Ulrich stands up to AMA Pro. I add my two cents' worth

Over the last few days, I've read a three-part editorial by Roadracing World editor John Ulrich in which he writes of fears that in the up-and-down relationship between AMA Pro Racing and other roadracing stakeholders, we're poised for another 'down' period.

Anyone who spent any time in the AMA Superbike paddock in 2009, the year the 'new regime' came into AMA Pro Racing, remembers just how frustrated team owners and other paddock denizens were with Roger Edmondson's management style. Roger's gone, but now it really seems as if Ulrich, at least, has doubts about whether current AMA Pro Racing honcho David Atlas is much better.

I should note that '09 was, in fact, the last time I spent any time in the Superbike paddock. I've spent some time covering the AMA Flat Track scene in the last couple of seasons, and feel that on balance that branch of the sport should be cautiously optimistic going forward. But Ulrich's skepticism about the state of professional roadracing in the U.S. should be noted for a number of reasons, not the least of which are that...

• he's a long-time participant in the Superbike series as one of the top private team owners
• although he certainly doesn't go out of his way to make friends, he's a smart guy with well thought-out ideas about how the cause of American roadracing can be advanced
• he's got his own bully pulpit in the form of Roadracing World, which is read by virtually every insider in our sport

If you want to read John's entire editorial, so far, start here, then go here, and here...

Are you back? Phew, eh?..

I have to say that Ulrich's implication that the AMA might impose draconian penalties on riders who merely rode in, say, a WERA race while wearing their 'AMA' leathers,.. that smacked of paranoia. Every major racing series has rules about riders/drivers and vehicles displaying the logos of series sponsors. A day or so later, when the AMA responded to the sticker flap by noting that the rule book has actually had an almost identically worded rule for the last several years, and that no one had ever been cited for violating it, they pretty much put the issue to rest IMHO.

If, as Ulrich implies, AMA Pro is really that vindictive, then the problem is much larger than any sticker rule. Some of the complaints he makes later in the three-part editorial though, are harder to equivocate about. Allowing one team to dictate rules about electronic aids is bullshit, and if that's how it happened, other competitors have a right to be angry. And there are a few riders on the Superbike grid who probably shouldn't be there.

It's a sad reflection on the state of the U.S. motorcycle industry in general, and professional racing in particular, that even venerable teams like Yosh are essentially selling some of their seats. That puts AMA Pro in a difficult spot. What are you going to do? Tell some 'big truck' team that you desperately want in the paddock that their rider won't be licensed?

Now, just while I was thinking that Ulrich was really letting his inner paranoiac out when he wrote about the possibility of riders being punished for riding in private tests while wearing AMA patches on their leathers, my email program 'donged' and I read an release from AMA Pro Racing to the effect that Go Pro was the official 'on board' camera in the series and that no rider was allowed to mount any other kind of camera on his bike, even to capture video for his own use.

I suppose it's possible that allowed to choose any camera, the entire paddock would choose Go Pro anyway. It seems to dominate the market.

But.

This isn't like the lists of approved performance parts that AMA Pro Racing issues for each class. That's really just a way of extracting money from the paddock, but they can at least pretend that it also helps ensure competitive parity.

It seems to me that the "if you use a camera, it has to be Go Pro" rule is no different than saying, if you choose to have an umbrella girl on the grid, she has to wear Manolo Blahnik pumps. And it is not much different than saying, you have to wear a Shoei helmet. Where does this end? If you're going to eat cereal in the paddock, it has to be Wheaties?

As far as I'm concerned, Go Pro can be the official camera if they want to pay for the privilege. And at some level of participation, I guess they too could get a mandatory sticker or patch. But if they want to make it a rule that competitors can only attach Go Pro cameras to their bikes, they should at the very least make those cameras available to competitors for free.

A modest proposal: Tax the $#!+ out of gasoline

So, as another summer travel season approaches, the American media will whip itself into another paroxysm about rising gasoline prices -- the same way it has every summer for the last 30 years. Only this time it will be worse, both because rising fuel costs are a slight but measurable brake on the economy at a time when we need to be hitting the gas, and because it's a Presidential election year. Only this will be the worst Presidential election year because the Republican primary season may not end until the GOP national convention* in Tampa. That means that the disingenuous bastards running for the Republican nomination will be desperately trying to pin rising prices on Obama, and lying through their teeth about how their policies will result in Venezuela style gasoline prices here in the U.S.

The truth is, nothing the U.S. can do in terms of freeing up public land, offshore areas, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling can possibly have an effect on the price of gas at the pump in the next few years, and even over the long term the impact of incremental U.S. production on the world price for oil will be trivial.

I think that the average American could be made to understand that. (Even though the Koch brothers and their ilk have spent billions to dumb down the quality of political discourse in the U.S., and the proof they've succeeded is the fact that the GOP rank and file have not shown up at any of the recent Republican primary debates with buckets of hot tar and feathers, which is the treatment all of the current candidates deserve.**)

I used to think, I wish Obama would hire me to write a speech that explained why 'drill baby drill' is only a slogan, not a solution, vis-a-vis rising gas prices.

But I have an alternative idea, albeit one that's even less palatable than educating the electorate. Let's tax the shit out of gasoline. I'm not thinking we'd tax it as much as it is taxed in most western European nations (where current prices average about $8 per gallon) because the average American probably 'has' to drive further than the average European, who lives in a smaller country and has better access to public transit. I'm thinking we'd tax it at about half the European rates, raising prices to about $6.50 a gallon.

That would increase gasoline tax revenues by about $200,000,000,000. Yes, there are 12 zeroes in that number. That money could be earmarked (pardon the choice of words, but...) for improvements to road infrastructure and public transit, which is almost all spending that cannot be outsourced to the third world. Good jobs for Americans? Check

The higher tax load would have a number of other desirable effects.

It would serve as a damper on impact of minor price fluctuations caused by hiccups in international markets or seasonal demands. All the same forces that cause gasoline prices to rise in the summer here in the U.S. are at work on the European market, too. And fluctuations in the world price for oil impact their gasoline prices just as they do ours. The reason they aren't screaming bloody murder about a $1/gallon increase in gasoline prices killing the fragile economic recovery is that the fluctuations aren't nearly as noticeable in Europe, because they're masked by high fuel taxes.

A significant gasoline tax would allow the government to get out of the business of trying to regulate CAFE standards. We wouldn't have to encourage R&D in clean energy technology. The tax would make now controversial public transit projects like the California high-speed rail project seem like obvious choices that would inevitably return a profit to the public/private joint ventures that promote them. Raise gasoline prices high enough, and the market will sort that stuff out. (Or will those free-market Kochsuckers come up with some reason why, suddenly, their beloved market forces won't work in this scenario?)

A big gas tax increase would even reduce the long term health costs facing the U.S., since ample research has shown that in countries where people walk more and use more public transport, the population's far healthier.

It would even get the motorcycle business off its ass.

End of rant.

*None of the current contenders will be the Republican Party's actual nominee. When the current crop of fatally flawed candidates have finally rendered each other unelectable, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will be drafted in at the last minute. You read it here first.


**Ron Paul is not really a Republican, nor does he deserve to be tarred and feathered.

Mister, we could use a bike like the TZ750 again...

Next spring, the AMA Superbike Championship will return to Road Atlanta. The track, which was laid out in 1969, hearkens back to an earlier era in course design. The AMA's safety committee has smoothed some of Road Atlanta's rough edges. The original course included the infamous ‘Gravity Cavity’; it was the closest thing in the U.S. to Bray Hill. And a few seconds later, riders came to the daunting, downhill Turn 11. Fans are still talking about the pass Miguel Duhamel put on Anthony Gobert there in 1998. It has been reprofiled to create a smidge more runoff. But make no mistake, Road Atlanta is not some slow, technical, safe, 21st-century Alan Wilson circuit; it's still big, fast, and dangerous. 

The Championship has only been absent from Road Atlanta for a year, but other things that are big, fast, and dangerous will be returning to Road Atlanta after a longer hiatus. During the lunch breaks on all three days of the ‘National’ weekend, Yamaha TZ750s will lap the track, along with the legendary ‘Yamamonster’ that Jamie James rode in the glory days of the old ‘no rules’ Formula USA road racing series, and some superbikes that are twenty-plus years old, even though it seems as if they were racing yesterday.

"It's hard to believe that the bike that I qualified on for Daytona is considered vintage, man do I feel old," said David Sadowski. He’ll be lapping on the Yamaha OWO1 that he rode to a popular victory in the 1990 Daytona 200.

The display will be repeated at at least two more AMA national championship events later in the season, as part of a new relationship that’s been struck between one of the U.S. Superbike series’ key promoters, M1 PowerSports, and an organization called Historic Moto Grand Prix, which the brainchild of a 60-something ex-road racer named Bill Brown. 

A few years into its production run, Yamaha had sorted the worst of the TZ750's handling issues.

If Historic Moto Grand Prix seems skewed towards the Yamaha marque, that’s because Brown was a AMA privateer during the stretch of about 10 years when the TZ750 utterly dominated the AMA’s Class C (aka F-1) premier class. It was introduced in 1974, and won every Daytona 200 until 1982. Finally, in order to ensure that other brands had a chance to win, Bill France (owner of the Daytona track) arbitrarily made the 200 a race for Superbikes, which had until then been a support class.

More recently, the AMA (like World Superbike and MotoGP) has tweaked the rules of its premier class to increase competitiveness and decrease costs. A few years ago, the 200 was even reconfigured as a race for 600s. There were howls in the paddock, but any realist has to admit that AMA racing - in both the Superbike and 600cc classes - is tighter and more exciting than it’s been in years. So why are there so many people, like Bill Brown, who feel that the new bikes have failed to capture the imagination of the fans?

“People want to see the biggest, baddest thing out there,” Bill told me. He knows just how bad the TZ could be; he spent a week in intensive care after his bike seized on the way into the chicane on the Daytona back straight. “They had to reattach my left hand,” Bill continued. “It was almost torn off. A few weeks later, I cut off the cast and put a big farm glove on because my hand was still swollen, and went racing.” 

The rest of the paddock, everyone from tuners to tire suppliers, were just as afraid the TZ would prove that their knowledge and parts were no match for a 750cc four-cylinder two-stroke. Looking back on that period, Kevin Cameron recently  wrote, “Wobbling, weaving and shredding their tires,.. these 750s were proof that skinny, hard-rubber tires, door-closer shocks with three inches of travel and broom-handle frames were finished.”

In its own way, though, the TZ750 was a great leveler. Yamaha had to make 200 bikes available to meet the AMA’s homologation rules. The first ones were sold for less than $4,000, and even towards the end of the bike’s production run when most of its handling problems had been solved, it sold for less than $10,000. All told, over 600 were made and many more were assembled from spare parts, so the bikes were widely available to privateers.

“Yamaha used to come to Daytona and fill two garages with spare parts,” Bill recalled. “They sold spares to the racers at dealer cost. European riders found the prices were way lower here than they were paying over there. Of course, some favoured riders got special parts; I didn’t even realize it back then, but some guys got special cylinders and stuff. But if you could keep the stock bike running until the end of the race, and you rode decently, you were in the hunt.”

“You could buy a TZ750 and go racing a long time with a spares kit,” he told me. “Superbikes were supposed to be cheaper, but they quadrupled the cost of going racing. Now, there’s a new generation of fans coming up that don’t even know what a TZ750 is, and more importantly, they’ve never heard one.”

My favorite racing t-shirt is the one that says, The older I get, the faster I was.

Old guys have always said that the bikes, racers, and racing was better in the old days, maybe it was. Anyway, a new generation of fans will get to see the bikes that may be old but are still big, fast, and dangerous. But, what will really make present-day racers wistful isn't the sound (or scary handling) of the big strokers -- it's the thought that at the beginning of its production run a new TZ750 which was a podium threat in the AMA's premiere class sold for under $20 grand in today's money. The price rose to about $25,000 (again, corrected for inflation) at the end of its production run. 

That's the shocking part, when you think about it. It now costs at least $20k to field a really competitive club-level 600 Supersport bike. If you wanted to run in the upper third of the current, fairly depleted, AMA Superbike field, you'd spend at least that much on suspension alone.

'Bricking' explained by the Times

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...

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…

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...

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.