not wrecking the equipment is a huge first step in building a rapport with any new team, and not taking anybody else out helps to build acceptance in the wider paddock. He seized an opportunity to top the time-sheets in the morning warm-up (a fluke, but still pretty cool) and then kept his head in the race, avoiding trouble with Katsuyuki Nakasuga, and passing series regulars when he got the chance. He finished ahead of Loris Capirossi and Tony Elias, who aren't exactly chumps. By any realistic standard, the goal for a first MotoGP weekend -- especially at the end of a season when you're the only newbie out there -- isn't to do something great, it's to avoid doing something stupid.

At the end of the day, seventh place in a MotoGP debut is eyebrow-raising, no matter who didn't start or who was taken out in the first lap. There will be those who'll say that Hayes got a gift last weekend, but that's not true. There's no such thing as being gifted positions in motorcycle racing. If Hayes had ridden over his head in the U.S. series, he'd be the one home recuperating from some injury. When someone crashes out in front of you, you beat them just as surely as if you'd stuffed them in Turn 1 and pulled off a nasty block pass.

Motorcycle racing is all about concentration, confidence, and focus; new stimuli (to say nothing of an unfamiliar bike, tires, and track!) are all concentration and confidence sappers. Hayes is now far more familiar with the M1 in particular, and MotoGP in general; getting that first race under his belt without a mishap sets him up to do even better next time, when he'll know what to expect.

What I'd like to see happen now is, I'd like to see Yamaha decide to enter an extra bike for him in the U.S. MotoGP rounds next season. And give Hayes at least a couple more testing opportunities. I think that if they did that, by the time he was in his third or fourth MotoGP race, he'd be mixing it up in top half of the field, even at races with a full grid and all the 'names' healthy and up on two wheels. Note that that is what I'd like to see, not necessarily what MotoGP wants to see (read photo caption for more on this.)

Would even that earn him 'a shot'? No. No chance. He's old enough to the father of the riders who'll get their shots at MotoGP stardom in the next couple of years. Is that unfair? Yes, totally. But motorcycle racing's become another youth cult. Get used to it. Josh Hayes will retire from motorcycle racing before he's ever seriously considered for a contract in the world's premiere series.

But.

What Hayes would earn from that kind of showing -- and he's really almost earned it already -- is the right to say, "If I'd been given the right breaks, I could have raced with those guys."

I once read a mainstream media sportswriter describe Hayes as, "the nicest professional athlete I've ever met," but every racer has to have a massive ego. The racer's ego in Josh Hayes already knows he could'a been a contendah, but the chance to prove that to a wider public would almost be as valuable, to him, as a legitimate shot.

We made noise for Marco Sunday

2011-11-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

When I got home from work on Saturday night, the first videos had already been uploaded to the #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday Facebook group, by bikers in Australia. I worked late into the night last night, and had to get up early this morning to go back into work.

Commuting by motorcycle, in Kansas City, in November, is chilly business. So instead of spending any time checking stats or responding to postings on #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday, I had to put on extra layers, go downstairs and take the cover off the bike (and hope that it would start at these temperatures.)

It did start, and as I rode off, my thoughts were of the race in Valencia, which had yet to happen -- and of the on-track tribute to Marco, which by then had already taken place. In the end, they didn't rev the bikes on the track; I suppose the MotoGP organizers never had actually agreed to that suggestion. But they had a ceremony in which most of the bikes in all three world championship classes did a slow lap of the track on a cold and rainy day, then stopped at the start-finish line.

I suppose it was just too much trouble to rev the bikes; God knows what it would cost if you blew one up. So, in Valencia, they shot off fireworks. Which, if you've been to a MotoGP race in Spain you know they shoot quite a lot of fireworks off anyway. There was some sincere mourning to be done, but as far as the people who actually run MotoGP are concerned, the purpose of this display is to help get back to business as normal. A really meaningful tribute would be to say, for one race everyone will run their bikes without any logos at all; just race numbers and the base paint color. That would remind us that what is important are the things we do for love, not money.

As I left my neighborhood heading towards the highway I take to work, I turned a corner that's always wet. There must be a broken water main there. This morning, as I took that bend, the Triumph stepped out. That was nice; it did something to my mood, because I rode to work at quite a spirited pace. I was passing cars on the highway as if they were pylons in a slalom.

At 10:25, I looked out the window of the grocery store and there was another motorcyclist parked beside my bike. It was Kansas City sustainable architecture guru Jim Van Eman, on his Ducati. I pressed another [NAME OF EMPLOYER REDACTED] employee into service as a videographer (thanks Lindsay!) and clocked off for five minutes to run out and rev my bike with Jim. Since the store's a zoo on the weekend, I had no time to chat with my friend; I literally ran out, revved the bike, and ran back in. The rest of the day was a bit of a blur; as you'll hear when I get my video posted, I had a murderous head cold.

I got off work at four p.m., and since last night was the night we turned our clocks back from daylight savings time, the sun was already low in the sky. All the way home up highway 71, I raced my own shadow. Neither of us could eke out an advantage. I didn't have to stop until I got to the bottom of the off-ramp near my house. There was a guy there, holding a cardboard sign that read
HOMELESS
HUNGRY
Anything helps
God Bless
Thanks

He looked at me and called out, "Nice bike!"

I have almost no voice, thanks to this cold, so I just nodded and gave him the thumbs-up. When I finally pulled into my parking spot, I turned the bike east and my shadow fell behind.

Despite the fact that it was cold; despite the fact that I have a cold; despite the homeless guy's comment that the Triumph is a nice bike even though it's actually a piece of crap... Despite all that, it was a good day to be a motorcyclist and to be alive. That's something that #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday has helped many of us to remember.

Ciao, Marco

#MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday is a go!

2011-11-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

The first video has already been uploaded to the #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday Facebook group's page -- by Jason Rogers. No, he wasn't cheating, it was already 10:30 on Sunday morning in Australia.

Pascal Bompard, another Aussie, recorded this video, too.

I worked an afternoon shift in the grocery store, and I work Sunday morning, too. So I'll be out in the parking lot of the [NAME OF EMPLOYER REDACTED] store on Ward Parkway in Kansas City at 10:30 CST.

As for what all this means... It's been a long day for me, I'm sick with a terrible cold, and I have to get some sleep because I have a long day of work at my day job ahead of me tomorrow. Yes, organizing global events is just a hobby for me.

So figuring out what #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday really means is a task for another day, when it's had time to sink in. In the meantime, many of you will read this before it's 10:30 on Sunday where you live. Make a plan to get out and rev your bike for 58 seconds -- preferably with other motorcyclists. Whether you do it alone or in a group, please video it if you can, and upload it to our Facebook group page. Even if you don't video yourself, add your comment, tell us what you did and where, and how it felt.

OK, I've gotta' go. It's T-11 hours here in Kansas City.

#MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday -- update Saturday at 1430 GMT

2011-11-05T07:39:00.000-07:00

Well, the number of people who plan to make noise for Marco Sunday is increasing. People have joined the #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday Facebook group from all over the world.

On Sunday morning at 1030h, motorcyclists will stop what they're doing, and rev up their bikes for 58 seconds to honor the memory of Marco Simoncelli. Hopefully, lots of them will do it in groups, and I hope that many of them will upload their video tributes to the #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday Facebook group page.

As I'm writing this post, it will be 10:30 on Sunday morning in Auckland NZ in about seven hours. That will be one of the first places motorcyclists will make noise for Marco. Motorcyclists in Moscow will get their chance in 16 hours; Mexicans in 26 hours, and finally, motorcyclists on Maui will make noise for Marco in 30 hours.

Over the course of the 24 hours, our wave of sound will travel around the world. We'll literally wave good-bye.

People have already asked, "How do we make this an annual event?" The timing is about right; smack in the middle of the two-week period that begins with the Day of the Dead and ends with Remembrance Day. At the end of the racing season, and the riding season in many countries. Maybe this should be the day and time, henceforth, when motorcyclists honor their dead.

There's a part of me that wishes that #MonsterEnergy and #IMS (Indianapolis Motor Speedway) to say nothing of Honda, would get behind the #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday group, since they have the media clout to really help to spread the word.

I guess that, despite the fact that those businesses have whole departments devoted to marketing & communications, and have employees with titles like 'Director of New Media', etc, they can't be expected to respond to a movement that will be conceived, grow up, and stage it's demonstration in less than a week. In any case, maybe it's just as well if this is a truly grassroots effort, with no hint of commercialization.

Anyway, #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday is less than a day away for most of us now. Check your battery; if you've put your bike away for winter, gas it up again. If you make a video, please try to title it, or hold up a sign telling us where you are.

Ciao, Marco!

Memorializing Simoncelli, in a way he'd appreciate - Updated

2011-11-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

OK, we've got a hashtag #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday. I guess that's proof, along with thousands of blog hits overnight, that my idea of a round-the-world wave good-bye is resonating.

A blogger in Valencia, ISA (link to her site in comments below) says the time is set for 1030h. So 10:30 a.m. Sunday morning it is. Valencia is almost exactly half-way around the world from the International Date Line, so #MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday will begin in the western Pacific about 12 hours earlier and end in Hawaii about 12 hours later. The big noise in Valencia will be right in the middle of the 24-hour wave. That's perfect.

#MakeNoiseForMarcoSunday = 58 seconds of revving your bike in memory of #58, at 1030h Sunday, November 6. keep checking this blog for details.

Original post follows...

I read that the FIM proposed a minute of silence on the grid at Valencia, as a way of memorializing Marco Simoncelli. Marco's dad Paolo suggested, instead, that all the riders rev up their bikes -- that would be something Marco would have preferred.

So, here's a note from the Dept. of Modest Proposals: Let's all do that.

I propose that we find out from the FIM when, exactly, they plan to rev up the MotoGP bikes for Marco. Then I suggest that at that time on Sunday, in each time zone around the world, motorcyclists stop what they're doing, and rev up their bikes.

The effect of this will be to create a wave of revving motorcycles that will travel around the globe, beginning in the western pacific and circling the globe, back to the International Date Line, over the 24 hours of next Sunday. We'll literally wave good-bye to Marco. We can rev up our bikes for a little under a minute -- say, 58 seconds.

Even a few years ago, organizing a global farewell would have been impossible on such short notice. But in this day and age of Twitter and Facebook, it might just be possible.

I think it would be great if motorcyclists took a short video of the bike-revving, and posted it to YouTube. Then, if they post the YouTube link in the 'Comments' section of this post, I'll embed all the videos on a page devoted to "58 for 58, times 24".

If I pick up RTs and reposts of this entry over the next day or so, I'll post more detailed instructions, and contact the FIM to find out when, exactly, the Valencia moment will happen.

A note from the Dept. of Devil's Advocacy

2011-10-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, MCN (the UK motorcycle tabloid, not Motorcycle Consumer News in the U.S.) contacted me and asked me if I wanted to participate in a sort of printed 'debate' about the state of motorcycle racing in general and MotoGP in particular. They wanted to pair me with another 'expert' (a term I'm using loosely, obviously) to argue for/against Traction Control.

Since I had a choice of what side of the argument I'd take, and since everyone seems to be against TC, I naturally chose to defend it.

Here's what I wrote...

Traction Control's not the real villain

Let’s set aside the fact that Traction Control is beneficial on road-going motorcycles. They say “racing improves the breed” and whether the latest TC systems - look at the Aprilia RSV4 or BMW S1000RR - grew out of those companies’ racing programs or not, they have allowed ordinary riders to explore their machines’ performance envelopes in much greater safety. ABS, similarly, is a huge boon to riders who are mere mortals.

So the question is not simply, “Should we ban TC?” The question is also, “Do we really want top-level racing series to rely on technology that will look increasingly primitive as road bikes continue to evolve?”

My answer to the first question is, “You can try but it didn’t work here in the U.S.” And my answer to the second is a simple, “No” on philosophical grounds. On principle, I believe that top-tier race bikes should be more advanced than ordinary road bikes.

Even if you don’t share my philosophical position, there are other reasons to think twice about a simple ban of TC. It’s easy to look back over the last decade or so, and point to TC as ‘the new thing’ that cocked MotoGP up. But other factors have also conspired to produce processional races on one-line tracks.

The overall engineering packages of motorcycles are increasingly homogenous. So are the development paths taken by young riders; the Red Bull Rookies Cup is a blatant attempt to produce cookie-cutter future stars. Smaller grids limit diversity and restrictive licensing and qualifying rules have made lapped traffic a thing of the past. Even the tracks we race on are getting smoother and smoother. And most importantly, almost all major championships now use control tires.

So the racing’s still thrilling in the 125 class and it’s wild-and-wooly in Moto2, but as the grids shrink in MotoGP and the risks (both physical and financial) of over-riding the machine increase, riders literally toe the same line. Why isn’t this a debate about riders and the culture of motorcycle racing? Sheene vs. Roberts; Rainey vs. Schwantz... If you could put those guys in a time machine and have them race contemporary MotoGP bikes, the races would not be parades.

And banning TC is not that simple. There was about a decade when the Yoshimura Suzuki team here (in the AMA Superbike Championship) had a clandestine TC system developed by computer guru Amar Bazzaz. Yosh had great riders in Mat Mladin and Ben Spies, but part of the team’s long dominance was simple cheating.

Here’s another lesson from America: Our Grand National flat track racing scene is still full of lurid slides and wheelies. Bar-banging last corner passes determine almost every race. Yet the series struggles to attract young fans - perhaps because the bikes being raced are far more primitive than any modern street bike.

In the final analysis, while banning Traction Control seems like a quick fix, it’s a certainty that within a few years, un-traction-controlled racers will lap at slower speeds than production bikes with advancing state-of-the-art TC - and that will suck. Petrolheads all want to see the fastest and the best bikes doing battle. The answer is not more restrictive rules, it’s a less-restrictive attitude, and it has to pervade the sport from top to bottom.

Author note: I wrote this before Simoncelli's fatal crash. Looking back on it now, and reading me sort of rhetorically asking, "What would Kevin Schwantz be doing, if he was here now?" makes me reflect on the fact that Simoncelli was the young rider most like Schwantz in every way, physically and emotionally, but also in his balls-out riding and acceptance of frequent crashes in the search of the absolute limit.

Simoncelli's Sepang crash began with a hairy knee save after over-riding and/or over-braking into that corner. If he hadn't been hit by Rossi and Edwards -- if he had pulled off the knee save, he'd've seemed even more Schwantz-like.

Trying that hard comes with a price.

Why Marco Simoncelli didn't think it could happen to him

2011-10-27T16:44:00.000-07:00

Last Monday, I wrote about risk in the context of sports like motorcycle racing. Today, I'll close that loop, with an excerpt from Riding Man that addresses the techniques that motorcycle racers use to deal with the psychological stress those risks entail.

It's a statement of the obvious: racers are acutely superstitious. We've all seen Valentino Rossi's going-on-track ritual, that begins with his deep squat and tugging his bike's foot peg and ends with him pulling the leathers out of the crack of his ass as he rolls down pit lane.

Of course, those rituals are part of a mind-clearing exercise and in some ways actually do help to protect riders, but they don't confer any real luck; he did all that stuff, I'm certain, before he rolled out onto the track in Sepang. Then fate cruelly threw Simoncelli directly into his path.

Did Rossi think, "That could have been me," or was it, "I wish it had been me"? Is he now mulling over last Sunday morning in Sepang, looking for the thing he did do to bring him such bad luck? Or wondering what good luck charm failed him?

The truth is, you can't really race motorcycles without an inner belief that "it can't happen to me." While I was on the Isle of Man researching Riding Man and preparing for the TT, I saw plenty of superstition on the part of racers, and came to term with my own 'magic thinking', as I processed the risks associated with the upcoming race. I addressed those topics in a chapter I called...

Hello, Fairies

The Manx Motorcycle Club annual dinner is pretty much the social event of the winter on the Island. The mayor of Douglas, the Island’s governor, and the leaders of Manx industry such as they are, they’re all guests; Jack Wood had to pull strings to get me a ticket.

I show up a couple of hours early, to attend the club’s annual meeting. Picture a large room full of men in blazers. Several men with snow-white hair announce their retirements. In order to fill their positions, gray haired men are nominated. Nominations are seconded. All in favor say ‘Aye’. The Deputy Clerk of the Course’s term was not up, but he’s unfortunately deceased. He too is replaced. Finally, a new President literally assumes the mantle, as a large medal is hung around his neck on an elaborate sort of necklace. Jack Wood is made an honorary life member. I am the youngest person in the room, or so it seems.

The business of the club attended to – the races presumably preserved for another year –we go back downstairs for drinks. I sit down on a padded bench, beside a guy who is carrying so much weight that he braces an arm on an expansive thigh to prevent his body simply flowing in the direction of gravity. He wants to talk, though it leaves him breathless. When he asks me what I’m doing here, and I tell him, he gets a little defensive. A writer? Am I here to skewer the TT? But I’ve become adept at allaying such fears; I’m here to ride in it, after all, how could I be against it?

Every now and then, someone comes by to say ‘hi’ to him, and offers to buy him a drink. Once, he makes a motion to get up, and a man twice his age puts a hand on his shoulder saying, “No, I’ll get them.” It turns out that he’s the director of the Island’s Emergency Planning department. He enumerates the good things that the TT has given the Isle of Man; a much bigger hospital and better ambulance service, and top flight orthopedic surgeons that a little place like this would otherwise never have.

We go in for dinner. I’m seated at the press table next to Norrie Whyte, a legendary British journalist who tells me he’s been to every MMC dinner “since Read won in ’60.” Then he complains that no one can write any more. There’s a toast to “The Queen, Lord of Man” and after a few brief speeches Tony Jefferies (current champ David’s uncle, and head of the racing clan) is wheeled up onto the stage for a keynote speech that he could give in his sleep, or at least completely drunk, which he is. “He makes me look like a teatotaller,” says Whyte with admiration. Somewhere in there, a meal is served and there’s a swirl of conversation from which I note only a fragment, “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? These young guys are trying to ‘short circuit’ the TT course.”

Standing at the bar, afterwards, I meet two riders, an old guy and his protégé. The old guy is Chris McGahan, an Englishman who nearly made a career of racing, back in the ‘70s. Since then, he’s specialized as a ‘real road’ racer, doing the major Irish meetings, the TT and Manx GP, and a few public road races on the continent.

Chris, who’s probably in his fifties, looks like an ex-lightweight boxer who stayed in shape. Long arms, strong hands and shoulders; his most noticeable feature is a pair of large ears, the tops of which stick out horizontally like wings. “They call me ‘wingnut’,” he grins. In a room where men outnumber women at least 20:1, he seems to have two dates. (The MMC Annual Dinner was actually stag until the mid-‘90s.) The younger guy is Sean Leonard, Irish. “Dere’s noothin’ known about racin’ dat Chris don’t know,” Sean tells me.

They’ve hardly stopped drinking when they call me around 10 a.m. the next morning. They’re going to drive down to Castletown to meet a sponsor, then cut a couple of laps of the Mountain in a borrowed car. Do I want to come?

Chris spins one yarn after another. Famous old racers, fast women; smuggling booze back across the channel from continental races, smuggling stowaways on the ferry to the island for the TT; serious substance abuse continuing right up to the green flag; choose any four from columns A, B, and C. He’s driving as fast as he’s talking. Suddenly, with Chris hurtling along in mid-sentence, Sean blurts, “Fairy Bridge!”

No Island native crosses the little stone bridge without saying ‘hello’ to the fairies. Sean says it, and so does Chris, injecting his “Hello Fairies,” in the middle of a sentence. I say it, too. They kind of laugh it off, like, ‘we don’t actually believe it…’

We park at a pub, and go in. It’s maybe 10:30 a.m., I’m thinking what, tea? Brunch? They stand at the bar and order pints of beer. “What about you, Mark? What’ll you take for a livener?” I order a pint of Guinness, and a second, before the sponsor shows up with his wife. He’s a dapper guy, younger than McGahan (and me, for that matter) but dressed older; he wears a pocket watch on a gold chain. There’s a bit of business done, as Chris discusses plans for a vintage bike, something they’re planning to build for one of the Manx GP classes.

I beg off the third pint, while we socialize. The sponsor, I learn, owns a scrapyard somewhere “on the mainland” but his involvement with Chris isn’t really a business proposition; in ‘real roads’ racing, sponsors provide bikes or money so they can hang out with riders, maybe that’s why the riders tend to be such characters.

We head back north in the car, and pick up the course at Ballacraine corner, about six miles into it. Chris is again in running commentary mode, driving even faster now. As we go over the various “jumps” and bumpy areas on the course, Chris takes his hands off the wheel and makes handlebar waggling movements. Sean reaches up and grips, tightly, the handle above the passenger-side door.

Just past Ballaugh, we come to a white cottage and Chris slams on the brakes. “Gwen’s always got tea and cakes for racers,” he says, then as he gets out “Wait here while I see if she’s in.”

Gwen’s become a minor celebrity, known as the ‘lady in white’. She stands in her garden, for every TT practice session and every race, rain or shine. She always waves as the racers pass, and many of them claim to acknowledge her, though she lives on a bumpy stretch of road so they don’t wave back as much as raise a finger or waggle a foot. For decades, she always wore a white dress, until she was made an honorary corner marshal and issued a white coverall. She’s an honorary member of the TT Rider’s Association, too. There was even a time when the ‘newcomer’s bus tour’ used to actually stop at her cottage, and everyone would troop out and meet her (later, on my bus tour, we didn’t stop. I assume she’s getting too old.)

When I ride past her cottage on my bicycle, I look in the big front picture window. The parlor walls are covered with photos and TT mementos, but I’ve never seen any movement in there. In fact, I’ve been wondering if Gwen is still alive. I’d like to meet her, but it’s not destined to happen. Chris jumps back into the car. “The door was open, but she’s not in there,” he says, and we’re off again.

Back in Douglas, we spend four hours in another bar, “The owner’s one of our sponsors,” Chris says, and we begin drinking as though someone else will pick up the tab. When I finally beg off, they can’t believe I’m not coming with them to the next party.

There was no way Sean Leonard was going to cross the Fairy Bridge without saying ‘hello’ to the fairies. Michelle Duff’s (she was previously Mike, but that’s another story) final words of advice to me before I left were, “Say ‘hello’ to the fairies from me.”Nowadays visitors tend to think, "How quaint, the simple folk still believe in magic." But motorcycle racers are superstitious, too.

One of the places that’s been bugging me – frankly, scaring me – on the course is Barregarrow crossroads. Two gnarly blind left-hand kinks, connected by a steep bumpy downhill. But one day as I’m riding along on my bicycle, I come to the farm just before the crossroads. There’s a huge tree on the left here, and I’m making a mental note that I need to be way over to the right, in position for the first kink, by the time I get to this point. As I’m pedaling beneath the tree, I hear a cacophony overhead. Hundreds of crows are living up in the branches. In fact, the road is plastered with their shit, which is another reason to be over to the right. But crows. Suddenly, I’ve lost my fear of Barregarrow.

All this goes back quite a few years. Once, I signed up for a California Superbike School session on a Honda RS125 GP bike. The school took place out at Willow Springs, on the ‘Streets of Willow’ practice course. As usual, I didn’t know anyone there. My lupus was acting up; every joint really hurt, and the prospect of folding myself onto one of those tiny, tiny bikes was not that appealing. As a Canadian in the ‘States, I had no health insurance. All in all, as I waited to get started, I figured I’d put myself in a very good position to make a fool of myself at best, break my body and my bank account at worst.

I was distracted from these glum thoughts by a flock of ravens about a hundred yards down the pit wall. They were fighting over treasure: a bag of old french fries. Suddenly, for no reason, I had a sense that these birds were good luck for me and that as long as they were there, I was going to be alright. This belief sprang fully-formed into my head. Like other people, the things I believe most fervently are based in utter nonsense.

Ever since then big, noisy black birds are good luck for me. I’ve always felt that – especially on the morning of races – if I see one it’s a guarantee I won’t be hurt. And it’s always been true.

(Author’s note: Long after that day at Willows, in the course of my advertising career, I had to write some public service TV spots on the subject of gambling addiction. I went to a few ‘Gambler’s Anonymous’-type meetings where I learned to two things. One was that gambling addicts were pathetic losers. The other was that this irrational belief that something is lucky for you has a name. Psychologists call it ‘magic thinking’ and it is one of the hallmarks of risk addiction.

In fairness, the big black birds have always worked for me. They’ve protected me on days I’ve seen ‘em, and indeed, I’ve had some hairy crashes on mornings when I’ve not seen them. If you set out to debunk my talisman, you’d say, “The birds calm you, and you ride better relaxed; you’re tense when you’re aware you haven’t seen one, and you ride shitty tense.” That may be true. The scientist in me is a little subtler. I think that the birds are common, after all, and there’s probably almost always one to see. I think that when I’m in a state of relaxed awareness, alert to my environment, I can count on seeing one. That’s the state in which I ride well. When I internalize, when I’m looking in and not out, I don’t see them. That’s a state in which I ride poorly.

Whatever the case, after the TT fortnight was over, I drove one of my visitors to the airport, and on the way home crossed the Fairy Bridge. Somehow, lost in thought, I failed to say ‘hello’ though I reassured myself that I’d said it on the trip to the airport and according to the letter of the legend, it is the first crossing of each day which is critical. Nonetheless, most Manx say hello on every crossing, and that had been my habit too.

As I was worrying through this very thought, I noticed a crow hopping in the road ahead of me. I got closer and closer I actually said, “Hey, take off” out loud. But it didn’t. I thought about slamming on the brakes, or swerving, and did a quick visual check to ensure the road was otherwise clear. Then I thought, “Don’t be stupid, they always wait to the last second to get out of the way.”

But it didn’t. I hit it and killed it.

I was fucking aghast.)

A writer's notebook, Simoncelli, and a meditation on risk

2011-10-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

The last week or so, there's been several moments when I've found myself thinking, 'That would make a great topic for a blog post,' but I just haven't had the time to jot down more than a reminder to myself.

The hip Hell for Leather site's been paying a little attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement; first covering the NYC cops' apparent use of their scooters as juggernauts, bowling over protesters. Then, they ran this story about Greek rioters using motorcycle gear for protection from police batons, etc. Are they taking a side? It's not yet clear.

Another disgruntled ex-motorcycle journalist, Mark Williams -- the long-time editor of the great UK magazine BIKE -- has taken to blogging about wider topics, and his blog's definitely worth reading.

I've been meaning to weigh in on the (hopefully final, for a while) sale of Cycle World magazine. Then I decided that, instead, I'd conduct a lengthy interview with America's greatest bike mag editor, Cook Neilson.

Cook, who studied Lit at Princeton, was the editor of Cycle from the late '60s through the late '70s. Picture this: When Cycle moved from New York to L.A., they moved into a space that was 25% office and 75% shop. Cook and Phil Schilling developed and built a motorcycle, in their own shop, that Cook used to win the 1977 Superbike race at Daytona.

That interview's epic, and I'll probably finish writing it up and post it in a month or two on the Motorcycle-USA web site. I wish Cycle World well I guess, but it's no Cycle.

I was going to write about two 'Love Ride' motorcyclists being killed in L.A., and point out for the nth time that rides for breast cancer, autism, toys for tots or whatever the hell else you want to benefit are misguided. The only thing we, as motorcyclists, should ride to benefit is spinal cord research. Breast cancer, autism, and toyless tots are all worthy causes, but we should be collecting money for the thing that most affects us, as riders. The only reason we don't is that we're all too scared to even raise the subject.

Oh, and my friend John Stein's amazing history of motorcycle drag racing is about to come out, and that's newsworthy too. All that was stuff I was hoping to write up when I finally got a couple of days off early this week.

Then Marco Simoncelli was killed in Malaysia. That changed everything.

I haven't seen the crash. Since I don't have a television, I wasn't watching it and I won't see it on the internet because my personal policy is not to purposely watch a crash that ends a career. It's just a thing with me; a place I draw the line.

Simoncelli's death, though, underlines the inherent risk in motorsport. The best gear, the safest tracks, the best corner workers and the Clinica Mobile will never take all those risks out of racing. In fact, if racing ever was made completely safe, it would also become boring to me.

Risk, as a philosopher might say, informs motorcycle racing. We don't race in order to take risks, but risk gives the decision to go racing meaning. About 15 years ago, when I was working my way up through the amateur ranks as a club racer, I realized that I wanted to explain that to a public that took a very simplistic view of risk sports. I knew that in order to come to terms with the topic, I would have to go and race in the place where that risk was most obvious. To fully understand that topic, I had to race on the Isle of Man, in the TT.

Although what Marco Simoncelli did for a living was very dangerous compared to, say, soccer, MotoGP is very safe compared to racing in the TT. Simoncelli was the first MotoGP rider to die in a race since Daijiro Kato in 2003. TT riders are killed every single year.

My book about the TT, Riding Man, is largely a meditation on risk and today and Thursday, I'll post a couple of the most relevant excerpts. Here's the first one, a chapter of the book called...

Memorials

The TT course is lined with memorials to riders. Some of them are big, permanent features of the TT course. The Guthrie Memorial on the climb up the mountain, which is really just a cairn; the Graham Memorial which is anA-framed chapel that looks west down the Laxey Valley; and now the Dunlop Memorial, a bronze statue up at the Bungalow. They’re the exceptions to the general rule, since Guthrie and Dunlop died on other circuits (Guthrie at the German Grand Prix in ’39, and Dunlop in Estonia in 2000.) Even Graham’s chapel was built far from the bottom of Bray Hill where he crashed and died. Officially, little is done to remember the fallen.

The vast majority of TT memorials are much smaller and unofficial; they’re placed by friends and families at the very spot their loved one died. At first, you don’t see them. Then you notice one because it’s relatively prominent, or because it’s new or freshly cleaned. As you get sensitized, you start to see more and more of them, notice ever subtler and older ones, see the ones that are set further back in the weeds. Eventually, you realize that no matter where you choose to stop along the course if you know what to look for, you can see something that commemorates a fallen rider.

They are permanent plaques in stone or metal, screwed to fences or set in the ground. They are personal mementos, stuffed animals or flags or photos, tacked to trees or jammed between rocks. They are flowers, long dried, brown, wilted and molding, or gone altogether leaving a faded bit of ribbon gradually fraying in the constant wind.

Alpine Cottage is a fast but normally innocuous right -hander between Kirk Michael and Ballaugh. The turn-in marker for this bend is the nearby bus shelter. When I stop to study the corner’s line I notice that the bus stop has a ceramic plaque set into its wall, low down in one corner almost at ground level.

On the plaque, there is a glazed bas-relief illustration of a racing sidecar, with Manx and Swedish flags. It reads: ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF TOMAS & MATS ERICSSON WHO DIED NEAR THIS POINT IN PRACTICE FOR THE 1985 T.T. RACES. THEY WERE BRILLIANT EXPONENTS OF SIDECAR RACING AND FINE EXAMPLES OF THE YOUTH OF SWEDEN WHO THEY REPRESENTED INTERNATIONALLY – COMPETITORS IN SPORT AND LIFE.

A mile or so down the road, just over the bridge at the entrance to the town of Ballaugh, there’s a fine bronze bas-relief set in a white stucco gate. It is a portrait of a man and since he’s wearing a pudding bowl crash helmet, I’m pretty sure it’s a memorial. I make a note of the name Karl Gall and the date1939, with an eye to checking on them next time I’m in the library.

Later on, I do go to the library and pull the 1939 volume of the local paper. Gall had been one of the leading German riders of the 1930s. In the ’38 TT, Gall had crashed hard at Waterworks and been badly hurt. He’d announced his retirement after that. But as war clouds gathered, the Nazis were determined to wring as much propaganda value as possible from international motorsport. The BMW, DKW and NSU teams all got Nazi support, but it came with heavy pressure to deliver results, especially at prestigious events like the TT. Gall was persuaded to take one more shot at the Senior, on BMW’s all-powerful, supercharged ‘kompressor’ twin. In practice, he lost control going over Ballaugh Bridge, and was flung headfirst into that gatepost. His team-mate, Georg Meier, ended up winning the last prewar Senior on an identical machine.

One time, Steve accompanies me on a bicycle lap. It’s nearly the death of him. I collect him at Ballacraine, which is already a pretty long ride from his house, considering that he doesn’t cycle or get much of any other kind of exercise. We set off up Ballaspur and haven’t gone too far – we’re near Laurel Bank – when he calls out for me to stop. At first I think he just needs a rest, but he leans his bike against a low stone wall and starts to climb over it. “Come here,” he says “I want to show you something.”

It drops away so the wall is only a couple of feet high from the road, but it’s a five-foot jump to the damp and musky forest floor. The Neb, a little stream, gurgles a few yards away. Hidden here behind the wall amongst fiddleheads are three little plaques devoted to Mark Farmer, a popular rider who died in 1994 while riding a Britten.

“I came here once and noticed that one of these plaques had been removed,” said Steve. “I thought ‘Bloody hell, someone’s stolen one of them,’ but the next time I looked it was back and all polished. They’d just removed it for cleaning.”

We clambered back over the wall. As we got on our bikes, Steve said, “I’ll tell you what my friend… I don’t want to be polishing your memorial around here.”

After a while, I start to get a little paranoid about the memorials, about the danger. Then one day I stop to study Kate’s Cottage. There never was a “Kate”, ironically. The cottage belonged to the Tates, but at one TT years back, an excited commentator got tongue-tied and blurted out something about “Kate’s Cottage” and the name stuck. It’s a hairy-looking spot; a narrow, fast, blind, downhill kink with – on top of everything else – a constant trickle of water that flows from a crack in the pavement right on the natural racing line, leaving it damp on all but the hottest days.

Dodging cars, I walk down through the corner to look for (more) hazards on the exit. There, I notice a commercial florist’s bouquet that’s been tied to a concrete fencepost with ribbon. It’s been there a long time, I can tell. There’s a tiny white envelope attached to it; the kind that comes with any basic commercial bouquet, which would normally contain a card with a message from the sender. I slip a finger into the envelope, which has been softened by the elements. It’s empty. No card. No clue who it might have been for, or from. I realize that there is some faded writing on the envelope itself. It says “34th milestone (Kate’s)”.

Something about this one, in particular, sticks in my mind. Sometime later, I walk down the Strand in Douglas and look in on a florist, when it hits me: It wasn’t that someone put the bouquet there, they phoned it in. That was why there was no message in the envelope: there was no recipient, at least no one who needed to read anything. The florist had just written the delivery address down on the envelope, and gone out and tied it to the fence.

The people, friends and family who gather in small groups to place the more permanent memorials are – at least in part – doing something for themselves. Getting ‘closure’, to put a pop pscyh label on it. But whoever phoned in that florist’s order was doing something very different. He or she was never going to see the flowers; they were going to be placed by someone with no connection to anything. And really, except for me, they were destined to go almost unnoticed. It was less a public thing than a private message to an anonymous rider, as if he was still out there somewhere, lapping the course.

Something about that flips a neuron in me, and I suddenly realize that, read as a collective, the hundreds of memorials are not sad. Although they often express loss, “You’ll be missed,” not one of them condemns the TT. If anything, they celebrate it as the high point, which it was, of every life thus recalled.

I don’t want Steve polishing my memorial here either. But I can not think of any place I’d rather have one.

Thanks for reading. Check back next Thursday for a second excerpt from Riding Man -- one that will explain why Marco Simoncelli almost certainly didn't think it could happen to him.

Now is the winter of our discontent

2011-10-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I had to be at work at 6 a.m., which meant leaving for work at oh-dark 5:30, in the middle of October. In Kansas City, that meant dressing pretty warmly. But I was pleasantly surprised when I stepped outside, swaddled in Aerostich, to feel that it was almost summery. We've had that kind of wonderful Indian Summer/fall here.

I unlocked and uncovered the Triumph. For the last few weeks, I've been commuting on my scooter, because the last time someone tried to steal the Triumph, they left it short-circuited and completely flattened the battery. I recharged it, and it worked in the heat of summer, but when we had the first touch of fall in September and temperatures briefly cooled, the battery lost enough voltage that it wouldn't turn over the starter.

It took me a while to get around to replacing the battery, during which time I got used to commuting on the scooter, even though my route includes about ten miles of divided highway. It was one of those deals where, the first time the Triumph wouldn't start and I had to take the Vino, I thought it was going to be real ordeal, and when it wasn't that bad, I got used to it. To be honest, my full-sized motorcycle is a turd; it wasn't that big a step down to the Vino.

But, with a new battery and (however brief) a new lease on life, the Triumph felt like a big step up from the scooter on Sunday morning. With a warm wind blowing from the south, I picked just the right line on my on-ramp -- one of the two 'interesting' bends along my commute. I'm using interesting pretty loosely. The tires on the Triumph don't have too much mileage on them, but they are about eight years old; it's not like I'm really going to lean it way over.

I've spent the last two weeks droning down the right hand lane on the scooter with the throttle pinned as every car passed me. It was a pleasure to slip through the cars for a change, and I had time for my mind to wander a bit. Actually, it wandered pretty far. to thoughts of T.E. Lawrence riding his Brough Superior. (Actually Brough Superiors, plural; he owned eight or so.) I figured that my Triumph, as crap as it is by modern standards, is probably functionally superior to anything Lawrence owned.

Mentally, I identified the Triumph's weak points (they are legion) and fantasized about actually turning it into a good bike. Of course, even scratching the surface of that project (fork, triple clamp, brakes, wheels and tires, shocks and swing arm, flat slides, and general weight reduction -- just for starters) would cost thousands of bucks. And at the end of the process, no matter how clever I was, the bike would still be nowhere near as fast as, say, a 2004 Suzuki GSX-R750 -- a bike I could find on Craigslist any day of the week, for sale for much less than the cost of building up the Triumph.

Anyway, all that is moot. Because winter's inevitable, and for the first time in a decade or more, I have a regular job; it's not an option for me to stay home writing on snow days. That means that I am going to need to be able to commute to the grocery store in the dead of winter. And that, in turn, means I need some kind of crap car (or preferably a crap small pickup.) Ergo, I'm going to have to sell the Triumph and probably my '64 Honda Dream too to fund it.

The wife knows this, and even she realizes that the longer I wait to sell them, the less I'll get for them. And that if I wait until the snow's piling up, I won't have the luxury of being picky about a used car or truck. We've discussed it; we've been discussing it for at least a month.

"Why are you resisting looking for a truck?" She asked me the other day. It's not so much the looking for a truck part I'm resisting, it's the putting my bikes up for sale in order to pay for the truck part. Still, I got her point.

And, about the time that I got to work last Sunday, having really enjoyed the ride, in spite of the fact that it was just a mundane commute on a very mundane motorcycle -- I realized why I've been resisting switching to four wheels to get to my job.

It's that I realize that the way the economy's going, and working at 12 bucks an hour, if I unload my bikes it's not likely that I'll ever replace them. I'm not totally pessimistic about my own future (although if you've been reading my more political posts lately you know I'm pretty pessimistic about the future of the U.S. as a whole.) There are things I've got in development that, if they come together, will certainly allow me to start riding again, and at a higher level than just commuting to a crap job on a crap bike I basically rescued from a scrap yard. wisdom

But making those good things happen is not within my control, it will take an element of dumb luck for any of them to come true, and I've got a little too much life experience to rely on luck.

When I think back on my racing 'career', such as it was, I often mull over this bit of... In the hundreds of races I entered, I was sometimes a real underdog; I was more usually destined for a mid-pack finish; and once in a while, I was even a favorite to win or at least run in the lead group.

Regardless of where I could be expected to finish, virtually every time I took my place on a starting grid, I had a plan to win the race. If I was a favorite, the plan may have been pretty simple; get a good start, keep my rhythm, and just flat outride everyone behind me. If I was an underdog, the plan might have counted on a couple of red flags to re-bunch the field, and me blitzing the final restart while, hopefully, faster riders crashed into each other and took each other out ahead of me.

The plans could have been plausible then, or far-fetched. But I always had a plan to win.

Until.

Until I got to the TT. There, my only plan was to survive. And while it was great to be there and have the experience, the certainty that I'd spent my life savings to get there and the realization that all I could hope to do was finish... It was bittersweet.

After the TT, I rather foolishly let myself get out of touch with my old career, in the ad business, and I got stuck into motorcycle journalism -- a 'profession' that I should have seen was about to go the way of say, maritime navigation, as a career path.

So now, I'm lucky to have a job that makes me one of the working poor, as a clerk at [NAME OF EMPLOYER REDACTED]. And the odds of working my way up and out of that situation are a.) slim and b.) definitely hinge on luck and elements that are totally out of my own control. The overall direction of the economy and the country are sure as hell not in my favor.

Selling my bikes feels like admitting that I don't have a plan to win; that my goal now is simple survival.

I should place ads for them on Craigslist this week. That's what a pragmatist would do; and buy some crap car or truck that will, at least, allow me to get to work throughout the winter.

But somehow I think I'll ride until it's simply impossible to continue. Why stop hoping now?

Is there a lesson for motorcycle rules committees in the Dan Wheldon crash?

2011-10-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

I heard about Dan Wheldon's fatal IndyCar crash on Sunday, when I dropped by a friend's place for dinner. He told me that crash footage was already on the web, but I haven't seen it; my personal rule is not to (purposely) watch crashes that end anyone's career.

I was at the gym yesterday, which is the only place I'm exposed to actual television. There's a wall of TVs in front of the cardio equipment, and when I looked up I saw snippets of "analysis" on ESPN, CNN, etc. I also saw photos on the New York Times website.

The 'Vegas track was modified a few years ago, when they increased the steepest banking angle to 20 degrees from 12. That meant that top speeds increased to, like, 225 miles an hour. I remember, maybe 15-20 years ago, when Scott Goodyear lapped the Michigan track at 230-something, and people in IndyCar muttered that it was maybe time to do something about those speeds because if anything went wrong, there would be carnage. Last weekend, despite the fact that the rules governing IndyCar are far stricter than they were in Goodyear's day, lap speeds were nearly that high on the 'Vegas track -- and it's a mile shorter than the Michigan superspeedway.

The Newtonian response to Wheldon's crash is note that Energy=Mass times Velocity squared. All else being equal, a crash at 225mph 'IndyCar' speeds dissipates about 60% more energy than one at 180mph 'NASCAR' speeds. Danica Patrick, in the aftermath of the recent IndyCar incident, noted that she wouldn't mind putting those speeds behind her when she completes her transition to NASCAR for the 2012 season.

The Machiavellian response to the Wheldon crash is that it will finally give IndyCar the marketing hook it has needed for about 10 years. "NASCAR is great, too. For girls. Real men race open-wheel cars."

You can pussyfoot around it all you want, but there's no point in denying the fact that a large part of the audience appeal in mass-market car racing is "wantin' ta see wrecks." One of the reasons that I'm of two minds about promoting motorcycle racing to a wider, mass-market, audience is that in our dumbed-down culture, a big crowd will inevitably be watching for wrecks and incapable of understanding the nuances of actual racing.

Don't get me wrong; there's (sometimes) a distinction between wrecks and fatalities. Over the last 30 years or so, NASCAR's been very good at building up the brand value of drivers, and it doesn't want them killed; it's bad for business. So they use restrictor plates and a bunch of other rules that, taken together reduce lap speeds to threshold below which driver survival is (nearly) guaranteed. As a, ahem, side-effect of those rules, however, the cars run very close together in drafting packs and there are plenty of crowd-pleasing wrecks.

Notwithstanding the Newtonian and Machiavellian responses, though, it was obvious that the Wheldon crash was the result of a series of events that unfolded very quickly as a large pack of cars traveled at very high speed in close formation. Clearly one part of that equation is that a rolling start on a speedway yields a closely spaced pack for a long time under almost any conditions. In current IndyCar racing -- it's nearly a spec series -- all cars' performance is very close. The difference between the pole time at 'Vegas, and Wheldon's time -- he qualified way back in 28th place -- was less than 2%.

We've seen a similar compression in qualifying times in MotoGP, with the advent of the spec tire and/or traction control era. The evolution of MotoGP rules continues, and the stated goal of rules changes in recent years has usually been to help (or force) teams to control costs. Much closer qualifying times are a side effect. The only reason we don't see huge packs of bikes racing close together for the first few laps until they string out, is that the grid is so sparse to begin with.

Curiously, the racing's not nearly so good as the tight qualifying results would imply. That's a subject for another post. Of course, the rules of Moto2 make that even more of a spec class, and with its larger grids it has been a crash-fest since its inception. With lots of bikes riding in tight formation for long periods, the occasional crash in which a rider is left on the track in the path of following riders is inevitable. Tomizawa's crash at Imola last year is just one recent example of how much more dangerous such crashes are in the world of motorcycle racing (although it occurred after the field had strung out.)

Restrictor-plate racing has bunched up the fields in AMA Pro Racing flat track competition, too. Races have been pretty thrilling as a result, and we've done OK, safety-wise. We're keeping speeds under control and there's more air fence than there used to be. In the Pro class, the singles races on big tracks are pure drafting battles that are exciting to watch but I think they're a recipe for disaster.

My point in writing this post is that historically, motorcycle racing has been great to watch when there were battles up and down the field, but it doesn't necessarily need huge packs of riders who can't get away from each other.

Maybe it's time to free up the rules and let that happen, before we have our own Dan Wheldon horror crash. You guys all seem to want more TV coverage of motorcycle racing, but I don't want to get my sport on TV that bad.

Superbike dispels rules rumors? Not really. And a note from the Dept. of Unintended Consequences

2011-10-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I noticed an item on the RoadracingWorld.com web site, in which SBK director Paolo Ciabatti dispelled rumors that the Superbike World Championship would be shifting its rules package towards something resembling the current Superstock rules.

I presume Ciabatti's fairly terse response was in response to a direct question from John Ulrich or someone else at RRW. I obviously don't know what specific rumors JU might've heard, but ever since MotoGP released rules allowing 1000cc production-based (i.e., Superbike) motors to be used in the top-tier championship, we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. (Or, given the name of the director of SBK, perhaps I should say, the other slipper.)

Let me digress for a moment. Years ago, I was working at an ad agency that lost a big account. We were all called into a meeting and the President of the company began by saying, "First, I want to assure you that we're not planning to have any layoffs..."

As the meeting broke up, I turned to a co-worker and said, "Well, better update your resume."

"Why?" she asked. "He said there wouldn't be layoffs."

I explained that there is a whole class of corporate statements which, when made, always mean the opposite of what was said. And indeed, within days, I was told to cut a few salaries in my department.

That was exactly what I thought of when reading RRW's SBK statement.

Let's review the facts...

MotoGP is #1
There have been times in recent history when SBK threatened to usurp Grands Prix as the most popular motorcycle racing series -- at least in some major markets, if not the entire world. Think of the days when Fogarty dominated the series and SBK races were far more popular in the UK than Grands Prix. But year in and year out, MotoGP has worn motorcycle racing's daddy pants.

1,000cc production-based motors really do challenge SBK's role as the top 'production-based' series
With MotoGP as the top tier of motorcycle racing, World Superbikes are left to justify the 'World' part of their name. They've long done so by saying, well, we're the championship for production-based machines. Now that the same motors that power SBK bikes will be used to power some motorcycles in MotoGP, the claim that SBK is the top production-based series is, at best, arguable.

A bone-stock production literbike is already 'super'
Anyone who thinks that even a stock BMW S1000R or Kawasaki ZX-10 isn't a super bike is an idiot. So there's no reason that SBK couldn't swap the SBK rules package for the Superstock package. This would allow them to say they had a true world championship for production bikes, as opposed to production-based bikes. From the point of view of manufacturers, as a marketing tool (and that is exactly what racing is) such rules would if anything increase the value of bragging rights. This would leave the existing Superstock class without a raison d'être, but so what? It could be converted into a European showroom stock class, with lights and mirrors and everything. That would be cool, too.

ergo...

I guarantee that within a year at the most, SBK will announce a new rules package that will force bikes racing the Superbike World Championship to be far closer to stock than they are now. SBK will not publicly admit that they've been pushed into this change because MotoGP's CRTs have moved into the production-based niche. Instead, the justification will be cost control.

"It's just getting too expensive," they'll say, "to build a competitive superbike under the old rules."

But what will the real consequences of the new rules be? Probably not what they expect.

Firstly, you need to realize that what matters is the total economy of the series. There are a whole bunch of businesses involved; teams, broadcasters, promoters, tracks, and of course sponsors, etc.

While they don't all have to turn a profit in any given year, the total amount of money flowing into those businesses as a result of participating had better be at least a little bit more than the total amount of money flowing out.

Now, the vast majority of Backmarker readers are not big-shots in the world of motorcycle racing. But a lot of you have built a race bike or two. So you can't be blamed if you think that, as a club racer, a huge chunk of your budget is going to go into actually building your bike. And it would be easy to think that building the bikes is the biggest cost associated with putting on the SBK series, too.

You'd be wrong. I had an old friend who occasionally said the most ridiculous shit, but also was occasionally wise. One of the wise things he once offered up was, "Any sufficiently large difference of degree becomes a difference of kind." Running a world championship isn't like club racing, but at a different scale; it's a whole different kind of business.

Once you start flying to Australia for races, or transporting a two-story, two-truck-wide hospitality area with a full restaurant-style kitchen, or bringing a mobile hospital to the track, or bringing 15 camera crews and full production facility to the track... in the context of all those costs, what's actually spent building the bikes is almost trivial.

Let me offer up a valid lesson from club racing. At the club level, you typically have some kind of Supersport or Superstock class for bikes that are not too heavily modified. And you have a 'Sportsman' or 'Superbike' class where almost anything goes. Now, while you could spend an almost limitless amount on your Sportsman-class bike, because there are almost no limits under the rules.

But the fact is that competing in Sportsman is cheaper than competing in Supersport. Why? Because to be competitive in Supersport at the club level, you need to buy a whole new bike every time some OEM releases a new and much-improved model. Whereas, the Sportsman racer can keep tweaking on the same bike for years and years, updating it with parts being sold by frustrated Supersport racers who are parting out last year's bike to pay for this year's model.

Once SBK adopts a much more restrictive set of rules, manufacturers are going to realize the hard way that in order to win, they have to homologate an improved base model.

The cost of developing and homologating a new road bike makes the cost of operating a race team seem like chump change.

My advice to InFront Motorsports is thus, beware of the law of unintended consequences.

Is "Occupy Wall Street" the left's Tea Party? Lessons from (recent) history...

2011-10-13T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party started out as a grassroots movement. But a playing field doesn't just have to be level for big-money pro sports like politics. It has to be astroturfed so it looks good under the TV lights. Once shadowy Republican supporters like the Koch brothers realized that the original Tea Party movement could be co-opted to re-energize the Republicans' base -- which had been demoralized by Obama's election -- they poured millions of dollars into the movement and, more importantly, through 'think tanks' like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, they started orchestrating media coverage and feeding those 'grassroots' 'real Americans' their talking points.

The irony that the Tea Partiers are by-and-large aging, middle-class, and poorly educated -- i.e., the very people the Koch bros. are committed to squeezing to death -- has thus far been lost on everyone, but the Tea Party definitely worked for the Republicans during the mid-term elections.

So, I wondered, would Warren Buffett (or some other liberal rich guy) seize a similar opportunity presented by Occupy Wall Street? God knows that the Democrats could stand to be re-energized by a popular uprising of people with no previous political knowledge (and no obvious political or economic sophistication) now, just like the Republiban Party needed it in 2009. Would Occupy Wall Street become, in effect, the Dems' Tea Party?

Any hope that Liberal money would parachute a spin doctor into the Wall Street encampment to organize them was dashed a week or so back, when the nascent movement finally released a rambling, ranting manifesto. It read as if it was written by a high-school girl writing with a ballpoint with a daisy attached by rubber band, who had eighteen people looking over her shoulder and adding their two cents' worth; it covered just about every global ill from overpaid bankers to that low-oxygen 'dead zone' in the ocean, to the exorbitant prices for Burning Man tickets.

I hope the Democrats do co-opt Occupy Wall Street, but not for the same reason other people do.

Here's a lesson from history: You take a loosely organized movement -- a rabble, and it doesn't matter if it's the Taliban, or the Tea Party -- and an organized group tries to co-opt that rabble, and harness its energies towards the organized group's ends, objectives, or interests -- the way the CIA co-opted the Mujahideen as an anti-Soviet force in Afghanistan, or the Koch bros. harnessed the Tea Party -- the same thing always happens. At first, the rabble gratefully accept support and progress is made towards the financiers' objectives.

Then, the rabble decides that rather than take direction, it will dictate policy. The Mujahideen morphed into the Taliban. The Tea Party stopped endorsing Republican candidates and started choosing their own. Virtually every Republican elected during the last cycle made that idiotic no-tax pledge in order to placate the Tea Party. Think about what that really means: every candidate basically tied one hand behind his own back before even getting to Washington; before even really learning what challenges lay ahead.

OK, this particular crazy may have dropped out of the picture but don't kid yourself, the Republiban Party is desperately trying to rein in the Tea Party before they turn the GOP presidential nomination into a circus. The Tea Party never really understood the history behind the Boston Tea Party, but as it evolves it resembles another famous tea party; the one in Alice in Wonderland.

This gets me to my point. If the Democrats try to co-opt Occupy Wall Street, the rabble will soon enough decide they don't just want advice, funding and organizational support. The rabble will want to dictate terms to Democratic candidates. And while the Tea Party may well prove to be the Republibans' undoing, the Dems' desperately need to pushed to the left after years of pandering to vocal right-wing grassroots (and astroturf) movements, despite the fact that the acolytes of those right-wing movements were never going to vote for them anyway.

I hope that Occupy Wall Street does co-opt the Democratic Party. Obama has spent the last few weeks experimenting with the tiniest step to the left; he's using stronger language in campaigning for the 'jobs' bill, and the 'millionaire' tax. But he still acts as if he's afraid of offending American households earning $250k or even a million plus per year. That's a group that (the two Warrens -- Buffet and Beatty -- excepted) isn't going to vote for him anyway!

In the last couple of weeks, I've heard the most ridiculous stuff go unchallenged. Some Republiban congressman from Colorado said, "Some people making a million dollars a year aren't rich, they're the guy operating the corner dry cleaner."

Obama should have jumped on that, and said, "What is this guy, on crack?!? The only launderers making a million bucks a year are money launderers. How out of touch are the Republicans to think that a guy operating a corner dry cleaner is pulling in seven figures?" Then he should have organized a town hall meeting of dry cleaners and asked for a show of hands of the ones making over a million. They'd roll in the aisles.

And the Democrats aren't challenging the trite assertion that there are places -- Manhattan, Cupertino, or the Hamptons, for example, where an household income of $250k or even $1M doesn't make you rich.

Obama needs to say, "Look, I understand that if you live in an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York, or if parking valets in Silicon Valley aren't impressed with your Ferrari because its just a 'California' and not a GTB, and you're making half a million a year, you may not be rich compared to your neighbors. But if you are going to argue that you're just another struggling middle-class American, you need to vote Republiban, because you're not going to like what I stand for. I stand for you guys paying something forward, so other people can have the same great opportunities that America gave to you."

Obama needs to say, "Hey, if you think the earth is only 5,000 years old, and you want every school day to start with a Christian prayer, you need to vote Republiban, because I stand for the separation of church and state."

Obama needs to say, "If you don't think global warming's a problem, and that we're causing it or at least making it a whole lot worse, then you need to vote Republiban, because I stand for science and against a new Dark Age."

Obama needs to say, "You know what, we're going to put a public health care option back on the table. If you're happy with your massive insurance premiums, if you're happy with enormous copays, if you're happy with paying $400 for an aspirin if you go to the hospital, if you're happy with being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, if you're happy with Byzantine billing practices, just vote for someone else."

The Democrats need to realize that they've been way to careful to avoid riling a vocal minority who will never vote for them anyway. If Obama is afraid to come right out and take a stand against right-wing fringe groups backed by a handful of billionaires, then the Democrats need to put forth a nominee who will take that stand.

If it takes Occupy Wall Street to force that to happen, so be it.

Bright’s Star: A rare BSA factory ‘tracker

2011-10-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Every year, my local motorcycle club, the Heart of America Motorcycle Enthusiasts - aka ‘the HoAMEboys’ holds a bike show here in Kansas City. This year, the bike that caught my eye was a Gold Star factory flat tracker. BSA only made 200 of them, in 1956, to meet AMA homologation requirements. They were sold through BSA dealers until the spring of ’59.

Ken Bright at the Airline Museum in Kansas City, this past summer.

The bike I saw belonged to Ken Bright, a 68 year-old guy from Ponca City, Oklahoma. At the show, he was chatting with another old flat track racer whose t-shirt identified him as a member of the ‘White Platers’ - a club of ex-flat trackers who had all carried the white number plate that identified them as AMA ‘Expert’ licensed racers at one time or another.

Most racing Gold Star fuel tanks had two petcocks where you’d expect them - one on either side of the tank. But since Bright’s optional aluminum tank was used for flat track only, it had both petcocks on the left side of the tank, from where they drained into a 1 1/2-inch Amal GP carb.

This is part of a two-page ad BSA ran for the racer-only, no-warranty Gold Star flat trackers in 1956.

I expected to hear that he’d had a long racing career on the Gold Star, kept his bike, and restored it after he retired. But I was wrong. He’d gotten his start in the early ‘60s, riding a Bantam in local scrambles. When he wore out the Bantam, he upgraded to a 250cc BSA, racing the occasional half-mile in the Novice class, which was restricted to 250cc.

It was no match for the two-strokes that were coming onto the flat track scene at that time, and Ken basically gave up and moved to Oklahoma City to go to college. That summer (it was 1966) he got a call from a Yamaha dealer in Topeka, Kansas, named Stan Newton. He offered Ken a ride on a TD1B road racer that he’d converted into a flat tracker by replacing the rear shocks with struts and installing a wide handlebar.

“The road racer would go about 130 miles an hour,” Ken told me, “so obviously the flat tracker was fast, but it didn’t want to turn.”

This photo was taken at the Indiana State Half-Mile Championship in 1967. Bright, at left, won the Amateur class. Although he made his bones riding Yamaha 'strokers, he's seen here on his sponsor's Gold Star, which at this point was 10 years old and well past its sell-by date. The guy in the glasses won the Expert class that year -- he's AMA Hall of Famer Babe DeMay, who went on to have a noted career as a tuner, too. DeMay's Ken Maely shirt (what would that bring on Ebay, these days?) the corn-fed Midwestern girl in the shades; the hat and attitude of the unidentified Amateur class winner; the Gold Star, Harley-Davidson KR, and Yamaha 'stroker. This IS flat-tracking in the 'sixties. I love it.

Ken spent that summer on what was called the ‘Kansas fair circuit.’ Actually they raced from South Dakota to Oklahoma, traversing an area at least four times the size of Great Britain, with about one-sixth the population.

After finishing third on the ill-handling Yamaha at Sturgis, Ken pulled into the pits feeling pretty good, until Newton told him that he could ride faster than that himself. “Stan told me that Yamaha had sent five engines from Japan to Sturgis that year, and that he really wanted to beat the factory bikes,” Ken recalled. “ The next day I won the race.” That cemented their relationship.

Ken earned enough Novice points on the Yamaha to enter the Amateur class at national races, where he needed a 500 (or a 750cc Harley) to be competitive.

“I’d never even ridden a 500,” he told me. “But I had a friend named Ted Davis, who used to travel with Dick Mann. We used to pit next to those two, and we were in awe of Bugsy; he made everything look so easy.” The fact that Dick Mann was a regular on the Kansas fair circuit gives you an idea of just how competitive regional flat tracking was in the Midwest.

Ted hooked Ken up with Cappy Crockett, a BSA dealer from Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. “Cappy was known for one thing,” Ken recalled. “He always had the ugliest bikes in the pit.”

“The Gold Star was narrow, and it handled beautifully,” Ken told me. “It had a lot of torque, and when you shut the throttle, it really slowed down - back then, we didn’t have any brakes at all. Then, when you got back on the gas, you could steer it with the rear wheel.”

In one of the first races he ran on Cappy’s bike, he crashed. “It must have sucked in some dirt,” Ken recalled, “because the next time we ran it, it got sicker and sicker. But we couldn’t get parts to fix it.”

There were several AMA National races on the Kansas circuit, and Ken was desperate to win an Amateur National. The Amateur races were occasionally even faster than Expert races, so that wasn’t easy. After Cappy’s Gold Star had crapped out. Ken borrowed one of Dick Mann’s bikes, but it was worn out, too.

His best Amateur finish - a fourth at Sedalia - came on a borrowed Triumph 500 twin. “It was a 14-lap race, and I led 11 laps, until I pushed the front and got off the line. Three guys got underneath me, and I couldn’t get back past them,” he said a little wistfully. “I sure wish I’d been on my Gold Star.”

Bright, on a borrowed Triumph, on the groove, and on the gas in Oklahoma City in '67. He finished fourth in the Amateur class, and collected $18.10 for his day's work. Although he picked up enough points to move to the Expert class, the writing was on the wall -- or in Bright's case, the blackboard. He moved back to Ponca City and became a middle-school math teacher.

Even in the Expert class, it was tough making a living. Fred Nix earned the equivalent (in today's money) of less than $900 for winning that GNC round. Which, just look at the guys he beat, was no small task in those days... For the record, although it's still awfully hard to make a living as an Expert flat tracker, winning a National now pays in the $6,000 range.

Finishes like that were enough to earn him an Expert’s white plate. But the next year, he couldn’t get a ride. He borrowed a couple more bikes, and did well, but when no sponsors came through, he gave up on the fair circuit, went back to Ponca City, and taught math in middle school. For 30 years.

He carried a torch for that Gold Star the whole time, and a few years ago he set out to find one to restore. I asked him if the bike I’d seen was Cappy’s old bike and he laughed and told me that, no, he’d wanted a nice one. Not a crappy one.

Bright finally found a Gold Star worthy of a detailed restoration...

Not that you can be too picky; they’re thin on the ground. Even bare frames can go for as much as $10,000. After a few years of looking, he found a complete bike that he took delivery of in a bunch of boxes and buckets. It was literally a basket case, but it was all there and now, Ken owns the nicest, most original Gold Star factory flat tracker that I’ve laid eyes on. He still lives on the outskirts of Ponca City, and about once a month he starts it up, runs it a mile or so down the road, turns around and races back to the barnyard, dreaming of what might’ve been.

Many thanks to Ken Bright, who supplied all the images for this post (except the top photo, which I took.)

'H' could stand for 'has-been'. Or hero...

2011-10-11T08:20:00.000-07:00

As I rode in to work on Sunday, I mulled over John Hopkins' bad luck in finishing second, by .006 seconds, in the British Superbike Championship. Hopkins had an amazing season in the UK, riding unfamiliar tracks in a new team. He was in the hunt all year and but for -- take your pick -- his MotoGP hand injury or a machine problem in the second leg of the final BSB triple-header, he would have won the championship in his 'rookie' season over there.

Hopkins, though only 28, has already seemed washed up as a result of injuries at least once. Now, he's a battered vet, but he nearly won the British Superbike Championship on his first go.

Hopkins is not old; he's still in his twenties. But a year or two ago, he seemed done in by Schwantz-like repeated injuries. When he dropped from MotoGP to an American Superbike Championship series satellite team, many in the motorcycle racing world classified him as a has-been. His career trajectory was definitely down. His old mentor, John Ulrich, found a place for him at M4 Suzuki but even Ulrich felt that Hopkins had misrepresented his race fitness.

As I trundled along my commute, my thoughts ranged to two other 'old' riders who've also had good seasons. Josh Hayes, who's pushing 40, won his second AMA Pro Superbike title in a thrilling final too. He finally came to the fore after toiling in a series where if you weren't on a Yoshimura Suzuki, you had no real chance of winning. (And, even if you were, you had to beat Ben Spies and/or Mat Mladin.) He's another guy that, just three or four years ago, you would have said was destined to 'best of the rest' status -- which is not too attractive to sponsors and team owners in a sport that places a pedophile's priorities on youth.

All things come to those who wait. In Hayes' case, he had to wait for AMA Pro to level the Superbike playing field in the U.S. His 2011 title defense was as hard-fought as his 2010 series, despite the absence of nemesis Mat Mladin. Now, he's slated for "a few laps" on a Yamaha MotoGP bike at the end-of-season test. I suppose that if he goes well, he might be in line for a wild-card ride (or three) in the U.S. next year, but there's no chance he'll actually move to MotoGP -- he's far to old. Not in reality, just in the minds of the motorcycle racing powers-that-be.

Then there's Nicky Hayden, 30. Although he may 'only' be languishing in seventh place in the MotoGP standings, 2011's been a season of redemption for him, too. Sure he won the AMA Superbike title in 2002 in dominant fashion, and won the 2006 MotoGP Championship, but he's also struggled for long periods. In those years when he was the 'B' team-mate at both Honda and Ducati, he continued to shoulder the 'A' testing load.

It could just be me, but Nicky Hayden seems a little less haunted this year. Is it that now the world's seen that even Valentino Rossi can't ride the Ducati MotoGP bike? And that Nicky's occasionally out-qualifying Rossi?

It must have been frustrating when Stoner could make the Ducati GP10 work (at least some of the time) and Nicky couldn't. Then, Ducati teamed him with Valentino Rossi for 2011. I guess we all knew who the teacher's pet would be in that class.

But it turns out that even the greatest living motorcycle racer couldn't make the GP11 work. Despite the fact that Ducati is (obviously) putting most of its efforts into Rossi's side of the garage -- despite the fact that Rossi gets all the best new stuff first -- Hayden's outridden Rossi several times. So no matter how long it's been since his last win, Nicky's had a few moral victories this year.

Where I'm going with this is that after a decade of increasing pressure to start kids road racing at younger and younger ages, there's still rewards to be reaped from experience and perseverance. I know that plenty of young riders would have looked at all three of these guys at the beginning of the 2011 season and thought, "I should have that ride."(OK, kids would look at two of the three and think that; most would admit that Yamaha would have been crazy to let Hayes walk away with his #1 plate.)

That's especially true of Hopkins in BSB. Most young racers (whose attention spans are scarcely longer than a fruit fly's) had forgotten his stalwart years in MotoGP (where he put in a yeoman's effort racing for teams in which winning was really not even possible.) Many European riders resent Hayden's Ducati deal, which they see as a reflection of the importance of the U.S. market to Ducati's sales.

So, many 'young guns' probably think they deserve those guys' rides. But the truth is, no kid could have done anywhere near as well as these 'old guns' in their respective teams/situations. So what's with the obsession with pushing kids as young as 12 into road racing?

Hopper, Hayes, and Hayden didn't put in creditable seasons this year because they started racing as little kids. They racked up good results this year because of the years of toil they put in after they stopped being young guns.

I don't really know what Hayes' early childhood riding experience was; I do admit that both Hopper and Hayden were racing at a pretty high level from a pretty young age and that both of them were backed to the hilt as kids by supportive families. Nicky started out as a dirt tracker. (If he'd stayed racing flat track, he would have won multiple Grand National Championships by now, but he'd probably still need an off-season job, so I don't begrudge his switch to asphalt.)

But when I talked to him by phone earlier this season, he told me that he never rides flat track -- even mini-bikes -- in the off-season any more, because it screws him up for his MotoGP bike. So Nicky's early riding experience is definitely not the experience he put to use to out-ride Valentino Rossi several times this year.

My point in all this is, your kid doesn't have to be a young gun to succeed. You don't have to rush your kid into road racing. This year, even the guys who once were young guns succeeded because of the experience they amassed over years of ups and downs on the way to becoming old guns.

To teams and sponsors I say: Sure, keep an eye on those young guns. But bear in mind that Suzuki, Yamaha, and Ducati would be way behind where they are now if they'd hung up their old guns a season or two ago.

Is the NCR M4 'One-Shot' the perfect motorcycle for these times?

2011-10-10T08:05:00.000-07:00

Unless you were at Brands Hatch all weekend, watching a riveting British Superbike final, you are probably aware that NCR -- a small, Italian, specialty sport-bike manufacturer -- unveiled the NCR M4 and it's even-higher-spec brother the 'One-Shot' during the Barber AHRMA weekend. These are motorcycles powered by tuned versions of a pretty low-tech air-cooled Ducati motor (think Monster 1100) but which embody Lotus founder Colin Chapman's famous dictum that, "First you design the [car], then you add lightness."

Recession? What recession? There's never been a better time to sell a $70,000 toy.

NCR is owned by Poggipolini -- a company that specializes in supplying magnesium, titanium, and carbon components to the motorsports industry -- so they've added plenty of lightness to both the 'base' model M4 (claimed weight: 286 pounds) and even more lightness to the One-Shot (claimed weight: 278 pounds.) One shot, indeed. That could just about describe my physical reaction to seeing the photos and reading the specs. Luckily, I was home alone in front of my computer.

Talk about adding lightness! These things will also add some lightness to your wallet, since the base model is $50k and the One-Shot is $70k. So far, NCR has released only American pricing, which gives you some idea of where they expect to do the bulk of their sales.

You might think that with the U.S. mired in a deep recession -- one that hit the American motorcycle industry especially hard -- NCR is pretty crazy to think that we'll be snapping up $70k motorcycles which, as beautiful as they are, will certainly not help the average mid-life-crisis track day geek or trust-fund baby lap any faster than he would on an eight year-old GSX-R750.

On closer examination though, the One-Shot is actually the perfect motorcycle for these times.

You see, it's true that the large majority of American families have seen a steady erosion of their wealth and purchasing power over the last decade or more. But middle-class families' wealth has not disappeared, it's merely been transferred to the richest 1% of the U.S. population and especially to the richest point one percent.

After the release of (I'll pick an arbitrary point in history) the 1986 GSX-R750, sport bike fans found themselves in an amazing situation. Any average Joe with an average job could afford to buy a motorcycle with a performance envelope that, if you wanted to find it in a car, you would've had to be a millionaire.

Although anyone who was really looking could see that Americans were on an unsustainable spending spree buoyed by an obvious bubble in the housing market (and irrational optimism in the stock market) that halcyon period lasted more than 20 years.

Now, it's over. If the average Joe has a job today, he's hunkered down and not wasting money on new motorcycles.

But things have never been better for the very richest Americans. When that first Gixxer was introduced, the average CEO made about 75 times the salary of the average worker in his company. Now, he pulls in about five hundred times the average worker's wage.

So the 99.9% of motorcycle buyers who never could have afforded the One-Shot, still can't. The wealthiest 0.1% of Americans -- the only ones who were ever going to buy it -- have more money than ever. And with the Republiban, oops, make that 'Republican' Party in control of the legislature, there's no prospect of even people earning a million-plus per year being asked to pay forward the opportunities that America provided to them.

Recession? What recession? NCR has perfect grasp of the American motorcycle buying public's ability to afford the One-Shot. The only people who ever could have afforded it can afford it more than ever.

Those Wall Street protesters have no coherent argument. Or do they?

2011-10-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days, the protesters who ‘occupied’ Wall Street have triggered spontaneous ‘occupations’ in other cities across the country. The one that I saw in St. Louis last weekend looked a bit like a political rally for the Burning Man party. The fact that these protests have gathered a strangely dressed rabble has helped the right to discount them. Usually, right-wing media scoffers dismiss such protests by rhetorically asking, “Sure you’re against Wall Street, but you have no idea what Wall Street actually does, and you certainly aren’t presenting any kind of viable alternatives or policies.”

That, as Monty Python might’ve noted, isn’t an argument either.

Just because those protesters can’t present a viable alternative path into America’s future, doesn’t mean the path we’re on isn’t worth protesting.

The protesters’ inchoate frustration reflects the reality of American life for at least 80% of the U.S. population. They’re frustrated that they can’t afford medical insurance or that if they have it they can’t get the coverage they need or understand rules and billing procedures. They’re frustrated that they were scammed during the housing bubble; and that Wall Street salaries are back to exponential-increases-as-usual while real incomes are falling for the large majority of American families. They’re frustrated by relentless cuts to government programs that used to benefit most Americans, while funding for multiple wars continues unabated; one of them a war that was entered into under false pretenses, the other of which will leave Afghanistan every bit as unstable and potentially dangerous as it was back in the days when it was an Al Qaeda stronghold.

So are those protesters naive? Are they just a bunch of dreamers? They are and they were; the dream they had was The American Dream. And now they’ve woken up.

Think back to the days when The American Dream was a reality for most American families - the 1950s and ‘60s.

Real wealth and purchasing power were increasing for most American families
American public education worked
Ordinary jobs allowed Americans to pay for homes and cars, and save for their futures
American civil rights were codified
Medicare and Social Security were signed into law
Although less than half of the American workforce was unionized, 2/3‘s of the population thought trade unions were good for America
U.S. stature in the world was increasing.

Throughout that period, the average American paid about twice as much income tax as he does now; peak tax rates for the rich exceeded 70%. In fairness, total government revenues represented the same share of GDP as the do now. IE, the total effective tax load was the same.

So what’s the difference? Well, the proportion of GDP spent on health care has doubled. Finance and Insurance account for a share of GDP twice as large as the did in those halcyon days. And the defense budget represents a larger share of GDP than it did even at the height of the nuclear buildup or Viet Nam. (The total defense budget has increased 10% per year every year for the last decade.)

Look: The economy is flat at best. If you take the fast-growing Medico-Insurance Complex out of the economy; if you take the fast-growing finance sector out; if you take out defense spending -- the rest of the economy is in fucking free fall, and we’re all falling with it.

So although those protesters can’t put it into words, the source of their frustration is in instinctive grasp of these simple facts:

We’re now spending vastly more on health care than any other nation -- in absolute and percentage terms -- and getting sicker and sicker. The only people this benefits are rich CEOs of hospitals and insurance companies, who can afford the Mayo Clinic.

The financial sector is twice the size it was back when America actually worked, and for all that growth we’ve had the internet bubble of 2000, the housing bubble, and insane stock market volatility. Whose benefitted? Merchant bankers who we bailed out, then stood by and watched as they got seven-figure bonuses.

And we’re no safer than before, American prestige is no better internationally -- probably worse. And all the actual, physical risk of projecting American power is taken by people who have, overwhelmingly, enlisted because they have no other viable work or educational opportunities.

Ranked by wealth, the bottom 80% of the American population is seeing an inexorable drop in their purchasing power, health, and security. People in the 80th-90th percentile are seeing drops, too, although they may be comfortable enough to remain in denial for a few more years. People in the 90th-99th percentile are seeing the sort of steady improvement in quality of life that all Americans saw during the ‘American Dream’ period. The top 1% of the population are doing extremely well and the top 1/10th of 1% -- the CEOs of those health care and finance companies, and defense contractors, are seeing an exponential growth in their wealth.

No wonder the protesters are frustrated and flabbergasted. You don’t need to have a viable alternative strategy to know that the one we’re pursuing isn’t working.

Some day in the future, economists, historians and even politicians are going to wake up to this truth: The health care sector of the economy is not actually inherently productive; it exists to keep workers (and their families) healthy and productive. The finance sector is not inherently productive; it exists to facilitate loans from people with capital to people with ideas and energy. The defense sector is not productive; it exists to protect Americans who are productive. If those sectors account for most economic activity, as the do now, the entire economy is built without a foundation.

Stressed members. Or, maybe this is why Ducati's knickers are in a knot...

2011-10-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

I guess the relative failure of Ducati's 'frameless' MotoGP bike, combined with the imminent release of a flagship road bike with a conceptually similar chassis design, has caused people to consider the implications of the motorcycle engine as a frame component.

A good post on the Superbikeplanet.com blog quotes one of Rossi's mechanics saying that if you take the engine out of most MotoGP bikes, you can still push it around the paddock, while if you take the engine out of a contemporary Ducati MotoGP bike, you're left with a fork, swing arm, and seat lying separate on the ground.

IE, the Ducati motor is a fully stressed frame member.

That's not to say that in all other contemporary racing designs (and all modern street bikes) the motor isn't part of the frame; it is. It's just that it's semi-stressed. IE, it contributes to the stiffness of the overall frame but does not completely replace any frame member.

This is an idea with a long history in motorcycling, stretching from the Vincent Black Shadow to the Britten among other innovative designs (as I've noted in earlier posts.) But it occurs to me that given the relatively conventional suspension design of the Ducati MotoGP bikes - they have the same telescopic front fork as other entries, and a similar rear swingarm - it may be that the fully stressed engine design has inherent problems that a semi stressed design would not have.

I note the conventional suspension components because one big 'issue' with modern sport bike design is that at maximum lean the conventional fork and swing arm arrangement essentially stops working as a way of keeping the tire in contact with the track over bumps. Obviously, as lean angles get well over 50 degrees, the suspension travel is sideways, not up-and-down.

The idea of ultra-stiff-and-light carbon chassis components and the idea of fully-stressed engine-transmission packages are both well proven in race car design. But because race cars ride essentially level on the track, ultimate stiffness is the goal. All the bump compliance in the suspension system comes from the suspension components. Motorcycles, because they lean into corners, require a completely different approach.

Motorcycle chassis designers have, thus far, sought bump compliance by tuning the stiffness of the total package, so that the total package flexes to maintain traction.

Even in a more conventional twin-spar frame design, making minor tweaks to flexibility is a challenge. But the beauty of a semi-stressed design is that while you have two expensive, complex-to-engineer components -- the frame and the motor -- contributing stiffness to the backbone of the chassis, you can tweak chassis stiffness without changing either of them. Rather, you can adjust stiffness by changing the way those two components are attached to each other.

I've talked to engineers developing modern sport bikes, who've told me they made just such tweaks by doing things as subtle as changing the bolts used to attach the motor to the frame.

Some people have speculated that the Ducati MotoGP project is having problems because of the material (carbon fiber) used to make the subframe/airbox that attaches the steering head to the motor. That's an area of the chassis that would typically be made of aluminum alloy in other bikes. But Nicky Hayden mentioned that he didn't think it was the material, per se, that was the issue. He said that he'd tested swingarms made of both aluminum and carbon fiber and found that both types could be made stiffer or more flexible.

The shape and structure of a typical swingarm conspire to make it a little easier to have different stiffness in the plane of suspension travel than at right angles to the suspension travel. IE, it's a little easier to have some lateral flex at maximum lean angle in the swing arm than it is in the front fork.

The shape of front fork components -- the tubes are pretty much radially symmetrical -- makes that differential stiffness much harder to achieve at the front. The front fork has to be stiff enough fore-and-aft to prevent the wheel rubbing on the radiator under braking (and to allow fork travel under heavy braking, too.) That means it's also stiff laterally, and max-lean bump compliance at the front end of the bike comes from tuned flexibility in the frame. Note again, as Rossi's mechanic pointed out on the Soup blog, the motor is the frame. The motor has to be as stiff as possible, to handle the enormous forces generated by the pistons changing direction hundreds of times per second. There's no taking a bit of stiffness out of that structure!

And indeed, it's been at the front, not the back, that the Ducati's lacked feeling and eaten tires. It's perhaps slightly less of a problem for Hayden than Rossi, and was less of a problem for Stoner last year, because both of those wild colonial boys are relatively more comfortable riding the rear tire than Rossi is.

Burgess, before the season, was certain he (and Rossi) would be able to sort the Ducati's handling problems out in the first few races, but handling and tire wear issues have bedeviled them all season. They seem to make a bit of progress at some races (like the recent one at Motegi) but I think those are the races where new paving reduces the problem of bump compliance at maximum lean. And since the series uses control tires, there's no chance to look for a little compliance in the one other spot they could seek it out -- in the tire carcass.

The first partially aluminum solution that Ducati delivered to Rossi was clearly (based on the handful of pics I saw) just an aluminum component added to the basic carbon fiber front subframe/airbox. I presume they reduced stiffness in the steering head area and then put some back in by bolting on that alloy component. That would allow them to seek some torsional flex up there by changing the alloy bit, or even the way it was attached to the air box, without re-engineering they air box itself.

I guess the next step is a full twin-spar solution we'll see at some future race. My guess is that if they choose to go that route, they'll find that the easiest way to adjust the stiffness of the overall package is not by making new frames (or new engine castings, which are a huge problem under current 'six-motor' rules anyway) but by tuning the connection between the two.

Donorcycles and the Medico-Insurance Complex

2011-09-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

Since everything your mother told you about motorcycles is true, it follows that motorcyclists should have a particular interest in the ongoing debate about the state of American health care and insurance (aka Obamacare, Romneycare, creeping socialism, Nazism...)

Opponents to a public option for Americans' health insurance love to begin their arguments with, "We've got the world's best health care system..."

And in truth, if you're rich and or very well covered by your work plan, you may well have access to the best, or at least world-class health care. But it comes at an enormous price, which you'll be well aware of if you pay for the premiums on your own. And it's not a high-price/high-quality/high-value system. Americans spend far, far more in both absolute and per-capita terms for health care than do the citizens of any other nation. And yet, Americans' health and life expectancy are no better than Lithuanians'.

It turns out that if you are administered a $40 aspirin in an American hospital, it's not any more effective than the four cent one given to a Lithuanian.

This cost affects the entire economy. If you've got a job which provides health coverage, the huge premiums you share with your employer amount to a payroll tax by another name. Over the last 30 years, the percentage of the U.S. GDP devoted to health care has doubled, to nearly 20%. While that growth in the Medico-Insurance Complex has enriched a few people, it's not really a productive use of resources (nor is it really making the people being treated more productive; for starters, about a quarter of all those expenditures are made in the final year of patients' lives.)

You want to talk about a jobs program in an election year in which the economy's in the toilet? The single biggest impediment to job creation is the cost of adding employees to group health plans.

One solution would be to just reduce the amount of care given. That's politically unpalatable. That leaves reducing costs.

You may be thinking, Surely the insurance companies are trying to reduce costs; after all, they're the ones paying the bills.

Wrong-o. In fact, the insurance companies will never, ever, bring America's spiraling health care costs to heel. Why? Because there's simply no incentive at all to do so. There's not even a feedback mechanism in place to encourage them to try.

As a private, uninsured individual, you've got a huge incentive to control costs, because any trip to the hospital is a personal financial catastrophe. (Half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical expenses.) But insurance companies don't hate big payouts. They only hate big unanticipated payouts. So if the levees break in New Orleans and a hurricane does far more damage than the insurance companies expect, that's a problem for them.

Your crash in turn four, that causes you to need $60,000 dollars in orthopedic surgery, probably comes a surprise to you. After all, if you'd known you were going to crash that day, you wouldn't have ridden. And while the health care problems of any one insured person are hard to predict, the health care problems that will occur over a huge population are extremely predictable, and insurance companies have hordes of actuaries to carefully calculate such probabilities.

Once the probabilities are known, insurance companies decide how much they'll pay for related medical services, and set premiums at a level that guarantee profitability. Obviously, health care providers have every incentive to increase costs, and perversely the insurance companies actually benefit from high costs, too.

Insurance companies benefit from high costs? First of all, if you had access to much more affordable health care -- say, you were racing your motorcycle in India, which is where your U.S. emergency-room doctor was trained anyway -- that $60,000 treatment might cost $6,000. In that setting, you might well choose to self-insure. The fact that in the U.S. virtually any treatment is bankruptcy inducing is, in fact, the strongest argument in favor of having insurance. And, since eventually even insurance companies would run afoul of the few remaining regulators if they operated at higher and higher margins, it's only by increasing the gross costs of health care delivery that they can be sure of increasing their net.

So you see, decreasing the cost of health care in the U.S. would actually hurt insurance companies financially. By contrast, denying coverage; that goes straight to the bottom line.

Husqvara makes its first road bike? Not really...

2011-09-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

There's been lots of buzz about the forthcoming Husqvarna Nuda road bike, and how this is a first for the Swedish marque (now made in Italy and owned by Germany, but whatever...)

Not really a first. In fact as a quick thumb through good old Tragatsch shows, for the first half of Husky's life, from 1903 into the 1950s, it made almost nothing but road bikes. And some fine ones. As road racers, the Huskies finest days came in the 1934 TT, when Ernie Nott finished on the podium in the Junior and Stan Woods(!) set fastest lap on a 500 in the Senior but failed to finish when he ran out of gas.

Apparently none of the '34 TT bikes survived. This is a sweet replica, which is claimed to be faithful in every detail. It's no Nuda, but it's definitely a naked...

Husky's first real off-road bikes were factory specials developed for the 1929 ISDT. The company focused on off road machines beginning in the '50s, though there were sporadic forays into road racing as late as the 1960s. One interesting story is that in the late '60s when the Husky 250 motocross bikes were dominant, a Swedish road racer convinced Husqvarna to build him a 500cc twin for road racing. Although that bike never fulfilled its promise, the flamboyant American motocross promoter Edison Dye convinced Husky to build a bike with that motor which he entered in the Baja 1000. Malcolm Smith, J.N. Roberts, and two Scandinavian riders teamed up to win the race on it!

So the Nuda, whatever it is, isn't a completely new idea for Husky. Once again I'm reminded of that French quote about, The only things that are new are those that have been forgotten. (And by the way, I was gratified to read that I wasn't the only person who saw a Vincent frame as providing antecedents to Ducati's 'frameless' MotoGP flop. No less an authority than Kevin Cameron noticed the same thing...

So this is how it ends...

2011-09-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

Too little, too late, Obama's staked some ground for 2012. Let's have an election decided by the question, "Should people making over a million dollars a year pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as people struggling paycheck-to-paycheck?"

The argument against the so-called 'Buffett Plan' will be that any increase in taxes paid by these multi-millionaires will reduce their investment and thus reduce their job creation. (Note they are multi-millionaires because the new rule would apply to people making over a million bucks a year, not people with a million bucks. That would be even better, but Obama won't dare go there, for reasons I'll get into in a paragraph or two.

Leave aside the fact that 75% of the U.S. economy is based on retail spending, and that a.) people making $1M+/year are already spending all they want, and b.) their marginal spending comes from buying Ferraris, not Fords, and Veuve Clicquot, not Two-Buck Chuck. So giving them more disposable income actually results in an economic boost for Italy and France, not us. And what? Are they going to invest it in the stock market?!? The market rewards companies that move jobs to Viet Nam, not companies that create jobs here. Then those investors blow their lightly taxed capital gains on Ferraris and Veuve Clicquot.

But none of that matters, because any argument about the net economic effect of such a tax is just a straw man.

The real issue here is that Americans have always been remarkably optimistic about their own economic futures. This has been true in fat times and lean; during the years leading into the baby boom, when the American Dream seemed like manifest destiny -- and things really were just getting better and better for most people -- most people thought they'd get even more better (if you can follow that tortured sentence.) And in the depths of the Depression, when things were getting worse and worse for most people, most people didn't think things were going to get quite as bad as they did. Yep, Americans have always been economic optimists -- or they've at least been insufficiently pessimistic in even the worst of times.

That means that a ridiculous percentage of the population entertains the fact that they themselves might someday be rich, and they vote accordingly. Remember Joe the Plumber? The moron who didn't want to raise taxes on people earning $250,000 or more a year because he thought that some day he might buy the plumbing company he worked for, and then he'd be saddled with those extra taxes? Obviously, he was just a dupe, part of a grand media setup by a cabal that stretched from Karl Rove to the Koch brothers, but the story angle that didn't get any traction was that people who were plumbing contractors -- people doing the job that Joe the Plumber aspired to -- were, like, He's going to make 250 grand doing this? He's on crack. The vast majority of plumbing contractors, including the guy who really did own the company Joe the Plumber dreamed of buying, told journalists that 250 grand was totally out of the question.

Rove's (and his ilk -- it's basically a cabal that's loosely organized but which is operating in shared self-interest -- I'll call them the Republicabal...) Where was I? Oh yeah, Rove's plan, all along, was to complete a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 1%. (People in the 90th-99th percentile for wealth and income weren't really scheduled to benefit from the Republicabal's plan, but 'trickle-down' economics does work in the sense that it trickles from the top 1% down to about the top 10%. So the wealthiest 10% of voters could be expected to support the Republicabal just by voting in their own interest.)

But obviously, 10% of the population can't swing U.S. elections on their own. To pull that off, the Republicabal had to first eviscerate America's public schools, to dumb the population down as much as possible. Then, they had to fragment chunks of the electorate who were committed single-issue voters -- gun rights activists, anti-abortion fundamentalists, people who hate crash helmets -- and pander to them. That gave them a pretty sizable minority to work with as a political base.

But it still wasn't enough to swing elections in many areas. Once they'd dumbed down the population, they could steep the Tea Party zealots in the idea that, despite the fact that the average American is paying a smaller percentage of his income in tax than at any time since WWII, it was taxes that were keeping the population down. (Not, for example, the way the wealthiest handful of industrialists had moved every middle-class American job offshore.)

They also worked hard to disenfranchise the poor. But even adding up all the rich people, plus all the people who aren't getting poorer, plus all the gun nuts and all the religious fundamentalists, and all the Tea Party kooks and half-wits, and taking many of the frustrated poor off the ledger could not quite swing most elections. So how did they succeed in getting more than half the population to vote their way?

The average family in the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population is now over 50 times as wealthy as the average family in the bottom 99%. That's a concentration of wealth that exceeds countries in Central America - or, say, Libya - where an army of secret police is (was) required to prevent a popular uprising. The Koch brothers are no more capable of withstanding a popular uprising than Kaddafi was, so what gives?

How they succeeded, and what gives, is this: the swing vote in every recent election was made of Americans who, in good times and bad, remain irrationally optimistic. (OK, in times as bad as these, let's call them insufficiently pessimistic.) Yes, there are millions and millions of American voters who, in the face of all the evidence and against all of their direct personal experience find themselves thinking, But what if I get rich? Then, I'll want to keep all my money, just like these guys. It's the political equivalent of 'The Secret'.

The old idea of The American Dream is politically sacrosanct. There have been long stretches in American history, too, when it really seemed to apply. If you worked hard, and lived right, it was almost a certainty that your kids would do a little bit better, even, than you did. Now, that is a dream. But it's unlikely any Democratic candidate will dare to tell the American electorate the truth.

If they did, here's what it would sound like:

If you're in the bottom 90% of the population in terms of wealth, you have seen and will continue to see a drop in your purchasing power and wealth for the foreseeable future -- IE, for the rest of your life. If you're in the 90th-99th percentile on the wealth curve, you can expect to break even. If you're in the top 1%, you're going to get richer. If you're in the top 0.1%, you're going to get exponentially richer. Congratulations! You're one of the American Kaddafis (for now.)

If this sounds like a rabble-rousing rant, it isn't. The Republicabal's plan worked. They won. It's unlikely, at this point, that the U.S. could reverse the course they set, even with all the political will in the world. Rebuilding the educational system alone would bankrupt us. We'll have our hands full taking care of the tens of thousands of seriously injured war veterans who gave limbs, eyes, and faces to enrich Haliburton and stroke the ego of America's second-stupidest President (and who sacrificed themselves in a second, ill-considered and unstrategic war against opponents -- like the Taliban and Al Qaeda -- that at least presented us with targets worth punishing -- even though we essentially created or at least empowered the Taliban in previously ill-considered support of the Taliban's fight against the Russians. Help drive the Russians out of Afghastlystan? That was the worst idea ever. If the Russians had still been bogged down there at the turn of the millennium, 9/11 would have been perpetrated against Moscow, not New York. We should have let them punch each other out for decades. But that is rant, and one for another time...)

The future, for the vast majority of us, has nothing to do with improving our situation. That isn't going to happen. It has everything to do with finding ways to be satisfied with less. That will do us all some good.

Motorcycle journalism gets 'Closer to the Edge' with TT3D release

2011-09-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

Maybe the '3D' stands for Desperate, Destitute, and Depressed...

Over the last couple of years, I've chronicled what amounts to the beginning of the end of professional motorcycle journalism. All I can tell you is, I'm lucky to have a job at a grocery store, [NAME OF EMPLOYER REDACTED], these days; better to be a member of the working poor than unemployed.

I was reminded of that last week when I got an email out of the blue from some guy packaging the Universal/Sony DVD release of TT3D. The DVD, it seems, will be released with a 16-page magazine-format insert.

The offer I got, as a professional motorcycle journalist who has both raced in and written extensively about the TT was this: I'd be responsible for 13 pages. (Everything but the covers and the inside front cover.) Universal/Sony wanted me to provide editorial direction and write the 13 pages, covering 4-5 'features' and including a couple of sidebars on each spread.

It sounded like a great gig, and I immediately started thumbnailing it. My anchor feature would have paired "What it will take to win" an in-depth interview with Guy Martin, the most popular TT rider who's not yet won one, with "What it takes to win" from John McGuinness.

They wanted in-depth, insightful content that would add a deeper layer of understanding for viewers coming to the video with little understanding of the TT. (I have not yet seen the film myself, but the online trailer looks brilliant.) I was pumped.

Then, came the shocker: The budget was 500 quid. Yes, Universal/Sony wanted to pay about $75 per page. REALLY?!? How many will they print? Surely it would be in the tens of thousands; the margin on sales of DVDs is vastly better than the margin in the magazine business, but even in their death throes, magazines are paying several times that rate. And that's for writing only; they also pay full time staffers to provide editorial direction. And the TT3D magazine will be on the market for years.

It occurred to me that maybe they'd left a zero off, or at least neglected to put the '1' in front of the '500.' I countered with 1,500 quid, or a page from the magazine in which I could run an ad for Riding Man, Kindle edition. I was told that 500 was the budget.

That wouldn't pay anywhere near as much on a per-hour basis as [NAME OF EMPLOYER REDACTED]. It's an amount that guarantees one of two things: either someone will just regurgitate a bunch of crap as content -- no new interviews, no actual thinking or insight, and no time spent crafting the writing either. Or, someone will actually do that work, but get paid far less than a living wage. The offer, coming from Universal/Sony, was a real insult to professional journalism. They're obviously not willing to invest even one percent of their profits back into the TT3D package, in order to make it a product that a wider audience will appreciate more, and one which will add a deeper level of insight into the TT for even devoted fans.

I highly doubt that I'll be sent a review copy of TT3D but if anyone reading this ever buys it, shoot me an email and tell me who wrote the insert, eh? And write that bastard a note castigating him for hastening the demise of professional motorcycle journalism.

Reno Air Races strike chord familiar to TT fans...

2011-09-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

When a pilot slammed into the ground at the Reno Air Races last week, killing eight fans and injuring many more, there was an understandable question in the media about whether the sport justified the risks.

The pilots at the races willingly take risks about which they are well informed. That reminds me of the Isle of Man TT races. The fans, however, probably didn't go to the races that day with a tiny voice in their heads saying, "This may be the last time I ever pack a thermos and sandwiches. This may be the last time I kiss my wife good-bye."

For the pilots, I know, the risks informs their sport. They don't race in order to take risks (which is a common misperception amongst casual onlookers.) But risk gives the choice to participate its significance. This is a complex subject, one worthy of an entire book, not a blog post.

It remains to be seen what the long-term implications of last week's crash are for the Reno event. Unlike the TT, which is a huge inconvenience for the sizable minority of Isle of Man residents who don't love motorcycles, there's not an established constituency of people in Reno politicking to have the races banned anyway. But the news coverage of the Reno disaster reminds me that, after David Jeffries' high-profile fatality at the 2003 TT, I realized that the TT races are one high-profile disaster away from being discontinued.

In the wake of DJ's death, the Auto-Cycle Union distanced itself from the TT races, and the Isle of Man government effectively took over the event. In the last decade or so, they've tried to make it both safer for riders and fans, and less inconvenient for those residents who count among its detractors. So there's more air fence (although there's not enough air fence on earth to make the course truly safe) morning practice has been eliminated, and in general total rider/mileage is being throttled back.

The Isle of Man government and the TT committee know that they can sweep the deaths of anonymous TT backmarkers under the rug, but that carnage among the fans is harder to rationalize. So, from a fan's perspective, the most visible impact of the changes at the TT is that prime spectating areas are now off limits to fans. The first time I returned to the Isle of Man as a fan after racing there, I resented the fact that I was not going to be allowed to stand and watch pretty much anywhere I wanted. Those changes haven't actually eliminated racers careening off track into fans, but they've definitely reduced the risk of a Reno-style disaster.

I'm of two minds about such changes. There's a part of me that would like to rise to the challenge of making the TT as safe as possible, in order to preserve it as long as possible. But there's another part of me that wants to keep it as it always was -- an anachronistic, gritty, gladiatorial competition in which risk, and death, were always near for competitors and (literally) near for the fans, too.

I guess the Reno event, for the moment at least, suggests that moving fans back from the action is a good thing.

I promise to get back to motorcycles soon, but first I have to share a dream about the 2012 Presidential Debate...

2011-09-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

I have this persistent daydream that is set during the 2012 elections, in some debate between the Democratic nominee -- presumably Barack Obama but who knows? -- and the Republiban (er, make that 'Republican') nominee, To Be Determined.

In my dream, the structure of the debate allows the candidates themselves to pose questions of each other. The Democrat, when it's his turn, says this...

"I'd like to pose a question that does not relate to this campaign in particular or even politics in general Instead, I'd like to ask you to answer a simple question of fact. Biblical scholars have determined that, according to the Book of Genesis, the Earth is about 5,000 years old. By contrast, virtually all scientists including all of the scientists -- geologists -- who specifically study the earth, have concluded that it's about five billion years old. So there's a profound disagreement there; it's not as if the scientists think the earth's ten, or even a hundred or a thousand times older than the earth's age according to fundamentalists. No, scientists think the earth's a million times older than it is, according to the Bible.

"So my question to you, sir, is simply this: How old is the earth? Is it more like 5,000 years old? Or more like five billion?"

9/11 redux

2011-09-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

Of course, the proof that Al Quaeda were just a bunch of morons was that, by attacking New York's financial district, they were in fact attacking their own allies. It was not until about 2008 that most Americans realized the financial sector was engaged in its own efforts to bring America to its knees.

Not long after 9/11 there was a spate of anthrax "attacks" (that were later traced back to a home-grown terrorist with a good old-fashioned grudge.) Anthrax was a perfect topic for media hysteria, since most of us don't actually work in buildings that could be meaningfully targeted by terrorists crashing jetliners, but we all get mail.

At the time, my ex-wife worked for Capital One, the predatory credit card lender. Capital One was the largest customer the USPS had, sending out millions of credit card solicitations per day. She was a graphic design genius, and got assignments from C1 like, for example, figuring out how to put in all the federally mandated information about fees, penalty fees, and interest rates in ways that met federal guidelines but that were most likely to be ignored by customers.

Anyway, at the height of the anthrax scare, Capital One's mail center got some responses that seemed to have been dusted by white powder. They immediately instituted a plan to have all the employees take turns opening mail, since it would be unfair to expect the mailroom employees to take all the risks. Hilariously, it later turned out the white powder was something Capital One's mail preparers put on the forms themselves, to prevent them sticking to envelope-stuffing equipment.

At the time, though, I was struck by two things: One, the extreme vanity of the company, that it would think, "Oh yes, terrorists wanting to strike at the U.S. would naturally choose us as a target," and two, that if Osama bin Laden had only known how corrosive Capital One was to American values, he would have invested in C1, not tried to harm it.

9/11 memory

2011-09-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

On September 11, 2001 I was in London, England on the way to the Isle of Man.

I spent part of the day walking around the West End, killing time. I entered a used book shop -- as always, keeping an eye peeled for Mike Hailwood's road racing book. I noticed that the clerk was riveted to a small TV. He barely noticed me coming or going. I caught a glimpse of the screen and assumed he was watching some low-budget takeoff of the Die Hard movies.

But as I walked back into the street, every pub I passed was packed, and everyone was silently staring at the television. I squeezed into one, and suddenly it dawned on me: this was really happening. Then, the second plane smashed into the second tower. I think I stayed in that pub until the first tower fell. Then, I walked back out into the street, and took the tube back to my sister's house.

Some time in the next few days, I called my mom and, of course, the subject of those terrorist attacks came up. And my mom told me a kind of triste but funny story...

You see, my dad spent all day, every day, staring at the TV in their condo. By the fall of 2001, he was in the last year of his life. He had lost all of his short term memory, so every time a plane flew into a building on TV, for him, it was happening anew. He called her over to watch it, and wondered what the hell was going on, time and time and time and time again.

I don't know if television caused his dementia, but it sure as hell didn't help it.

My initial reaction to the events of 9/11 was that the terrorists had hit two home runs clear out of the park in New York, had scored a solid double in Washinton and a single in PA. An amazing run of luck for four at bats. If they tried it 100 times in 100 parallel universes, the other 99 attempts would have been far less successful.

But, on that day, they won.

And then we showed it over and over again on television. We could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by leveraging world opinion that, for the first time in decades, briefly swung back into our favor. But instead, the defense budget was doubled, an enormous fortune was wasted on security theater, two wars -- one of which was embarked upon under obviously false pretenses -- drag on in countries that are if anything less stable and more dangerous for their own citizens, and more likely to polarize them against us.

"We will never forget" became a catchphrase. And we won't, because the media will continue to use 9/11 as an excuse to sell advertising and the military-industrial complex will keep using it as an excuse to profit from an ill thought-out and unstrategic 'war on terror.'

I don't know if television caused this dementia, but it sure as hell didn't help it.

The French have a great expression for, well,.. everything

2011-09-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

I was reading a post on Hell for Leather earlier this morning, about the implications of the 'frameless' Ducati MotoGP bike's failure on the soon-to-be-released 1199 production bike. It was better than the average motorcycle blog post, but one sentence stuck out...

Michael Czysz credits himself for perfecting this arrangement on his stillborn C1 GP bike...

You know, the French have a great expression that, loosely translated = The only things that are new are those that have been forgotten.

I can't possibly know what part of this design Czysz claims to have invented, but 'frameless' motorcycles have been around a long time. Phil Vincent's famous twins used the engine as a stressed member and had only a rudimentary 'spine' bolted across the tops of the cylinder heads.

More recently, John Britten's V-1000 was a frameless design. So there's nothing particularly new or innovative about cantilevering the steering head off the motor. At the other end, the MZ Supermono Cup race bikes pivoted the swing arm through the cases. And my friend James Parker has designed bikes that are even more frameless than any of those examples. So what's the innovation here? Building that front subframe as a monococque and using it as the air box? Maybe, but quite a few very conventional bikes draw engine air through the castings of the steering head, so the idea is only as big as expanding the volume of that channel, to make it a resonating chamber.

Is there something about those electric motorcycle entrepreneur types that makes them especially prone to claiming to have invented ideas they've, at best, repurposed?

America gets its Monaco, shame it will never get its TT...

2011-09-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

According to this great New York Times piece, Baltimore had a very successful launch of it street race for Indy cars last weekend. Getting a race downtown in a major city is a huge deal for open-wheel car racing; it exposes the sport to lots of people who would otherwise never attend a race.

Obviously, it's a hell of lot easier to put on a(n acceptably safe) car race on streets lined with barriers than it is to put on a(n acceptably safe) motorcycle race in an urban setting. This was no Macau Grand Prix. But as there gets to be more and more Airfence available, it's fun to fantasize about an urban motorcycle race that would thrust our sport in front of a whole new group of potential fans.

That was part of the promise of Supermoto. Its most successful events were the ones staged in Reno, and around the Queen Mary dock in Long Beach. But the whole sport basically imploded before those events could really build a franchise. And a few Backmarker readers will remember the ill-fated attempt to hold a Cape Breton (Nova Scotia, Canada) TT. The organizers couldn't pull that off, even though it was to be held in a remote, impoverished area where locals would have supported anything that brought in revenue.

Is there a Backmarker reader out there old enough to have seen the races in Montjuic Park, in Barcelona? That's the sort of thing I'm fantasizing about. The best place to pull that off in North America would be in Montreal, at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, which is certified by the FIA for F1 car racing. What American cities have a downtown park that could hold a world-class race?

A mea culpa, with qualifications...

2011-09-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

I can't tell you how I know that 'Elbowz11' is not really Ben Spies, but I can tell you that I know for sure it isn't Spies -- unless he's carefully crafted an entire second identity in England, complete with another name and address!

So my pot-stirring post about Elbowz11 dissing Valentino Rossi last week -- which, in my limited defense acknowledged the possibility of the post coming from a faux-Spies -- was just pot-stirring. Hey, I'll do almost anything for 1,000 hits.

The larger point though, is still worth mulling. I admit that I'm one of the rare motorcycle racing fans who's not particularly in love with Valentino Rossi. Don't get me wrong; I totally acknowledge his dominant riding skill over a long period. His comeback from a nasty injury also earned him a couple more points in my book. A win on the Isle of Man (which will never happen) would push him into Mike Hailwood territory in my books. And since I've never met him, I can't say that I really dislike him. I just don't love him.

As a writer, I can say that from a literary point of view Rossi the man is far more interesting than Rossi the superman, and I've watched Rossi's (and Ducati's) struggles with a little more interest this season. I never expected to read press releases from Ducati in which they expressed satisfaction with the fact that their star rider was finally catching up to the third group. I feel a little bit sorry for Ducati, a company with an admirable passion for racing. But I also feel a bit vindicated; there were people who'd written off Honda once and for all, and that's something you do at your peril.

Speaking of things done at peril, it's clear that anything that could possibly be considered a public slight of Rossi will still trigger a vitriolic response from his fan base (a group only slightly less protective than Sarah Palin's base.)

I guess than it will be a while before I ask the most provocative Rossi question...

Willie McCoy!

2011-09-05T08:36:00.000-07:00

The epic Springfield Mile win by series part-timer Willie McCoy brings to mind only one thing, Jim Croce's great '70s song You Don't Mess Around With Jim.

Uptown got it's hustlers
The bowery got it's bums
42nd Street got Big Jim Walker
He's a pool-shootin' son of a gun
Yeah, he big and dumb as a man can come
But he stronger than a country hoss
And when the bad folks all get together at night
You know they all call big Jim "Boss", just because
And they say

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Well outta south Alabama came a country boy
He say I'm lookin' for a man named Jim
I am a pool-shootin' boy
My name Willie McCoy
But down home they call me Slim
Yeah I'm lookin' for the king of 42nd Street
He drivin' a drop top Cadillac
Last week he took all my money
And it may sound funny
But I come to get my money back
And everybody say Jack don't you know

And you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Well a hush fell over the pool room
Jimmy come boppin' in off the street
And when the cuttin' were done
The only part that wasn't bloody
Was the soles of the big man's feet
Yeah he were cut in in bout a hundred places
And he were shot in a couple more
And you better believe
They sung a different kind of story
When big Jim hit the floor now they say

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim

Yeah, big Jim got his hat
Find out where it's at
And it's not hustlin' people strange to you
Even if you do got a two-piece custom-made pool cue

Yeah you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim

Croce released that song in 1972. Is it just me, or was that just a better time for songwriters?

That year, Mark Brelsford won the GNC, but the it was a tumultuous time; Kenny Roberts went on to win the #1 plate in '73 and '74. Those were the first overall championship wins for a Japanese manufacturer.

The real reason Indy deserves a MotoGP race

2011-09-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

The news (perhaps unexpected?) that Indy has renewed its MotoGP contract means that for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will host three MotoGP rounds.

With Indianapolis, Austin, and Laguna Seca nicely scattered across the country, that gives a lot of U.S. fans access to a race in their region. The country may not be motorcycle-mad, like Spain or Italy, which also have multiple rounds, but the sheer size of the U.S. market easily justifies three events.

I have to say that while Laguna Seca seems to put on MotoGP out of a sense of noblesse oblige, IMS has really done a lot of heavy lifting, in terms of raising the profile of the sport in the U.S. They generate a steady stream of press releases about MotoGP all season long, and work tirelessly to get traction with non-endemic media. I don't get the feeling that the MotoGP paddock really appreciates the work IMS does.

So far, that work's been pretty thankless, but IMS deserves a lot of credit for approaching the challenge of building a mainstream U.S. audience for MotoGP in a rational, realistic way. IE, IMS appreciates the fact that this is a multi-year challenge.

Creating a national audience in the U.S. for MotoGP is not like getting a new franchise for an established sport; it was comparatively easy to introduce the Diamonbacks to Arizona, or the Rays to Tampa. Everyone there new what Major League Baseball was; they had winter league play and farm teams already. It's more like the challenge faced by Major League Soccer here.

We're finally at a point where American soccer fans no longer need to plaintively explain to their friends that, everywhere else in the world, 'football' = soccer and it's hugely popular. We're finally at a point where pretty much any sports fan in a city with an MLS franchise can, at least, name his local team. Here in KC, Sporting has become a real hot ticket (although that may reflect the shaky performance of our other major league teams.)

The thing is, it took MLS nearly 20 years to reach this point.

I think -- at least, I hope -- that part of the faith MotoGP has shown to IMS in renewing that contract stems from a recognition of IMS' hard work promoting MotoGP, not just its own event. I hope Austin's organizers are willing to take a page from IMS' play book, too.

In eight years, the U.S. has gone from no MotoGP events to three. If they work as tirelessly down in Austin as IMS does -- and if Laguna Seca improves its media game -- in another eight years, we may not have to explain what MotoGP is when it comes to town.

SBK and MotoGP: Is any town big enough for the two of them? Don't worry, they don't even know they're in the same town

2011-09-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

I'm reading news that Bridgepoint Capital has acquired InFront Sports, which effectively means that the company that owns Dorna (holder of MotoGP's media rights) now also owns the rights to the World Superbike Championship.

Even before this development, SBK and MotoGP have operated at, at best, a sort of uneasy truce. The latest source of tension, of course, is MotoGP's creation of Claiming Rule Teams, which blurs the 'pure prototype' status of MotoGP by allowing the use of modified production motors. Colin Edwards has openly discussed his 2012 season plans now, and has said he hopes to get Yamaha World Superbike-spec motors -- and that he wants to poach Yamaha's top SBK engineer -- for his CRT.

The implication in most of the reporting about Bridgepoint's acquisition of InFront is that the change in ownership status might trigger some kind of rationalization at the top level of motorcycle racing.

Don't count on it.

Leave aside the fact that anyone with big-business experience will tell you that -- not withstanding the Tea Party's idiotic kowtowing to the so-called free market -- it's unwise to expect businesses to operate rationally at all.

The real reason that it's unlikely any kind of rationalization will result from this deal is that it's unlikely it will really occur to anyone. Dorna represents about 5% of Bridgpoint's portfolio. And the acquisition of InFront can only be about one thing, really... FIFA.

You see, in addition to SBK and a range of sports properties from show jumping (that's horses, not Evel Kneivel wannabes) to curling, InFront also holds the media rights for the Federation Internationale de Football Association. This is the giant, famously corrupt governing body of soccer, and the World Cup. As much as MotoGP and World Superbike are big deals for us, the global audience -- and attendant commercial opportunities -- for motorcycle racing are trivial when compared to soccer. Sony alone spends about $50M/year on FIFA sponsorships. And in a weak global economy, soccer's relative strength is enhanced by the facts that it costs almost nothing to participate in the sport at the (literally) grassroots level, that it has vastly better terrestrial/free TV packages in place, and that there are far more events in total with lower average ticket prices, making it more accessible to cash-strapped fans.

When Bridgepoint's board reviewed the due diligence on its InFront acquisition, I doubt that more than a minute was spent discussing SBK. And most of that minute was occupied when one old boy asked, "Really? We own motorcycle racing." At that moment a young assistant leaned in, whispered something in his ear. The old boy raised his eyebrows, muttered "Frightful things," and went on to ask, "How's Sepp Blatter doing these days?"

Still, it's fun to speculate about how an informed, intelligent owner could rationalize SBK and MotoGP. I'll get around to that soon. But right now I have to go the farmer's market. Don't want to miss the last of the summer's corn and fresh Missouri peaches, tomatoes...

Indy fallout: Is this a note from the Dept. of Kicking Rossi While He's Down?

2011-08-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, a wind gust toppled a concert stage at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. That resulted in the cancelation of the Indy Mile flat track race, and ratified my decision not to go to the MotoGP race. For me, that weekend is a great racing event, with some bonus racing at a nearby track during the day before and after the Main event.

But, I kept an eye on Indy from afar. If Valentino Rossi's ever had a more dismal qualifying, I can't bring it to mind. Rossi and Ducati's struggles this season have almost made Corse's MotoGP effort an exercise in anti-marketing. Surely people must be thinking, "If Jeremy Burgess can't make that thing rideable, and if even Valentino Rossi can't be competitive on it, it must be a real turd."

So far, it doesn't seem to have had a negative impact on Ducati sales, but you have to wonder where they'd be without the as-far-from-MotoGP-as-you-can-get Multistrada model.

In some ways, it's been interesting to watch the process of Rossi's devolution to 'human' status. That was underlined when he qualified six positions behind Nicky Hayden. (For the first time in a few races, they were on what appeared to be functionally identical bikes.)

On Saturday afternoon, Rossi's near-last grid position prompted Matthew Birt to post this brief story on the heavily trafficked UK website associated with the weekly MCN newspaper. [Full disclosure: I'm also a contributor to MCN from time to time. -- MG]

If you don't live in Europe, you may not realize that MCN is probably the most influential (not necessarily accurate, just influential) English-language motorcycle industry news source. It's closely read by everyone in the business.

Within a few minutes of Matthew Birt's story going up -- and it should be noted that Birt merely reported Rossi's rough qualifying session, quoting Rossi extensively; he didn't criticize Rossi's performance at all -- this comment was appended to MCN's post...

I quickly scanned it, thinking it was evidence of Rossi's falling from fan favor, then I did a double-take on the user name. Elbowz11?? Was that really Ben Spies?

I clicked on the Elbowz11 hyperlink only to find this...

Holy crap, eh?.. I have no real way of knowing whether MCN user Elbowz11 is really Spies or just some spotty fanboy. [Actually, I probably could just email friends on the MCN staff and confirm it, but rumors are so much more fun that facts. -- MG]

But, I assume that this really did come from Spies. The nature of the post suggests it; a terse message shortly after qualifying, still in the heat of battle, delivered via smartphone without much punctuation or second thought.

That a class rookie -- even one as talented as Spies, who was forged in the crucible of the Yosh team with Mat Mladin as 'mentor' -- would openly, publicly diss Valentino Rossi...

It shows how human the once-alien Rossi has become.

Isle of Man TT organizers put the 'zero' in TT Zero

2011-08-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

A friend just emailed me to note that the 2012 Isle of Man TT practice and race schedule's posted on the TT's website, and there's no mention whatsoever of practice or racing for electric motorcycles.

I was going to knock out a quick post earlier this week, when the TT organizers announced a new 'Supertwins' class for 2012. This would be for bikes like the Kawasaki Ninja 650 or Suzuki SV650, among others. It'll be a great 'entry-level' class for TT newcomers; all in all, it's a development I support.

I guess that -- unless the TT Press Office quickly issues some kind of correction -- some of the 'track time' taken up by the new twins class are, in fact, the times that had previously been reserved for the TT Zero.

I won't say, "I told you so." But I did, sort of.

When none of the 2011 TT Zero competitors topped 100 miles an hour to take the vaunted 10,000 quid prize, I wondered whether they'd bring the class back again. I guessed they probably wouldn't; my only mistake was that I thought they'd introduce a time trial class for rally cars in its place. After all, that car demonstration lap really generated a lot of buzz.

Notwithstanding a documentary film about the TT Zero race -- and in spite of the fact that electric motorcycles may still represent the long-term future for my sport -- the sparse field in last year's race, the uneven quality of entries, and the underwhelming performance of even the top machines don't justify a TT class -- even one accorded the bare minimum of time in the schedule. By contrast, the Supertwins class will draw lots of entries. It will give fans another chance to see all the top riders in action. And since those machines are bread-and-butter models for Suzuki, Kawasaki, and possibly others (depending on how the rules are written) there's a good chance the class will attract some manufacturer support.

Since the TT organizers didn't see a lap average speed with two zeros, and didn't give out their prize with four zeros, they have decided that they don't want any zeros at all. Do I blame them? Nought right now. Now when electric motorcycles get some major manufacturer support, I'll revisit my opinion...

I guess it was inevitable I'd wake up to this, someday...

2011-08-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

Some fucking dumbass smashed the ignition of the Triumph open last night and tried to hotwire it. This morning, it was on its side, with broken clutch and shift levers to boot.

The thief's tools, a bent screwdriver and cheap set of channel-lock pliers, were on the ground.

It occurs to me to wonder, is this the shittiest bike anyone's ever tried to steal? Since the fuel petcock sells for $125, I don't want to learn what a new ignition will cost. And talk about a fussy, frustrating repair to make. I guess if I have any consolation, it's that it didn't happen on a morning I was leaving at 0430h to go to work.

The eerie thing is, I got up in the middle of the night to piss, and without my glasses on I peered out the window towards the bikes and thought, 'Some night I'm bound to look out and see someone moving around out there.'

My next thought was, I really should have a rifle handy...

Some of the deets on Paul Thede breaking 200 barrier on the Lightning e-moto

2011-08-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

As I wrote this post, it was early in Speed Week out on the Bonneville Salt Flats (although at least one day's racing was washed out.) I'm finally getting around to posting a partial account of a long phone chat with Paul Thede, who has just become the first person to top 200 mph on an electric motorcycle.

Last Saturday, I got a cryptic text from my friends at Falkner-Livingston Racing, noting that Paul Thede, the Falkner-Livingston crony and suspension guru, had just become the first person to ever top 200 miles an hour on an electric motorcycle. The next day, I got another text to the effect that Thede had 'backed it up' with a second run that averaged out to a new record of 206 miles an hour and change. That is, as far as anyone seems to know, an outright land speed record for any two wheeled EV.

L-R: Crew Chief Jeff Major, Thede, Lightning Motorcycles' Richard Hatfield.

The bike Thede rode was the very same Lightning motorcycle - designed and built by Richard Hatfield - that had a less-than-electrifying outing at the Isle of Man TT Zero race earlier this summer. [Paul Thede told me that this was the bike that raced on the IoM; I'm not sure if it is also the one that finished third at Laguna Seca. Others have suggested they're one and the same machine. - MG]

The Bonneville Salt Flat (or 'Flats', even the U.S. Bureau of Land Management can't pick one name and stick to it) in particular and land speed racing in general is a pretty good environment for EVs. Bonneville's high altitude and chronically thin air asphyxiates internal combustion motors but of course it has no effect on electric motors. The weight of battery packs isn't a problem; conventional ICE bikes often add ballast, in fact, to improve traction. And since runs only cover a few miles, batteries' low energy density is not much of a handicap. (John Burrows finished the 37+ mile TT race under his own power, pushing the 500-pound Lightning across the finish line on Glencrutchery Road.)

Anyway, the Lightning redeemed itself at Bonneville, and weather permitting there may be more to come later this week.

I called Thede, who took a break from working on the bike to talk to me on Monday evening. Thanks to Falkner-Livingston, who know all the right people, Thede, Hatfield, and crew chief Jeff Major were able to work on the machine in a hangar at the old Wendover airport. The very hangar where - brace yourself - the Enola Gay was stationed prior to the Hiroshima bombing mission.

"Yeah, I say we dropped a real bomb on the competition," said the irrepressible Thede. He was giddy at the thought that after several years of trying, he'd just become the first person to top 200 on an electric motorcycle.

Thede's relationship with Hatfield/Lightning goes back a few years. In 2009, Motorcyclist's Aaron Frank was scheduled to ride the Lightning at Bonneville. Thede was roped in to cure some handling ills. When the racing was weather-delayed, Frank had to go to his next assignment without ever riding the bike. Hatfield asked Thede if he'd take over land-speed-racing riding duties and he was only too happy to oblige. He set a speed in the 160 range in '09 and upped it to the 170 range at the 2010 BUB meet.

"Richard built an all-new bike for this year," Thede told me. "The motor, the battery packs, it's all new. He wants to be a manufacturer, and to create a viable sport bike. People only want to know two things really, 'How fast will it go?' and 'How far will it go?' So it's important to get the answers to those questions up where conventional sport bike riders will be impressed." Thede was definitely impressed with the build quality of the new bike. Earlier Lightning prototypes looked cobby to me, but he said that under the skin, the current bike is beautiful.

The skin is almost the only thing that has really changed, since the bike was raced on the Isle of Man. Thede told me that the salt is rough this year, and that he softened the suspension. "Actually, there are some limitations with the road-race suspension, which is too stiff.," Thede told me. "The salt is different every year; sometimes it's rough and it will pound the shit out of you; sometimes it's smooth, sometimes it's the texture of cane sugar."

Other than changes to suspension settings, the chassis is identical. Hatfield has reprogrammed the power controller - obviously, since a record run is a fraction of a TT lap. The power controller is water cooled, and the AC motor's armature is cooled by an oil spray. Thede was in awe of the motor itself, which he describes as a cylinder about six inches across and six inches thick, putting out 140 horsepower.

The bodywork was not specifically designed for the Lightning; purpose-built bodywork would have a smaller frontal area, permitting at least a little higher top speed.

The bike ran as an Altered Partial Streamliner under SCTA rules, so the rider's body has to be visible from the side (although his arms can be obscured by the fairing.) The bodywork creates a lot of sail area, and a crosswind on one of the Thede's runs was a cause for concern. "I was probably only five degrees from vertical," he told me. "But at that speed, it felt like I was about to drag my knee!"

But, I'm getting ahead of the story...

Thede told me that they'd only just gotten the bike out of customs, after it's return voyage from the IoM. They had to fit the fairing and reprogram the controller with the goal of getting through the SCTA technical inspection last Friday. Thede and the Falkner-Livingston crew know from experience that you need to be ready to race as soon as possible at Bonneville, because the weather can - and frequently does - put the kibbosh on racing long before the scheduled end of Speed Week. As it was, the SCTA tech guys stayed open late Friday to see them through, and Paul Livingston was still applying sponsor stickers as they pushed the bike up to the start line.

According to SCTA rules, new bikes have to make a first pass at under 175 miles an hour, as a shakedown run. Since you need to go over 175 to qualify for a run on the long course, that meant the first two runs had to take place over the short (7-mile) course. Thede was in a hurry to get in a fast pass, since although he hadn't seen either Czysz or Mission around, he was aware that there were other bikes that could - at least in theory - attempt a 200 mile an hour run. So after an initial shakedown, he made a second, full-power, run on the short course.

Despite bumps and the crosswind, Thede and the Lightning recorded a flying mile at 205.238 mph. That easily qualified them for a record, and the bike went into the impound lot in anticipation of a ratifying run the following day (Sunday.) That run went down at 206.921, for a new record of two-oh-six and change.

Thede laughed as described the wave of torque the electric motor produced when he opened the 'throttle' at about 150 miles an hour, and the smooth power delivery. After years of tuning suspensions on high-end ICE bikes, the Race Tech proprietor is now an EVangelist, for sure.

On the second day, the salt was a little wetter, which produced it's own excitement. "There was a little bit of a weave," Thede recalled, adding, "People think, '200, what's the big deal? I went 165 on my 600,' but first of all, their speedometer was lying to them, and they were on asphalt. If they think it's easy to ride 200 on salt, they should come and do it."

"When I broke the record, it was more a feeling of relief than excitement," Thede told me. "I'd been worried that someone else would be the first to go over 200. There are a few guys who were potential threats; Mission's been out here, Czysz has a fast bike. Kent Riches, who own Air-Tech [aftermarket bodywork] has a bike he's working on..."

At the end of our conversation, he told me they were making some tweaks to the bike. Fitting taller gearing, narrowing the fairing a bit, and that they'd hang around another few days and try to go faster still. The bike probably has 220+ in it, with even minimal development.

"I don't know if anyone else is going to show up, or how fast they'll go. Eventually, every record falls. But no matter how fast they go, only one person can be the first to go over 200 miles an hour, and that's always going to be me."

[MG NOTE: There was more to come. Thede upped the record to nearly 216 mph two days later, with a top speed of over 218.]

Official text of MV Agusta statement on passing of Claudio Castiglioni

2011-08-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

Varese, 17th August 2011

Claudio Castiglioni, 64 years old and President of MV Agusta Motor S.p.A. passed away this morning in Varese, Italy after a courageous battle against an illness.

Although I didn't know Castiglioni (seen here in an official photo, not mine) we did meet when I tested the first MV Agusta 1000. He was quintessentially Italian; always dapper and perfectly groomed. At an official dinner at a nice restaurant in Rimini, he made the assembled American motorcycle journalists look like barnyard animals. I wrote about it for the old Road Racer X magazine. That's a story that I'll dig up and post some day -- enough time's past that I can safely provide more detail about the brothel under the Grand Hotel, where MV put us up...

The man who personally elevated the Italian motorcycle industry to its current role as world leader and the businessman who excelled with MV Agusta, Cagiva, Ducati and Husqvarna brands has left us.

After his experience in the family business’s specializing in metalworking and manufacturing, in 1978 Castiglioni founded the company Cagiva which continually developed new and innovative motorcycles that have influenced the direction of the Italian and world motorcycle markets through the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Intuitive, tenacious, and a true visionary: these qualities drove Claudio Castiglioni to purchase the historic brands like Ducati, Husqvarna and MV Agusta. Coupled with his vision, diligence, hard work and financial investment these brands have once again become the protagonist of the two wheeled market.

Claudio Castiglioni has given us some of the most important motorcycles ever built, personifying performance, elegance and style: Cagiva Elefant and Mito, Ducati 916 and Monster as well as the MV Agusta F4 and Brutale. Finally, the President crafted the latest jewels in every detail, a testament to his insatiable passion for motorcycles: the MV Agusta F3 and Brutale 675.

Racing has always been one of his greatest passions, and his forays into competition have resulted in success at every level of world championship racing. With Cagiva came the titles of World Motocross Champion as well as the triumphs in the most enduring desert race, the Paris-Dakar. Also with Cagiva were the numerous successes in the 500 GP class. Ducati, under his guidance, dominated entire seasons of the World Superbike Championship thanks to models such as the 851 and 916. Finally, Husqvarna acquired a number of World Championships in Enduro, Motocross and Supermotard.

At the very center of his personal and professional history there is MV Agusta, to which he dedicated over 15 years creating motorcycles which have come to be considered the world wide icon for style and exclusivity as well as representing excellence Made in Italy. With the MV Agusta motorcycles, nothing was ever left to chance, the smallest details were reviewed and revised hundreds of times in order to create motorcycles that are simply unique, personifying perfection.

Behind every detail, there are the ideas, heart and soul of Claudio Castiglioni.

For the past year, the President has left the guidance of MV Agusta to his son Giovanni, who has been by his side during many of the battles that have formed the story of the manufacture in Varese. These challenges, day after day, constructed and invisible fabric that was so well woven by this truly unique person and businessman. Giovanni, with the same passion and tenacity as his father, from this day forth will continue to create what Claudio Castiglioni described as “the most beautiful motorcycles in the world”.

The funeral will take place Friday August 19th at 14:00 in the Church of the Brunella in via Crispi, Varese (Italy).

Notes from Gary Nixon's funeral

2011-08-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

I have a friend in the D.C. area who attended the memorial service for Gary Nixon, which was held in Timonium MD, earlier today. He wrote me a personal email describing the service, and with his permission, I'm posting it here.

I hate it when journalists rewrite source material in ways that allow readers to think the journalist was on the scene. Rather than edit or rewrite my friend's account, I'm sharing it almost exactly the way he shared it with me. IE, it's not written as a 'story', just as a quick email.

Still, I think it creates a great impression of the memorial. In life, Nixon was a guy who took racing seriously but life with a dose of humor. (In a second email, my friend noted, "Somebody at the funeral told a story of Gary Nixon taking a horseshoe crab shell and fitting it to a radio-controlled car chassis, and subsequently putting beachgoers into a tizzy. I almost plotzed when I heard that one." It sounds as if the memorial was held in that spirit. My friend's account follows...

The funeral home had about 150 seats set up, and nearly all were full. There were large poster-size photographs of Gary from throughout his career arrayed all along the periphery. They even had one of his old Cub short trackers on display, and they brought it up to the coffin area.

There were several floral arrangements highlighting the number 9.

Don Emde was the first to speak. Talked about how much Nixon hated losing (a recurrent theme throughout the service).

Steve DiGarmo(?) was next. Talked about how Gary helped a lot of young guys get their start in dirt track.

Gary's sister Peggy gave a little insight on their Oklahoma childhood.

Carrie Ann (an absolutely beautiful lady, by the way), his daughter, gave a great speech, touching on some religious aspects, and also about what kind of dad he was.

Stephanie, a young lady who worked as his secretary, talked about how he was the only person to come visit her when she ended up in a psychiatric unit.

Stephanie's brother cracked everybody up while demonstrating how Gary mumbled. Stephanie jumped in and added that she was the official office "interpreter" for customers who couldn't understand Gary at his old shop.

Jay Springsteen was obviously very upset. It was an open casket service; Gary was wearing a riding jacket; the coffin was draped with a checkered flag; Jay, before the service, went up to the casket and he said his goodbyes to Gary, and left the casket very distraught. Jay gave a short speech about how sometimes you just wanted to choke Gary, but you knew that there was no one better to have as a friend.

Erv Kanemoto nearly broke down. He was obviously in a lot of distress, and Mary had to come to the podium to support him. He could hardly speak. That was the saddest part of the whole service. He obviously was quite affected by the whole day.

There was a 15-minute presentation on two big screen monitors. An early picture on the farm in Anadarko. Gary as a kid on a small motorbike. Then a montage of about 100 racing photos. Then a series of family photos. There was a soundtrack throughout, and when the racing photos were going, that Carly Simon song "You're So Vain" started playing, and the family members were actually singing along - it was oddly funny!

I was not happy with the amount of people there from the racing community. No Kenny Roberts. No Earl Hayden. No Gene Romero, Yvon duHamel or just about anybody that he competed against. I think Gary Fisher was there, but I am not sure. Perhaps there were some industry people there, but I didn't see anybody I recognized from Kawasaki, Suzuki or any factory. Dick Mann did send a letter that he wanted read to the attendees.

Basically the whole service focused on funny stories about Gary's antics. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Mary, before the service, had envisioned the whole thing as a "roast" - but it was not disrespectful.

Sometime in the next day or so, I'll try to reach the current national #9, Jared Mees, and ask him if his choice of the number was inspired by Nixon, or some other rider.

A note from the Dept. of 'Hmm...'

2011-08-02T13:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I saw two unrelated(?) press releases that, together, make me wonder what's up.

First, I read that Yamaha would not field an official factory team in World Superbike next year. The press release actually seemed to threaten more than just the factory SBK effort, with language that suggested a general de-emphasis of racing and a [relative] increase in customer-focused marketing efforts.

Then, Francis Batta, who runs Suzuki's official SBK team released a far more cryptic statement to the effect that if Suzuki withdrew from the World Superbike series in 2012, he would not seek to affiliate with another manufacturer.

Are we about to see the World Superbike Championship suffer a MotoGP-style grid recession?

I haven't been paying too much attention to the European bike market, nor do I know what the implications of a larger European credit crisis would be on motorcycle sales over there. But, it can't be good.

Shifting gears...

I've written in the past about Honda's interesting R&D in the area of mind-controlled machines. Now I see that Toyota has collaborated with a couple of hot shops to produce a bicycle that will shift gears based on the rider's merely thinking about it. Apparently the system -- which picks up the rider's brain waves with a sensor-filled helmet -- then sends those signals to a smartphone via bluetooth which, in turn triggers servos that change gears... phew! -- 'learns' when the rider wants to shift.

You used to describe a really good-handling motorcycle as one that, you just had to think about where you wanted to go, and it would turn.

Lane splitting: Killer app for motorcycles, or just a motorcyclist-killer?

2011-08-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

I have been writing about lane splitting for years -- it's the 'killer app' for motorcycles on increasingly congested roads. While a few states have considered amending traffic laws to specifically allow motorcycles to 'filter' through slow moving cars, as of now only California lets motorcycles filter. In the rest of the world, it's de rigeur (literally, filtering is a riding skill you need to demonstrate to get your license in the UK.)

My feeling on this is that allowing lane splitting in more U.S. states will drive up motorcycle sales and encourage the use of motorcycles as primary vehicles. When we lane split, not only do we get where we're going faster and with lower carbon emissions -- but by taking a vehicle out of the traffic column, a lane splitting motorcycle also marginally speeds the entire traffic column. And if lane splitting is the factor that encourages a driver to become a rider, then at his destination (in many cases) he or she frees up a parking space, too. So cars spend less time circling the block looking for a spot. Again, reducing carbon emissions and saving time for everyone, not just motorcycles. And, if making lane splitting legal across the U.S. increased the number of motorcycles in daily use, all motorcyclists would be safer. Right now, one reason car drivers don't notice us is that they're not used to seeing us, so they don't anticipate our presence and 'watch for motorcycles.'

The argument against lane splitting is basically that the vast majority of car drivers think it's not a killer app, it's just lethally dangerous. Many U.S. motorcyclists (especially non-Californians) share this misconception. Lane splitting is not inherently more dangerous than riding in the traffic column. By that, I mean lane splitting in a responsible, skilled way -- I've seen plenty of dumbasses lane splitting at speeds that make it dangerous, but those guys ride stupidly when they're not lane splitting, too. If you're an idiot, it's not lane splitting that's dangerous, it's motorcycles period. (The one consolation, I suppose, is that idiot motorcyclists really only endanger themselves. I guess if they were in cars they'd be even more dangerous.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, lane splitting: is it the killer app for motorcycles, or just a killer?

My friends at Aerostich, who created 'Ride to Work Day' in the U.S., recently sent out an email with a link to a study by Steve Guderian (any relation to Heinz? I'm not sure...) that attempts to tease the risks of lane splitting out of existing traffic accident data. You can - and should - read Guderian's study here. I get the feeling that he had a bit of a pro-lane splitting ax to grind, but safety studies going back to the Hurt Report in the '70s have all suggested that the strategy is less risky than it looks to most car drivers.

Back in the day when I commuted between San Diego and Motorcyclist Magazine's offices in downtown L.A., I lane split for hundreds of miles a week, and developed a whole theory of doing so as safely as possible. Basically, lane splitting is not as a riding exercise -- can I fit my motorcycle through that gap? -- but an exercise in data processing. Riding between columns of traffic is, in this sense, like riding in traffic generally: The only safe speed is the speed at which you can see, process, and control for every visible risk. If you can't process the onrush of data at the speed you're traveling, you need to slow down, increase gaps and following distances, until you're back at information equilibrium.

I've long been planning to write about this at length, but last week, MCN (in the UK) posted this excellent guide to filtering - as they call it. If you live in California and want to be a good lane splitter -- or if you live in the rest of the U.S. and are forming an opinion about lane splitting, read MCN's guide to filtering here.

Monday Morning Crew Chief: Mission Accomplished, etc...

2011-07-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

Mission Accomplished

I guess I've been a bit of a Mission Motors 'slammer' over the last few months. I basically called the company out, in MCN (the UK motorcycle weekly) when I wrote that the company had pretty much abandoned the idea of actually manufacturing motorcycles.

Few people now remember that Bridgestone - the MotoGP tire supplier - once made whole motorcycles. In the 1960s, the company made tires and some really high-performance bikes. When it became obvious that other manufacturers like Honda would not specify Bridgestone tires as OEM fitment as long as Bridgestone was itself a competitor, the company had to choose whether it would pursue the tire business, or the motorcycle business. I think Mission is in the same sort of position; it can make motorcycles, or try to become a supplier of technology to Honda, et al. I think that they're positioning themselves as high-end suppliers to the car and motorcycle industry.

If I'm right about that, they made a pretty good impression at Laguna Seca last weekend. Steve Rapp obliterated the field in the TTXGP race. Rapp was several seconds a lap faster than Michael Czysz (though Czysz finished second, his MotoCzysz company was probably the one hurt most by being utterly outclassed.)

Based on his 8-lap race time, if Rapp and the Mission R had been entered in the AMA SuperSport race, he would probably have been solidly mid-pack until mid-distance. IE, Mission's taken the e-moto performance envelope and stretched it a good ways towards modern ICE sportbike performance.

For the record, with a full tank of gas, the ICE bikes in the field could have maintained their race pace for 80+ miles. If Rapp had to shepherd the energy in the Mission R's battery for 80 miles, his lap times would have been in the 2-minute range, not the 1:35s.

Still, my hat's off to Mission Motors, who have set a new benchmark for zero-emission motorcycle performance. If anyone, anywhere (Honda?) has a better handle on the challenges of managing the limited energy available in current batteries, they've not shown their hand.

It remains to be seen whether Rapp's impressive TTXGP win on the Mission R reinvigorates interest in Mission Motors as a limited-run motorcycle manufacturer -- or, will it bring in new consulting business from major OEMs who might decide to essentially outsource their R&D effort to Mission and jumpstart an e-moto program with Mission's package, which is clearly the best one that has broken cover.

Bostrom. Wrong choice?

There was a lot of skepticism when it was revealed that Ben Bostrom would get a wild card MotoGP ride at Laguna. At 37, he's probably still close to the fittest man in the AMA Superbike championship -- but he's obviously past his sell-by date as a top-level racer.

He qualified last, almost a second behind his LCR team-mate Tony Elias, and pulled in after an off-track excursion for a completely forgettable race. So the question is, did he suck, or not?

In his defense, Bostrom lapped in the 1:25.6 range in Superbike qualifying, while Tommy Hayden was the fast Suzuki rider in the AMA field, at 1:24.8 (Hayes, on a Yamaha, took pole with a 1:24.5) So if my math's right, BBoz gave up somewhere between 8/10ths of a second and a second to the fastest of the American riders in the U.S. series. Based on this, I'd say that no matter who else Lucio Cecchinello had picked among active AMA Superbike riders, his second bike would still have been the backmarker.

Stoner. Wrong choice.
The big race wiener (er, make that 'winner') was Stoner. After I ranted about MotoGP riders boycotting the rescheduled Motegi round, the FIM released a statement that could have been inspired by my post. And a number of riders, sensing fans' lack of sympathy for their cause, opted to restate their opposition to the race in terms that gave them some wiggle room.

Not Stoner, who told one reporter that his decision was not anti-Japanese at all. He said that if the tsunami and nuclear reactor damage had happened in his home country of Australia, he would not go to the Australian GP, either.

Way to endear himself to his homies, eh?