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AGV Backmarker: San Francisco then, London now, Daytona soon…
January 21, 2010 by Mark Gardiner
Filed under Backmarker
Charlie O’Hanlon runs what he describes as a “haven for old Hondas.” I saw Charlie’s Place http://www.charlies-place.com/ for the first time a few years ago. I turned a corner in San Francisco and came upon a row of old Hondas parked against the curb. It was as if I’d been transported back to about 1973. As if that weren’t enough to pique my curiosity, the shop had an amazing sculpture that served as a hanging sign. The sign should have tipped me off that although he now works as a mechanic, O’Hanlon was trained as an artist.
Charlie O’Hanlon in his shop. Nowadays, he tends to work on restorations or custom jobs, turning out tidy, functional cafe racers. -Mark Gardiner photo
“I was born and raised in New York, and I was fascinated by motorcycles,” he told me, adding almost apologetically, “but I didn’t start riding until after I moved out here to go to art school.” Once he got to the West Coast, Charlie bought a bike but even at that, he was mostly a car guy and only rode because a bike was cheap transport, and because finding a parking spot in downtown San Francisco is rarer than discovering a hooker who’s actually female. As a self-taught mechanic, he worked on his own and his friends’ vehicles. Until one fateful day…
“Back in 1993, someone brought me a Superhawk that needed some work. The guy told me nobody else would work on it,” Charlie told me. “Until then, most of the Hondas I’d worked on were bikes like CB350 twins, and I was not crazy about working on them. Now, I realize that, if anything, the bikes were too effin‘ reliable. People tended to ignore basic maintenance and just ride them and ride them. By the time I saw them, they’d been ridden into the ground.
“But the Superhawk changed my whole feeling about motorcycles. I was blown away by this bike, made in the ’60s, that, to me, was way ahead of its time. Beautiful design, and when I put it right, I was amazed how nicely it ran.”
That bike didn’t just change his attitude; it changed his business. Once that Superhawk owner started talking about a mechanic that took tender loving care of old Hondas, customers poured in. First, he gave up working on cars, telling me, “You work on a car, you have to climb into it, crawl under it. On a motorcycle you have all the same things, but they’re right there.” For most of the last twenty years, though, he’s specialized in nothing but vintage Hondas.
Several employees do the bread-and-butter work: basic tune-ups and up-rating the electrics. “Once a week, I show some customer one of my old owner’s manuals, where it actually says, “When battery is low, recharge battery.” Those old AC stator charging systems, at this point in the bikes’ life, work in the negative; they discharge the battery,” said Charlie. “We upgrade them to a modern system, and we’re about to start offering our own electronic ignitions that will bolt on to almost all of the twins.” He’s also having new pistons forged for 450 twins, since those have become scarce.
I thought I was one of Soichiro Honda’s biggest fans, but after talking to Charlie, I think he’s more obsessed than I am. There’s an interesting parallel in their lives, since after Honda retired, he devoted himself to art, and Charlie went the other way, studying art before becoming a Honda mechanic.
A Czar neutralizes potential revolution…
As I noted a few weeks ago, Azhar Hussain—the man who created the TTXGP race on the Isle of Man last year—is now promoting a number of zero-emissions races and also selling a TTXGP production racer called the Mavizen TTX02 http://www.mavizen.com/. Someone was quick to give Azhar the nickname “The Czar.” While I suspect he takes secret pleasure in that tag, it also alluded to the potential conflict-of-interest in that situation. Obviously in that dual role, Azhar could have structured or at least interpreted the TTXGP rules in ways that would give his Mavizen motorcycle an advantage.
Such a conflict of interest and the prospect of competing at a disadvantage might scare potential race teams away from TTXGP, especially now that the FIM has announced a rival ePower championship.
Now, that’s an art education that didn’t go to waste: Charlie’s even made a couple of dozen electric guitars out of old Honda parts, so even if the bike can’t be tuned up, its parts can. Meanwhile, lots of people are wondering if, now that Roger Edmondson’s no longer pulling the strings, AMA Pro Racing will change its tune... -Charlie O'Hanlon photo
But I have to admit that Azhar has at least temporarily silenced his critics by declaring that the TTXGP rules will be crowd-sourced. He’s appointed an independent moderator of the rules “wiki.” I suppose this is an alternative to either a rules dictatorship or the often-fractious rules committee.
It will be interesting to see how it works in practice. Frankly, at this early stage in the zero-emissions racing world, I’d like to see the simplest rulebook, one that would encourage the most diverse grid.
With that in mind, here are my (complete) suggested rules: Chassis design—two wheels that are in-line when the machine is traveling in a straight line; power train—no internal combustion of fossil fuels.
Regime change is never as easy as it looks from the outside…
The announcement that Roger Edmondson will be leaving DMG (dba AMA Pro Racing) came out over the holidays. That timing and the unspecified “health” reason cited for his departure were the kinds of things one would expect to hear when an organization’s hoping the news will go unremarked.
Edmondson’s health is a private matter, and the subsequent announcement that he’s also taking a leave of absence from Grand-Am suggests that his departure could have little to do with the motorcycle racing community’s frustration with the current incarnation of AMA Pro.
For all the flack AMA Pro’s taken, the current regime in Daytona has always been professional toward me personally, and I think that in the last year or so, DMG has taken some shots that really should’ve been aimed at Wall Street. Still, I understand the motorcycle racing community’s frustration, and I know that many people now hope that in Edmondson’s absence, AMA Pro will be more receptive.
Back in my days (actually, I guess it was decades) in the ad business, I was frequently called in to advise businesses that needed turning around. In fact, on two or three occasions, ad agencies brought me in to press CTRL+ALT+DEL on their own creative departments.
I wish I could tell you that it was easy, but it never was. What I learned was that corporate culture almost always survived the departed boss. In fact, it often turned out that the old boss was the way he was because of the situation he’d been in. Even if everyone remaining wanted change (which was rarely the case) and a new leader with a clear and alternative vision was empowered, change—if it happened at all—often happened too slowly to be visible from the outside.
AMA Pro recently put David Atlas, a lawyer who’d worked with Edmondson in the past, in charge. According to AMA Pro, Atlas, along with Tom Bledsoe and Chris Harris, will take over Edmondson’s duties. If they have a different vision—if they want to change the way AMA Pro has been relating to other racing stakeholders—they should tell us, rather than wait for us to see a difference. If they think the status quo is fine, they should tell us that, too. It’s time to engage in genuine dialogue, even if it’s just to manage expectations.
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