AGV Backmarker:
Daytona Nights: It was the Hess of times, it was the…
March 23, 2006
By Mark Gardiner
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The Speedway doesn’t release attendance figures, but a cursory glance at the stands on Friday night (and again Saturday afternoon) proved that the supercross drew a lot more fans than the 200.

I guess, like most road racing guys, I’m jealous of the success of SX. Not that they don’t deserve their mass-market, mainstream audience; I watched them practice Friday around noon. Those kids (that’s what they are) ride a new track slowly for one lap, then start nailing the doubles and triples, because they only get about 15 minutes of practice before they have to qualify.

“What’s that honey? No, I’m just working late at the office. Oh that sound, I think there’s something wrong with the air conditioning.” Main Street, Friday night. While the often-cited Bike Week attendance figures (usually around 300,000) are wildly exaggerated, there are still tens of thousands of bikers down here. And one thing’s clear: in America, “motorcycle” = “Harley-Davidson.” Mark Gardiner photo

You know, you get out on a new road course and you work your way up to speed gradually. But you don’t work your way up to a 70-foot triple. It’s totally ballistic and totally binary—you make it or you don’t. Better them than me.

I read an account somewhere of the first motocross race at the Speedway. Some road racer sat up in the grandstand glumly watching and when it was over said, “It won’t be long before we’re a supporting act for this,” or words to that effect. (I can’t find the original quote, so I may have the text wrong but the substance is correct.)

What makes it poignant is that that was in 1972. So that prescient racer, whoever he was, was watching supercross’ first faltering steps (guys riding CZs, Huskies, and Maicos looked at Gary Bailey’s one “big” jump across a drainage ditch and many elected to ride around it in the race). And he was comparing it to the 200 while that event was at its absolute peak. Giacomo Agostini, Jarno Saarinen, Johnny Cecotto, Kenny Roberts, and Steve Baker were all “200” winners during the 1970’s—and all were once and future world champions. Hailwood was here too.

By the time long-travel suspension turned motocross into an air show, it was probably a foregone conclusion that road racing—especially the 200—would lose its status as the American motorcycle championship.

Maybe supercross was the original extreme sport. After all, the AMA has had supercross championships since ’74, and the X Games only date from ’93. But maybe SX only broke out of the motorcycling niche when it could piggyback on the marketing of other, more recently invented, and equally telegenic extreme sports. The truth is probably a bit of both. (All this might have followed from those first long-travel suspension MX bikes, but it could just as easily have been triggered by the switch from composite to urethane skateboard wheels, or even the invention of surfboard thruster fins.)

Anyway, they don’t call it “mass media” and “sports entertainment” for nothing. Any time a sport is broadcast on American network television, the audience has grown much larger than the pool of people who do the sport. The NFL isn’t primarily watched by people who play football (even flag football) even occasionally.

Will Harleys on the grid put this guy in the stands? It’s a good thing there’s lots of empty seats, so the people behind him can move. No one will see over that hat. Mark Gardiner photo

So the triumph of supercross is that the audience is now general (not “random”—the marketing staff at Live Nation can break the audience down into very specific demographic and psychographic groups), but there’s one way the audience can’t be generally categorized: as motorcyclists.

That explains why SX sponsors aren’t (all) motorcycle-industry companies. Less than two percent of the U.S. population are active riders. Do you think Amp’d Mobile or Makita tools could be bothered to target them? Not a chance. I’ve been the VP of marketing for a $200 million company, and I’ve made those decisions myself.

Unlike the SX audience, the road racing audience is made up of motorcyclists. Back in the ‘70s, this was perhaps less of a problem. Then (as now), the motorcycle industry was booming. The difference is that in the ‘70s, the average motorcycle buyer was about 20 years younger than he is now and more likely to relate to road racing. There was already the beginning of a Harley vs. everything else schism in the market. And Harley never won the 200 after ’69. But the XRs were a factor in road racing for a few more years, and as long as the AMA championship was a unified dirt/pavement affair, the Harley crowd could surely relate.

Nowadays, Superbike paddock whiners complain that our series lacks a title sponsor, and they envy the out-of-industry money that (seems to) pour into SX. In fact, we don’t even draw from the pool of all riders.

Late Friday night during Bike Week, I cruised both Main Street, to check out the Harley scene, and the Hess garage, which is a hotbed of street racers.

The attendance figures for Bike Week are pretty exaggerated, but there were still at least 10,000 hogs down there. I looked for an anti-Japanese T-shirt. I couldn’t find one, either for sale or in the crowd. My friend Bill J. (I always like to cover biker gatherings with someone who’s 6’6” and 285) told me, “You should have been here a few years ago, when I saw a guy in a shirt that read, ‘God made Hondas so n____rs wouldn’t ride Harleys.’”

Main Street’s not overtly racist any more. And it may not be as vehemently isolationist as it once was. But while the Harley riders park up and mingle, the Japanese bikes keep moving.

The gathering at Hess is maybe a couple of hundred sport bikes—a drop in the bucket. Since the nearest bend is about a day’s ride to the north, it’s more of a drag scene. The odd Harley rider pulls in to actually buy gas, and while they’re not jeered, you can see them looking around and wondering if this is the first chapter in a motorcycle version of Bonfire of the Vanities (“Darling, can’t we just outrun them?” “Are you kidding, look at them, they all have six foot swingarms.” “Ohmigod, one’s staring at us…”)

If you hadn’t seen the throng on Main Street, the crowd at the Hess garage would seem big. It is pretty interesting, which explains why I ran into a guy from Honda’s R&D department checking it out. Half an hour after this pic was taken, the atmosphere changed when the cops came through to check VINs. Mark Gardiner photo

From a marketing point of view, I think it might be almost as easy to make a supercross-style transition to a non-riding audience as it would be to unify the currently fragmented audience of riders. And obviously, there’s a huge upside to targeting the mass market.

There are obvious lessons to learn from SX: They have a small number of classes (two) and lots of short races in rapid succession. Maybe we could do that. SX fans can see the whole track from their seat—that’s not something we can offer. SX riders bust huge moves. A road racer’s riding inputs are much more subtle, visually; we might have to really educate new fans before they’d see what we insiders appreciate.

For better or for worse though, it’s about making good TV. And TV is about stories, and stories are about people. The best lesson may come from watching ABC’s package of the Olympic Winter Games—a bunch of sports even more obscure than road racing that are made interesting by focusing on the people involved.

At one point during Bike Week, I found myself alone in the press cafeteria with Steve McLaughlin. To describe him as a made man in the world of motorcycle promotion would be an understatement. He invented World Superbike racing and has promoted a bunch of MotoGP races, too. His family goes back three generations with the France family, who own the Speedway and control NASCAR. We had a lively discussion about the pros and cons of making the “200” an FX race and the potential benefit (to everyone) of having a few Harleys—AKA Buells—on the grid. He doesn’t mince words, and if he’s interested in the conversation, he won’t let you skate over any point.

I said that MotoGP had moved from “niche” to “general” interest in a lot of markets.

“Why is that?” he demanded. Not because he wanted to know—he already has his ideas, I’m sure—but because he wanted to see if I could buttress my point. And in truth, he sort of had me. Not because I didn’t have any answer, but because these things are complex and organic. In MotoGP’s case, Rossi arrived on the scene at the same moment that a huge global audience was frustrated with Formula One car racing. That was lucky for us.

It’s not all show and no go. Check out the pressurized swingarm. It powers an air-shifter that is triggered by computer. Mark Gardiner photo

Certainly, the Rossi factor supports my argument that success will be driven by characters. But television’s still the key to creating those interesting, character-driven stories in the general public’s mind. It can be done. For God’s sake, in the last Olympic Winter Games, ABC made a two-hour cross-country skiing relay pretty compelling once they managed to tell the whole Italy vs. Norway backstory.

Bringing those characters to life first takes time, and more to the point, investment. A lot of people are mad at Jimmy France for making the 200 a Formula Xtreme race and a lot of people are mad at Merrill Vanderslice for assuring Erik Buell that his bikes would be deemed legal to race in it. One who wasn’t mad was Jimmy France. Who can blame him for seeing that throng of devoted Harley riders—a crowd that vastly outnumbers sport bike riders at Bike Week—and thinking, “I want to give them a reason to buy tickets”?

As long as each promoter is pushing his own one or two events, no one will spend enough to reach a really wide audience. In fact, they may find themselves working at cross purposes. Perhaps the most timely and applicable lesson we can take from the success of supercross racing is that Live Nation had to promote the whole series if they were to justify the substantial investment required to make it appeal to a general audience. The Jam Sports fiasco showed that the AMA’s relationship with its SX promoter wasn’t all sweetness and light, but it worked because the single promoter had a huge incentive to make it work.