Writer's Notebook: Barcelona

Spain's in the midst of a crushing recession, although I didn't personally see that much evidence of it. Maybe what I was seeing was actually evidence of Europe's social safety net. 

Barcelona's a nice place to be a tourist; there's good public transit, better-than-average bar food, striking modern buildings that, I presume, were just finished in time for the bottom to fall out of the economy. That said, I did keep my record intact, which is that every time I spend any time in a big European city, someone tries to pick my pocket. I'm now about five for five vs. the gypsies.

Of course, Barcelona's famous for Art Deco architecture—especially the work of Antonio Gaudi. I took the Metro out to Sagrada Familia, a Gaudi church that is one of the 20th century's masterpieces. Or, at least, it will be if they ever finish it. It's surrounded by Starbucks, KFC, and a Burger King.

When I went to pick up a credential, the press officer opened her eyes wide, and told me, "You're a very famous journalist!"

I assured her that she was thinking of some other guy, but she was adamant. To prove it, she opened up that day's Periodico newspaper, and flipped to a story about the Superprestigio, which described the whole social media campaign I conducted to get Brad an invitation. The writer made a point of quoting me as saying that if the MotoGP riders failed to invite him, it could only mean they were 'gallinos'--chicken.

This hairpin turn was part of the old Monjuic Park circuit.

During the long siesta between qualifying and racing, I was desperate to get away from the noise, dust, and exhaust, I walked out into Montjuic Park, where the arena was located. The 'mont' in the name is for 'mountain'; it's on a huge hill that dominates the city. 

For years, there were motorcycle and car races on the roads around and through the park. The F1 circuit abandoned Montjuic in 1975, after an accident killed a driver and five fans. Occasional Grand Prix, TTF1, and World Endurance Championship motorcycle races were held until the '80s, along with Spanish Championship events. Kenny Noyes' dad Dennis clinched a championship the very last time anyone raced there. Dennis was so popular in Spain that the Spanish equivalent of the AMA once passed a rule, which came to be known as "the Noyes rule", that foreigners could accumulate points in the Spanish domestic championship.

Back in Montjuic's heyday, Spain was still under the control of Francisco Franco. Political niceties meant nothing to the Generalissimo; the country had trade barriers that basically made it impossible for the Japanese manufacturers to sell there.

Eventually, to get around the situation, the major Japanese manufacturers all bought into Spanish subsidiaries. Honda bought Montesa, Kawasaki bought a piece of Derbi. Yamaha invested in Sanglas, a maker of unloved police bikes. And Suzuki invested in Puch, an Austrian company that made mopeds in Spain. (My first motorbike was a Puch Condor.) The only manufacturer who was too proud to sell out was Senor Bulto.

Of course, by 1980, Bultaco was out of business.

The huge building that dominates Montjuic from Plaza Catalunya is the Museo Nacional d'Art Catalan. Yes, Catalunya thinks of itself as a separate nation, complete with a secessionist movement. A crowd of people sat appreciatively as a busker, an excellent flamenco guitarist, played a song it took me a while to recognize: Time in a Bottle, by Jim Croce.

Inside the museum, there was a swing band playing, and at least two hundred swing dancers. So it was U.S. music inside and out.

I meant to ask Baker about the amount of time he spent on the rev limiter; more than anyone else. I wonder if it was just that he didn't have the right gearing available, or if for some reason he likes riding on the overrun. At the end of every straight, his bike stuttered like a tobacco auctioneer.

Although Bradley Smith wasn't particularly fast, I thought he looked smooth and controlled most of the time. I was impressed with his workmanlike attitude, which was consistent with the observations of experienced MotoGP journos, who have for the most part defended him against critics who say he's not the most deserving guy for his ride.

Before suiting up, Smith goes through an elaborate and typically methodical stretching and loosening up routine, involving calisthenics, various elastic devices, and a roller. Other riders have said, "If I did all that, I'd be too tired to ride!"

It's a cliche to say that in Spain and Italy, guys like Marquez and Rossi are treated like rock stars. But I was taken aback to see way people--lots and lots of people--just want to be around Marc. He was pretty relaxed and available in his little pit box, signing autographs and flashing his toothpaste-commercial smile for a never ending series of photos. In many ways, it was a lot like a typical flat track pit scene, except that of course all the people who had access to the Superprestigio pit were industry insiders. Still it was nice to see MotoGP coming a little down to earth (or at least, clay.)

Baker signed a lot of autographs too, something he did especially enthusiastically if the seekers were, shall I say, date-worthy. The closest I heard to him speaking Spanish was a cheerful, "Hola, girls" when two cute ones approached. He says he's going to try to learn a little Spanish, for next time. He might find it difficult; they have a different word for almost everything.

Here's how I look at Brad Baker and Marc Marquez coming together, and having Marquez crash out of the 'Superfinal' last Saturday night: Baker told me--and I believe him--that he intentionally held a little bit back in order to give the fans a race to watch. If you accept that there was no chance that Marquez was going to win, then crashing out of a battle for the lead was the most honorable outcome.

Marc deserves a lot of credit for insisting there there'd even be a Superfinal. In the hotel, the night before the race, Bradley Smith's dad/manager was certain that this would be the first and last time a Grand National Champion would be invited to participate, because, he said, the promoters wouldn't countenance their hero being beaten.

"By agreeing to the Superfinal," the MotoGP insider opined, "Marquez has gone from a situation in which he was a certain winner to one where he won't even finish on the podium."

That, it turned out, was a little harsh; Marquez certainly would have finished second if he hadn't crashed.

The influential MotoGP blogger David Emmett came up to Brad after the races, and said, "I thought that you and Marc, on dirt, were like Lorenzo and Marc in Grands Prix; you and Lorenzo are both very smooth and controlled, and Marc was all over the place, the same as he is on a MotoGP bike."

But, David, bear this in mind: Marquez crashed out of a lot of Moto2 races, too. In a year or two he might be all over the place and still be on his wheels at the end of the night. The point is, he beat Lorenzo.

This wasn't the first time that AMA flat track has represented in Spain. In the early '90s, Solo Moto held an American style flat track race on a dog track. They brought in several top U.S. riders, who explained that it wasn't just a dog track, it was a dog of a track.

Still, I can guarantee you that more people watched Baker win the Superfinal on Spanish television than have seen any AMA flat track race in decades. My guess is that more Americans watched and followed the Superprestigio than have watched any Grand National in decades. So when I heard a rumor--that's probably all it was--that AMA Pro Racing had discussed holding a National in another country for next season, I couldn't help but fantasize: How cool would it be to bring the top 10 guys in GNC points, and their bikes, over to Spain for the final race next year?

Jaime Alguersuari is the publisher of Solo Moto and a legendary figure in Spanish motorcycling. After the banquet, he hugged me, thanked me, and made me promise I'd come back next year. "I think," he said while refusing to let me go, "that today, Barcelona was part of the United States. "

I guess exposing thousands of Spanish racing fans to dirt track makes up, in some small way, for exporting Starbucks and KFC, eh?

What with interviews and thank yous, we were the last people to leave Palau St. Jordi on Saturday night. Brad's mechanics offered to help carry out his gear bag. As people divided up the load to lug out, he said, "I'll carry the hardware." He's a racer: leaving with the trophy is what it's all about.

You should've stopped reading at 'fucktard'

I'm not going to go all Chris Christie on you, but I put a post up late on Friday night, in Spain, that excoriated Cycle World and AMA Pro Racing for appropriating the Superprestigio.

The only reason it came to my attention was that I got a flurry of emails from people saying, "Hey, it would've been nice of them to give you credit." And the truth is, it would've been big of them to point out that they were only covering the event at all because, thanks to my Backmarker column on Motorcycle-USA, Brad Baker had been invited. 

The worst part of my little fit of pique wasn't the language I used, it was that I was being stupid. 

The reason I called out Marc Marquez in the first place is that I love the Grand National Championship, and want to raise its profile any way I can. I want to help the GNC regain its past glory and relevance, and I was stupid to be mad at DMG in the guise of AMA Pro Racing for wanting to tag along. That should have been my goal and in fact I did offer to write press releases for them from the event. (They never responded.) Because my feelings were hurt --I know: sniff--I dumped on AMA Pro, saying things calculated to rub them the wrong way. Not too mature.

Furthermore, I didn't only want to raise the profile of the GNC in Europe, I wanted to raise it here, by illustrating how much respect European fans, at least, have for our flat track tradition--more respect than U.S. fans show for it. Cycle World helped with that, a lot. (And in fact, about a week before flying out, I offered them a written account to use in  print and got a one line "no thanks" email. It's not as if I was popular there to start with.)

Anyway, my plan worked: Brad Baker gained nearly a thousand Twitter followers in two days, doubling his social media reach, and Bike--probably the most respected English-language motorcycle magazine--asked me to cover the Peoria TT this season.

So, mea culo, I mean, 'culpa'. I was wrong to call AMA Pro Racing and Cycle World 'fucktards'.

AMA Pro Racing's failures of imagination

Earlier this month, in one of me regular "Backmarker" columns on Motorcycle-USA.com, I wrote—half seriously and half just out of frustration—that AMA Pro Racing should reunify the Grand National Championship. I.E., revert to some form of the pre-1985 rules, when a single #1 plate was awarded to the rider who scored the most points at Expert Nationals held on road courses, and on Mile, 1/2-mile, ST and TT courses.

That column almost set a record for 'likes' (600+) and triggered a debate on Facebook that was interesting both because of the obvious emotions it brought up (both positive and negative) and because of who got involved: Chris Carr's and Mike Hacker's pages lit up; I even got a phone call from Bill Werner. More on that in a few paragraphs...

My column was really written from a marketing-strategy point of view. I began by essentially exempting the Supercross series from my critique, on the grounds that as an outsider looking in on SX, I think Feld Motor Sports does a pretty solid job promoting that sport. This morning, I had that position ratified by the L.A. Times, which ran a headline about Anaheim I on its home page (tablet version) above the fold. I thought that, for a moment, the Times' website was feeding me stories they thought I'd like, so I also opened the site on Mary's iPad; AI results were shown in the same spot.

Anyway, back to the column and the debate it provoked.

In general, the reactions I saw came from people on the flat track side of the sport. Most were positive, perhaps because the consensus is that it would be easier for a flat tracker to transition to asphalt than for a road racer to go the other way. If readers were critical of my proposal, it was usually because they thought, "We can't find the budget we need to run twins on Miles and 1/2-miles as it is; you're telling us we need to build a road racer, too?"

But another way to look at my proposal was, we'd be rationalizing both AMA Pro Road Racing and Flat Track; we'd be consolidating the best (and best-attended) 6-8 road races and the best 6-8 flat track events. We'd also be consolidating all the sponsorship available at the National Championship level.

As an "ad guy" the thing I like about this is that it gives AMA Pro Racing a real marketing hook. For decades, the AMA's Grand National Championship was a search for the best all-round racer in the U.S. In the '70s, Kenny Roberts went to Europe and reinforced the idea that the Grand National Champion was in fact the best racer in the entire world. Spencer, Lawson, Rainey, etc., did nothing to discourage that hubris.

Americans are sports isolationists: The NFL, basketball, baseball... they're all sports that were invented here and are still mainly played here. "Football" means something totally different in the rest of the world. That's why I think reverting to a uniquely American motorcycle championship makes sense from a marketing-strategy perspective.

Bill Werner's not one who suffers fools gladly, so when I saw his name on my "missed call" display I held my breath, wondering if he'd bite my head off for suggesting a reunified championship. But when I called, I found that he thought the idea had merit. We talked for quite a while, and when Bill gets excited it's hard to make notes as fast as he's going. But suffice to say that he's incredibly frustrated by the current state of AMA Pro Racing. He ran the Harley-Davidson factory flat track team for years; from his perspective, for example, the idea of balancing the regulations every 30 days will drive factory teams out of the sport.

Honestly, AMA Pro Racing has—perhaps in spite of itself—achieved some things in the last few years. Most people feel the racing on display is good; there are more brands present on flat tracks. But from a marketing perspective, and looking at it as a business from a strategic perspective, it's a disaster. The problem is the lack of imagination and foresight in Daytona.

Last month, I got Brad Baker invited to Marc Marquez' Superprestigio race in Barcelona. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that to point out that AMA Pro Racing didn't do it.

So, the most charismatic and exciting new Grand Prix racer in at least a decade decides he's going to put on a flat track race and it doesn't occur to AMA Pro Racing to try to capitalize on it? Or did no one at Daytona even know it was happening—despite the Superprestigio making the news in motorcycle media around the world?

In the last few years, flat track's seen the return of Triumph, Ducati, KTM and even BMW to the big tracks. All that's happened with little-to-no manufacturer support; and yet it didn't occur to anyone in Daytona that having the American champion making news in Europe might create some marketing synergy. To say nothing of the fact that flat track desperately needs a shot in the arm back home. Doesn't anyone at AMA Pro Racing realize that having the U.S. champ go and show the MotoGP boys the fast line on a short track is a golden story opportunity for all U.S. motorcycle media?

The failure of imagination at AMA Pro Racing is stunning, but U.S. distributors and manufacturers aren't doing much better. After getting Baker invited, I wrote AMA Pro Racing, KTM (who make the bike Baker races on short tracks) and Harley-Davidson (Baker is the factory's official rider and while he'll ride a KTM in Spain, U.S. flat track and H-D are inextricably linked.) I told them, "Look, I'm going to Spain anyway. If I go, and write a couple of Backmarker columns, they'll appear on Motorcycle-USA only. If I go and write press releases, the story will be picked up by every American web site and magazine. If I go and issue releases to European media, we can spin this into a great story about flat track in the 'States, too.

I got no responses. AMA Pro, zilch. KTM, nada. Well, I did get a reply from H-D, saying, "He's going to be racing a KTM, so we don't see how we can use it." That was after I'd suggested that we could seed stories in European media about Baker being Harley's factory rider, Baker could sign autographs in the Barcelona Harley dealership, ride up to the arena on a Harley street-tracker...

The AMA actually did put out a press release about Baker's trip to the Superprestigio. I guess it would have killed them to credit Motorcycle-USA.com and Backmarker for making it happen, eh?

Anyway, I don't suppose that I should be surprised by the lack of imagination from AMA Pro Racing (and KTM, and Harley.) But honestly when the motorcycle industry in general and the professional motorcycle racing industry in particular is still blaming "the economy" for their commercial woes... Suffice to say that doesn't ring true for me.

If they can't see their way clear to capitalize on things like Baker's trip to Spain, I guess there's no chance that the powers-that-be in Daytona are going to call me up and say, "Tell us more about this idea you have, to reunify the Grand National Championship."

There are only a handful of road races currently scheduled; the AMA Pro Racing superbike championship seems to be without a title sponsor. Don't be surprised if the series' already-sketchy TV deal falls apart next. And AMA Pro Racing will blame poor motorcycle industry revenues, "the recession", or for all I know, Obama.

The real problem is a lack of imagination.

Merry Christmas, eh?

Don't drink and ride. But, like Mitzi here, do what you gotta' do, to get 'em home.

It's been a long time between posts here at Bikewriter. And this is just a Christmas wish, not a real update.

I seem to be on an upswing here the last few months, with traction for my new advertising consultancy, record book sales, and a moto-journalism 'win' in convincing Marc Marquez to invite AMA Pro Racing's flat track champ Brad Baker to the Superprestigio in January.

I'll be attending that event, and I'm sure there will be some interesting posts as a result. I've also got a ton of other stuff I've been meaning to write about, including critical looks at: AMA Pro's ability to market itself; motorcycle websites that seem to have sold out or given up, or sold out and given up; and a cop whose sideline is having hookers administer unneeded oxygen to motorcycle club racers in between events. (Hey, it'll be cold day in hell before I can make up shit half as weird as what's really going on out there.)

Speaking of which, stay warm, eh? And please start checking back again every now and then, because I really will be updating more than once a month again.

Thanksgiving Notes: Motorcycles saved my life

I wrote this three years ago. It's one of the essays featured in my new book, On Motorcycles: The Best of Backmarker.

A couple of weeks ago, on one of the many perfect fall days we've had this year in Kansas City, I went out on my usual bicycle training ride. The ride wasn't a huge deal; on my single-speed, out of my loft and over into the West Bottoms then up the 12^th Street viaduct, through downtown, past River Market and down into the East Bottoms, and back. Basically, it was up and over the biggest hills I could find around my house; an hour and a bit in which I try to make up with quality what I lack in quantity. 

Most of the route passed through largely un-, or at least under-used warehouse districts, and the roads, as usual, were pretty empty. The Kansas and Missouri rivers meet here, hence the 'Bottoms' in those neighborhood names, but I only occasionally caught a glimpse of the water. The American Royal, a huge rodeo and stock fair, was on and there were horses hobbled in parking lots, and pastured along the levee.

It was late afternoon. The sun raked in. The sky was a deep, deep blue. Black shadows. Backlit trees in fall colors; as if the the world was created for  cinematographers. I rocked it; if my quads got any more pumped, I'd've been at risk for compartment syndrome. As I approached my turn around point, down in the East Bottoms I came to the long straightaway where I sprinted into a headwind.

The East Bottoms is, well, sort of a weird area. It's mostly industrial, with some run-down residential and a great honky-tonk bar – Knucklehead's – hidden away there, too. I passed a trailer park, and heard the sound of a compressor and a nail gun. The place was was mostly filled with actual trailers like the ones you'd pull on a vacation, as opposed to mobile homes. The nail gun was being used to skirt one of the trailers to keep winter drafts out from beneath it. I thought, The guy should've taken care of that last winter – which was KC's hardest winter in decades. Or, had he just been foreclosed out of some warm home and moved into those new digs?

I turned around, caught the tailwind, and cranked up my cadence, as fast as I could spin. Ripping back down the straight with my head down, for the nth time I felt intense gratitude for such simple pleasures, and for having managed to stay in shape. I spent a few weekends last summer watching Kevin Atherton limp around the Lloyd Brothers Motorsports Ducati at flat track races. While he's resolutely cheerful, it's clear his racing career took a huge toll on him. I've had friends pay far higher prices than that, too, enduring injuries I know I couldn't bear.  

Our sport is dangerous; that's not news. I wasn't one of those riders who thought, It won't happen to me. I thought about danger often. It was never dying that scared me, it was not dying that scared me. I've got some expensive Ti components (and I'm missing some cognitive functions; if you tell me your phone number, I have to write it down one digit at a time) but so far, I've come off lightly.

In fact, I'm able to enjoy simple physical pleasures not in spite of motorcycles and motorcycle racing, but because of it. It's not just that motorcycles haven't killed me (yes, I'm touching wood as I type this.) Motorcycles actually kept me alive.

I've never really told this story in much detail, but 15 or 20 years ago, when I was a club racer up in Canada, I got sick. I had some kind of autoimmune disorder, which depending on which doctor I asked was either lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. You know the expression, 'off the charts'? My white counts were literally off the charts. I got a graphic output after one lab test and the bar graph went off the edge of the page. When I finally got in to see a specialist, after a long wait, he looked up from that lab result and said, “I wouldn't have been surprised to see you come in in a wheelchair.”  

I was lucky that when it came on, I was in outstanding physical condition; I'd been training hard since university. I had a lot to lose before I'd ever be incapacitated. And, typical of people with lupus, I found that while it was painful and utterly exhausting to keep working out, the harder I trained the less I felt the symptoms. Still, I could only slow – not reverse – the course of the disease.

Month by month and year by year, I lost strength and range of motion in virtually every part of my body. It was frustrating because I was club racing and learning to ride better, but I couldn't really capitalize on it. I had to be super-careful not to crash; the drugs I was taking made the risks of injury much higher and besides, just getting out of bed in the morning already hurt like hell. By the time I raced in the TT, in 2002, I was careful not to let my friends see how hard I had to struggle just to get into my leathers or let them know that I'd almost bleed out from a shaving nick. And after that... It was as if my body had been holding out just to let me live out that dream, because in the next year, symptoms took a turn for the worse.

During that year of precipitous physical decline, I found myself wondering, At what point would in not be worth living? My life had, for decades, been defined more by physicality than intellectuality or spirituality. I decided that at the point where I couldn't wipe my own butt, I didn't want to live. Let me tell you, it was seriously depressing and I frequently rehearsed, in my mind, that hunting accident. 

Through that period, I really wanted to finish my memoir, Riding Man, and I was grateful that I could at least type. But the thing that kept me going was that I could still ride motorcycles. Maybe not well, or nearly at the level I once had ridden; getting a leg over the saddle was a real trick. You really don't need Too Much Information on this so I won't go into detail, but even though there days when I wasn't flexible enough to reach my butt, I still put in 1,000 kilometers in the alps, unearthing the story of Pierlucio 'Spadino' Tinazzi, the hero of the Mont Blanc Tunnel fire. 

So I put off the hunting accident.

Before I reached that point, I found a doctor who changed my drug regimen to one that worked way better, at least in the short-to-medium term. The drugs I was taking were literally toxic – one of them is used to kill cancer cells in chemotherapy – but they radically improved my life. Once they really kicked in, I could ride OK. I could cycle and swim and, as before, the harder I trained the better I felt. For the first time in over a decade, I started to feel better and better, not worse and worse.

After a year and half in France, I moved back to North America, to San Diego. I started working at Motorcyclist, had health coverage for a while, and found a new specialist. By that point, I was an expert on lupus and rheumatoid arthritis myself, and we had a long discussion about which of those two diseases affected me. It didn't really matter, since I had a treatment that worked for the time being, and in any case, neither disease is curable. At that point, when I looked at friends my age who weren't sick, they were mostly in such crappy shape that I wouldn't have traded places with them.

Then my cool job fell apart, I got divorced and remarried – poor but happy – and I started to feel... good. My doctor and I developed a plan to wean me off drugs and, for the first time in well over a decade, my blood tests started to look... normal. I don't use the phrase 'miracle,' that would be too strong. But about two years ago, my doctor – a very experienced rheumatologist – got a little teary when he said, “Don't call me again unless you get sick.” That's not something those guys get to say. Their patients don't get better, the job is just to mitigate the symptoms as long as possible.

I know that the thing that got me through to that point, was, there was a part of me that was determined to stay healthy enough to ride motorcycles. The weights, the cycling, swimming, yoga; the glucosamine sulfate, the 30,000 aspirin, the prednisone, the methotrexate... all that stuff wasn't to ward off pain and depression and slow the progress of the disease, it was, This is what you have to do to ride. You know those idiots in the German-inspired half-helmets who wear those “Live to ride, ride to live” patches? Well, for me that was literal truth.

I climbed up out of the East Bottoms through downtown KC, and right up at the top of that hill in the financial district, I was distracted by something I saw on the sidewalk. Two private security guards were sort of wrestling an unconscious street person upright on bus stop bench, and he ended up slumping heavily to the sidewalk. It only took a few seconds for me to process the situation. It wasn't violent and as far as I could tell, they were just getting ready to call the cops or an ambulance which would be doing the guy a favor. He wasn't very warmly dressed, and when the sun went down the temperature would quickly drop into the thirties. One of the guards noticed me noticing them and as I rode past called out, “Good afternoon sir, how are you?” They'd said similar things to me when I'd passed before under normal circumstances, but his question was incongruous when there was someone lying right there at his feet who was clearly not having a good afternoon .

The light turned green and I pedalled away. At the next light I stopped beside a limousine. The passenger window rolled smoothly down. I looked in at the driver, who called out, “Want to trade?” It crossed my mind that his job paid better than motorcycle journalism, but then I remembered that my job allowed me to the freedom to hop on my bicycle and train, or go for a motorcycle ride, on any unseasonably fine day.

I laughed and said, “No.”

“I'd rather be where you are,” he said. “This is the wrong kind of saddle-sore!”

Then, he rolled up the window and the light turned green. 

A few blocks later, one short final sprint, I was home. I locked up my bicycle downstairs, glanced at the Triumph and my '65 Dream, and thought, You deserve to take the elevator today. Before I'd even reached my door, I could smell chili simmering on the stove.

Monday Morning Quarterback, Wednesday edition: Rossi sacks Burgess

Well, Marquez did what he had to do, in order to win the Championship. Whether you should add your own “in spite of the MotoGP stewards throwing out his entire PI result” to that sentence is up to you.

But the story turned out to be Valentino Rossi firing Jeremy Burgess, who had been his crew chief through thick and thin, since his days on a Honda 500 two-stroke.

Rossi’s obviously had a hard, hard time riding the Ducati in 2011 and ‘12. He quickly had to face the fact that Casey Stoner could win on the Duc, but he couldn’t. I suppose he could tell himself that Stoner was a completely unique case -- the one person on earth for whom the Duc was actually a winning machine. It probably helped that Stoner was an odd duck himself and not particularly well understood or liked in paddock or by fans.

Then, Rossi returned to Yamaha, and notwithstanding a couple of flashes of brilliance (Qatar and Assen) he was showed up all season by Jorge Lorenzo. Honestly, there’s no dishonor in that... Marquez won the title this year, but 99, not 93, is the best rider of the current-gen MotoGP machines.

The truth hurts: When Yamaha needed Rossi to finish on the podium, to give his teammate any chance of the title, he was incapable of doing so.

Anyway, back to Burgess’ summary sacking.

My Facebook friend and ex-Bike magazine journalist Simon Hargreaves noted that in order to compete in MotoGP you simply must have a supreme degree of self-confidence. Si essentially excused Rossi’s undignified treatment of Burgess by saying, “Hey, an irrational self confidence is an essential trait of top riders, so it’s not Rossi’s fault that he can’t look in the mirror and spot the problem. Psychologically, he has to find someone else to blame and it can’t be Yamaha, because Lorenzo’s winning on the same machine. Burgess is the only logical target.”

I think Simon’s pretty much on the money there, although what he calls an essential character trait in MotoGP -- that selfishness and unwillingness accept blame or acknowledge the effect of your actions on others like faithful crew chiefs -- would make those guys psychopaths out in the world.

(As an aside, I can guarantee you that Jeremy Burgess is a ruthlessly competitive guy too, yet I am certain that he would never have dumped Rossi for some incoming hotshot rider. Nor do I think he would ever, ever have said, “Hey, the bike I give my rider is every bit as good as the bike Ramón Forcada hands off to Jorge Lorenzo; the only thing I can’t do is change the torque settings on the nut that connects the handlebars to the seat.” Burgess, I am certain, would have stuck by Rossi come what may, and would have been happy to retire when Rossi did, confident in the knowledge that Rossi had been the greatest rider of his era, as Burgess had been the most successful crew chief. Although Burgess was also the most successful chief of the preceding era, as well.)

What’s fascinating to me about the rider confidence that Simon noted is not the rather sad personality traits that come with it when those guys get off the bike. And I don’t excuse their sad personalities off the bike, because I’ve met real sporting gladiators -- guys who put their blood and bones on the line in scary, intense pursuits -- who are thoughtful, introspective, and even gentle people away from their particular arena.

What fascinates me about that confidence -- and makes me jealous of it -- is that it is not only  a trait you need to ride at the top level. It is a trait that actually makes it easier to ride at the top level.

Most people see a rider like Marc Marquez and note his incredible lean angle at mid corner. I see the nearly shocking speed at which he makes the transition from upright to max lean. For us as hack street riders, or track day riders, or club racers, mid-corner speed is the thing that is going to move us from the C group to the B group; it’s the thing that is going to impress your pals in the canyons. But at the top level, everyone’s got mid-corner speed; it’s the transitions that determine your finishing position.

To ride at that level, riders must have the self belief to totally commit to 99%+ of max lean and go there instantly. Mortals would feel their way there. And when they get to max lean they can’t have self doubt, because anything that causes them to tense up on the bike will mask the sensitivity and feel they need, slow their reactions, and prevent them from making the myriad but very, very micro corrections they’re making.

Most of that is happening in their bodies, not their minds. But doubt is the enemy of kinesthetic genius. This year, for the first time in his life Valentino Rossi was flat out dominated by his teammate. 2013 probably brought a few doubts to the surface that he’d been able to compartmentalize -- even at Ducati where he’d been relegated to running mid-pack.

We’ll know next year whether Rossi’s new crew chief brings a return to winning ways. Like Jeremy Burgess, I doubt that will be the case. But if it does, it may not be because Silvano Galbusera actually knows anything that Burgess doesn’t. It may just be because a change -- any change -- has allowed Rossi to pack up any tiny doubts and hide them away.

Why I love Honda: Part 8,736

Anyone who's a regular Backmarker reader knows that while I love a lot of motorcycles, I've got a special place in my heart for Honda.

In spite of the fact that Marc Marquez seems poised to give Honda another MotoGP championship, and Honda did well at the TT this year, I suppose there are still more than a few people who feel that, for example, the CBR1000 lags far behind other bikes in its class. There are old farts (like me) who in their dark moments bemoan a company has not been the same since the death of Soichiro Honda.

Then, Honda does something like this, and restores our faith.

 

When I watched this, I got a little choked up at the thought of how much time, effort, expense -- and yes, love -- went into a beautiful tribute to a guy who who has been dead and gone for 20 years.

Sure, the Italians wear their hearts on their sleeves. But no other company has Honda's profound, soulful passion for racing. So when the company stumbles next, and you hear detractors saying it no longer has what it takes to win, remember this: In racing, come what may, passion will out.

Some of you may hardly remember Ayrton Senna. If you find yourself wondering what this is all about, take a couple of hours and watch this. Keep that box of Kleenex handy.