AGV Backmarker: Just Kidding, Part 2

Last week, I transcribed the first part of a long chat I had with Mike Kidd, who has taken the reins of AMA Pro Racing’s Flat Track series. Over the winter, I’ve spent a few columns looking back at Ascot Park, and at the evolution of Honda’s NS750 and RS750 factory racers. Those were periods in Grand National racing when Harley-Davidson had real rivals. I was interested to hear what Mike had to say about bringing brand rivalry back to the Twins class:

“The Twins class is a delicate, touchy situation right now, and I say that because probably 80 percent of the bikes on the racetrack are Harleys. Teams have a lot of money invested in them, Harley’s invested a lot of money in this sport.

If you walk through the pits, you’ll hear people say they’d like to see another brand come in and compete. We’ve got to figure out how we can balance the field, everything from 550cc Aprilias to 1,200cc Buells that want to flat track, but in the middle we’ve got this dominant XR750.

We don’t want the bikes going any faster than the XR750s are going. If you look at Springfield, you’ve probably got four of five guys that can run in the 34-second range when the track’s just right. But you’ve got fifteen-to-twenty guys that can run in the 35-second range, so we’ve got to get the field balanced so that we have more guys capable of winning on the miles, rather than just the top four of five all the time. [Hah! If four of five guys could win in AMA Superbike, or MotoGP for that matter, road racing would be a lot better than it is! MG]

Some of the production 1,000cc bikes have over 100 horsepower and you can’t use it to try to beat the Harley, because they actually have too much power. So what we thought we’d do is have bikes 750cc and larger run 38mm restrictors. I don’t think it’s fair to lure brands back into flat track, and then when they win a race or two, hand them restrictors. We learned our lesson with Honda, and we need to remember it.

We should say 750s and bigger, this is a restricted class. The smaller bikes, from 550 to 750, there’s no restrictions; you can bore and stroke ’em—we feel like those smaller motors aren’t up to the Harley yet, but that in the hands of a good tuner they’ll be able to compete with the XR750 and even win. So long term—this is not going to be a fix overnight—we’ll see the lap times slow down a little bit. That’s not to help the other brands compete; it’s just to give us a little cushion for safety.

Back when I rode in the ’70s and ’80s, the most horsepower I had was probably 88 to 91. The tracks aren’t any wider today, but they’ve got ten more horsepower. There’s a need to slow the bikes down a little bit for safety.

Personally, I don’t like achieving that with horsepower limits, because the last thing I want to have happen is for a guy to win and roll up onto the dyno after the race and have him be illegal. We had to do that a few times in road racing and it broke my heart to see a team that had won a race be half a horsepower over. I’d just as soon not get into that.

I think that as a sanctioning body, we can work with the tuners and mechanics to get good, accurate dyno readings, which is what we did at Indy last year. We invited about ten guys, we put Harley-Davidsons on the dyno, Aprilias, Suzukis; we ran ’em on the dyno and on the track to get lap times, so we could see how they compared.

I mentioned to Mike that a few years ago—I don’t remember when—they specifically banned “twingles” (twins with uneven firing orders to make them behave more like singles). I figured it would help a lot of Harley’s rivals if they could adjust crank timing.

“Yeah, I wasn’t involved in the rules committee or anything, but I think the Harley twingles were banned because there were fears they would be too expensive to run; the longevity wasn’t there. Also, they thought they didn’t sound as good. They just sounded like big singles. Personally, I think that not being able to twingle is a good rule.

It all comes down to the show. Last year at Springfield and Indy—the races I attended—we’re on the right track but we just have to do some marketing. Our number-one priority right now is increased ticket sales for the promoters. We’ve got to increase spectator count. There’s four or five events in this series that do extremely well, and there’s a handful that come and go.

We need to get a good, stable series. On our end, we’re going to work with our promoters this year and help them with their advertising and marketing because, again, some of them do one motorcycle race a year—they’re not that familiar with the motorcycle industry, with the getting the dealers motivated. We want to put our two cents in and help the promoters.

We have to get more TV coverage. We’re working hard; we understand that Lucas Oil is going to televise the Indy Mile again. Chet Burks is putting together three events—probably the Springfield Miles and Peoria [TT]. That will give us four televised events this year.

We need to work on point funds, and get to marketing this thing. The marketing will help with ticket sales, and if we do a good job with TV, you’ll see the manufacturers start getting interested in dirt track again. They’ll want to come and play with us. You know, unfortunately for Jim France and Roger Edmondson, they probably couldn’t have taken over at a worse time. There’s not much money; sponsorship’s being cut back. The old tobacco money’s gone; the energy drinks are tightening up.

A year or two ago, it was pretty easy to call Red Bull or Monster and get some type of sponsorship support. That’s lacking right now, but if we all stick together and get through the next year, the future’s still bright.

I asked Mike what has to happen to get from four televised events to televising the entire series:

The way television works today is, you pretty much pay to be on TV. So what we have to do is go and find some corporate sponsors. I know the industry gets tapped a lot; Harley-Davidson, Honda—everyone comes to their doors saying, “I’ve got this great program, but we need your support.” It’s time that we go after non-endemic sponsors, whether it’s Lucas or Valvoline, Red Bull, or Monster. There’s a ton of potential sponsors out there once the economy turns around.

Of course, to get sponsors, you need the TV package, so it’s kind of a Catch-22. Do I get the TV first, or the sponsors first? I think on our end, if we can get a TV package together, we can go sell it [to sponsors and advertisers]. That’s the way we can go from four events to ten events. Maybe in the next five years, all of them will be televised.

I asked Kidd what the prospects were for teams—how healthy, financially, the average Grand National entrant is:

This is the worst shape they’ve been in since I’ve been in flat track, and I was a rookie with Kenny Roberts back in ’72. Financially, for these teams, this is going to be the roughest year ever.

I can tell you that, as a sanctioning body, we’ll be enforcing the rules. Any team that tries to cheat, and take money out of the pockets of teams that are having to race for purse money, they’ll be sitting in the stands. Rules will be enforced. It’s going to be a purse money series this year.

I asked Kidd how much purse money a solid mid-pack team could expect to earn—say, a guy who might not win any races but will make every main:

I haven’t run that number, but I know it’s not nearly enough. I’d say that a rider that won on a typical weekend, and had all the right contingency in place, he’d be looking at $10,000 for a win. I know that it takes anywhere from $5,000 to $7,000 per race, by the time you throw all your travel expenses in, your mechanics; it’s expensive today to go racing, and I feel for these guys.

I’ve been on the phone to people I know in the industry, and with non-endemic sponsors, trying to get some of these guys sponsorships, and potential sponsors come back to me and say, “Mike, it’s a great product, we want to get involved, but you’re hitting us at the wrong time.” It’s not the product, the show, the fan demographics—it’s just not the right time to be investing money.

A while back, before the DMG takeover, I spoke to Ronnie Jones about a plan he had to promote flat track in conjunction with a few NASCAR races. When talking to Kidd, I asked him if there’s any opportunity to leverage Jim France’s other business interests.

Yes, but the thing with doing them with NASCAR races is—there’s a couple of issues: They’ve tried doing “World of Outlaws” [short track sprint car racing]. Bruton Smith has a few super-speedway tracks with a dirt track on the property; he couldn’t get many spectators to walk over to watch a World of Outlaws race.

I think one thing that hinders dirt track in a setting like that is that those are NASCAR fans, who came to watch a stock car race. For a World of Outlaws fan or a flat track fan, to fight that traffic to try to watch a race, it turns them off. I think it’s a great idea and something we should research, but the feedback I’m getting from promoters is that it’s risky.

I know it worked at Indy, in the context of the MotoGP weekend, but it was off-premises; the traffic wasn’t a problem. People could get from the speedway to the track [at the Indiana State Fairground], and we got them in there and put on a great show.

I think [Indy] really kick-started flat track. People had heard how great the racing was, but they stayed away. Our hardcore fans know how good the racing is every week, but a lot of people saw it for the first time there and couldn’t believe it. That one race is really going to kick-start our sport, and now it’s our job to take that momentum and not screw it up.

I asked Mike if there’s an opportunity to leverage other, non-motorcycle events in the same way that Indy worked. I was thinking of events with appealing demographics, whether it’s the PBR, or the UFC.

Maybe, but it’s not always easy. A few years ago I promoted a fair race in Winston-Salem. I thought, there’s 15,000 people at the fair. All I have to do is run practice, and those people will hear the bikes, come see them, and then they will want to watch the races. It didn’t work. Motorcycle racing does have a fan base. It may be smaller than a lot of people think it is, but to start generating new people is a risky business. I’m not going to say it can’t be done. I’m not going to say we shouldn’t try to cross-promote with monster truck shows, or rodeos. Something’s got to work, because it worked with MotoGP.

Thinking that NASCAR built itself up to be pretty huge before really emphasizing its western presence, I asked Kidd if we need to get dirt track back to the West Coast:

We have to be on the West Coast. There’s a huge fan base out there, and the whole industry, besides Harley-Davidson, is back there. We’re talking to the Pomona promoters about possibly having our season finale out there. I think it would be great to wrap up the ’09 season at Pomona with Gene Romero’s race and the Love Ride; that would be a great weekend.

Right now, there’s a long gap in the Twins schedule between Topeka in September and the first Springfield race on Memorial Day weekend. So we’ve got to look at how can we go west after Daytona, and maybe go to Phoenix, Tucson, Southern California, and build up that area. Maybe Las Vegas—maybe we try to start the season out west.

The number of events isn’t as important to me as the quality. If we had sixteen really good events and half of them were televised, that would be a great series. If we end up with twenty to twenty-four, is that too many? No, but they have to be good events. We don’t need events that maybe can’t pay their bills, or have a history of the track being bad or being rained out; we have to weed those ones out.

First things first, we’ve got to show the fans at the Daytona short track that we can run an efficient, entertaining show there. At Springfield, the crowd’s been shrinking a bit, and I’m talking with the IMDA about ways to get that crowd built back up. Each promoter, we’re talking about ways to help sell tickets and get the crowds built back up, so that we can sell more tickets and eventually get purses increased.

At the end of our conversation, I felt relatively good about the future of flat track. For better or worse, it will always be America’s real motorcycle racing heritage. Mike and I are both cautiously hopeful (admittedly, this is a gut feeling, not backed by research) that the young audience currently skewed toward FMX/SX will eventually shift to a back-to-basics, handlebar-to-handlebar racing mindset. I certainly hope that’s true, and I hope it doesn’t just reflect the fact that I’m old and old-fashioned!

A couple of years ago, Mike would’ve sounded too cautious by half, but I think he’s the kind of realist we need right now. There’s no point in wasting energy, trying to manifest new multi-million-dollar sponsors because right now they just aren’t going to come out of hiding. AMA Pro Racing’s Flat Track series needs to survive the next year or few, which is probably going to involve doing all the things it’s been doing, just doing them all a little bit better.

One of the keys to putting on a great flat track race is, quite literally, doing the groundwork—making sure the track itself has the right surface and moisture content, and isn’t all groove or all cush. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. That’s a pretty good analogy for the work Mike Kidd has ahead of him.