AGV Backmarker: New Year’s Resolution

When I was up in Portland, I spent a little time with Bradford Duval. He’s the owner of Corazzo, a Portland-based scooter- and motorcycle-clothing manufacturer. He’s also one of the ringleaders of the newly formed U.S. TT Foundation non-profit company that was created to fund an American assault on motorcycle racing’s Mount Everest: The Isle of Man TT.

The first rider the USTTF will support is Jimmy Moore, in 2010. It was Moore’s appeal for sponsorship that inspired the creation of the foundation, but the hope is that it will do more than send Moore over in 2010. The foundation’s immediate goal is to get Moore to the island on a brace of competitive bikes; Moore’s goal is to podium in June. After that? Well, Moore wants to win, and the USTTF would like to send one competitive rider over every year.

It’s easy for me to understand why Jimmy wants a competitive ride over there, but I was curious why Bradford and a few of his friends would work so hard behind the scenes to help arrange that. So I sat with him in his office at Corazzo—a chaos of souvenirs, racks of cool clothing samples, and a crazy puppy named Cletis—and listened while he told me how he came to get into the motorcycle business, then into the non-profit business of supporting U.S. riders at the TT:

We opened a Vespa shop here in Portland in 2001. I opened it for the Portland Motorcycle Company. They got the Vespa boutique; they were an old BMW dealer. I had been a motorcyclist for a long time before then; I’d ridden around the world and done some racing.

Some of the US TT Foundation founding members: (from left) Paul Duchene, Bradford Duval, Jimmy Moore, Brooks Cooper, and Matt Gougler. - courtesy USTTF

No one called me to sell me any gear. I know that falling off a bike even at 25 mph—it doesn’t matter if it’s a motorcycle or a scooter—you’re going to get scraped up and maybe break some bones. So we created this brand—Corazzo—that was originally focused exclusively on the scooter market but has since found a home in other places too: the vintage guys, the Cretins up in Seattle, and some of the guys at the San Francisco Motorcycle Club—people who were looking for more style in their riding apparel.

We looked at most of the big companies and didn’t like what they were doing, style-wise. Most of the great styles have already been done, so we try to look at classic styles and take inspiration from them, but apply modern materials, technology, and armor to them and bring them to market.

Our business is 85 percent scooter gear, but we’re doing more motorcycle stuff. We’re bringing out a line of leather jackets, and we’ve got some high-performance gloves and riding pants—other things that will go beyond the scooter crowd, although they still could be used there. Our market is mostly that 35- to 54-year-old person who’s bought a Vespa to commute with and has actively made a choice to buy a scooter and not a motorcycle, so we try to provide gear that fits with that brand image.

We sold our first stuff in 2004. It took about a year to get our first products together, and the first round was awful! But you learn from your mistakes. I knew the right people to get the job done, and we’ve got world-class designers. Most of our designers have either run categories at Nike or Adidas; they’re big, swingin‘ designers who take on our projects not because we can pay them big money but because they like the work. The woman who’s responsible for our bomber jacket did all the uniforms for the Athens Olympics.

If you’re in the Pacific Northwest, stop by Kelly’s Olympian tavern on January 16 for the official U.S. TT Foundation kickoff. Listen to Jimmy Moore narrate a lap of the TT course, buy a few raffle tickets, and drink in the atmosphere of one of America’s best biker bars. - MG photo

Our logo was designed by a scooter-racing champion, so we also try to bring in people who really get what we do and who are authentic.

We have probably 700 SKUs [

Ultimately, if you just look at the fundamentals, there’s 300 million people in China who have access to the internet, but there’s 600 million who don’t have water and power. Just building the infrastructure needed to get that 600 million people up to speed will require a huge quantity of fossil fuel, and this year they’ll become the number-one car market in the world. So you’ve got that, and India, and those companies will drive the consumption of fossil fuel, and that will push prices up.

And then there’s simply more people. The “congestion charge” in central London had nothing to do with fuel consumption; it was just a response to too much traffic. If you drive a car in London, it costs you something like £1,100 [$1,800], but a scooter’s free. I think we’ll eventually see something like that here, too. I think it will drive more people to use two wheels, whether it’s a motorbike, an electric bike—which is huge, they sold over 22,000,000 of them in China last year—or bicycles.

I’ve always been a competitor; I was a ski racer and a hockey player. I race a Honda 160 and am a track-day instructor on a big bike. I’ve ridden 700,000 miles on motorcycles, mostly adventure riding. I was always one of the fast guys on the street—who was not stupid; one day I took my RZ350 out on the track, and the next year I was racing 160s. We’ve sponsored some 160 races as a company. I love the sense of community, and the quality of the racing is great.

One day Paul Duchene called me and said, “We’ve got this guy, Jimmy Moore…” and he described Jimmy’s TT history, which I wasn’t familiar with. He was looking for money, and I told him to have Jimmy give me a call.

In turn, I called around to the usual people who might have had money to spend on a project like that, and none of them had any money. This was a group of people who spend almost as much as we need [to send Jimmy Moore to the TT] on a single weekend of vintage-car racing, but those guys have been hit pretty hard, too. So I couldn’t find anyone who was willing to write big checks, and I was talking to Jimmy on the phone, saying, “Well, dude, sorry. I called around.”

“People think I’m too old to be a motorcycle racer,” says Jimmy Moore, seen here with son Gus, “but I don’t feel any older at 40 than I did in my 20s.” The TT has always been a place where older riders do well. - MG photo

He was, like, “What do you think I should do?” I remembered that there was a guy who’d done the Dakar Rally by seeking a lot of small donations, and I thought that since the TT had been covered on HD Theater this year, we might be able to leverage an increased awareness, bring the community together. Everyone can donate $10—even if your company is losing money, you can donate $10 and it’s not going to affect your lifestyle—and it gives you a chance to have a horse in the race, a chance to have your name on the bike.

As more people learn about just how crazy this race is, they seem to be more enthusiastic about supporting this effort. We’ve been working on this a little over three months; everything went live in mid-December. We’ll see; we’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there. The overall goal is to get 5,000 people to donate $10 apiece.

We’ve set three tiers of sponsorship: $10, $50, and $500. So far, about half the people who’ve stepped up have done so at the $50 level. That speaks to the depth of feeling that a lot of American motorcyclists have, that we need to put up some good results on the Isle of Man. With the exception of Dave Roper’s win in the Classic TT in 1984—which, according to the organizers, wasn’t a premier class—we’ve never even had an American on the podium, much less on top of the rostrum.

It seems like a lofty goal, but one that’s achievable if you look at the quality of riders that America puts out. We’ve taken the 500cc and MotoGP Championship many times and won in every other discipline, but no one’s ever gone to the Isle of Man and won. It requires both exquisite preparation and a certain insanity to compete at the level where you have be, to win. The level of commitment required to go through those blind corners at 180 mph, or come off the ground when you’re leaned over and expect to land and not get into a massive speed wobble and high-side into a brick wall or a fence with pointy stuff on top… it’s extraordinary.

You can’t just take a top-shelf motorcycle racer over there and expect him to be successful. You need someone with that mix who’s willing to throw it all away. But they also need to understand the dynamics of the bike. After three years there, Jimmy has come up against most of the problems you can come up against, be they political or technical, team-related or tires—not having enough money for tires. He seems like the perfect candidate to go and do it. Your Ben Bostroms of the world aren’t willing to give it up; they have too much to lose and they’re already into this set route of racing that they’re going down.

As Bradford says, to win at the TT, you have to be committed. Or maybe it’s that you should be committed, as in “to an asylum.” This is Moore, using all of the course in practice. - Moore archive

I’ve never been there. This year will be the first time I’ve seen it, and I’ll go with a horse in the race, which is pretty cool.

We’re looking for help getting our message out, especially from communities of people: racing organizations or track-day operators, places where we can send one email and they can forward it to fifty or a thousand more. It’s a numbers game. If we want 5,000 contributors, we need at least 50,000 people to consider it. We’re pretty connected in the motorcycle community: myself, Arun Sharma from MotoCorsa, Paul Duchene from Sports Car Market, Cliff Baker… but for us to make this successful, it has to go viral. So we’ve got a

We want to provide rich content to the people who support us: everything from Jimmy providing updates on how his training is going, how he’s handling specific corners. On January 16, we’ll be holding a kick-off party at Kelly’s Olympian

One challenge is that we have to do all this before the motorcycling season even starts in most of the country—Jimmy goes over in April, to prepare and race in the North West 200—so we need all of our fundraising for this year to be complete by April 1.

Our goal is to be a self-sustaining organization that will be able to field an American every year. We’re a registered not-for-profit corporation, and we’re working on the charitable side, but that requires a lot more accounting, so for now, donations aren’t tax-deductible, but it doesn’t really make much difference if all you’re asking for is ten bucks.

That being said, if we do go “501(c)(3),” then everyone who did make a donation will be able to deduct it. Until then, our books are open. We’ll spend no money on private planes of fancy hotel rooms. None of the USTT Foundation’s members will take anything—when I go over there, I’ll go on my own dime. All the money donated goes towards getting Jimmy on the most competitive bike possible. It’s all-volunteer, it’s pure. We’re all doing it out of passion.

So, make this your New Year’s Resolution: that you’ll help to put an American on the podium at this year’s TT races. And now—right now—you can actually make good on it before the year even starts (if you’re reading this the day it was posted): go here and make a donation.