Backmarker: Mike Kidd, AMA Pro Racing’s Director of Flat Track

Over the last year, this website has covered a significant transition, as the AMA Superbike Championship was “taken private” under the auspices of Daytona Motorsports Group (now known as AMA Pro Racing). That transition was, to say the least, a stormy one. But it wasn’t the only one. The promotional rights to the dirt track national championships were also unloaded, as Pickerington got out of professional racing altogether.

From my perspective, DMG’s takeover of flat track seemed more like a peaceful transition of power and less like a civil war. Maybe that’s because in recent years, there has only been one real factory team in flat track—Harley-Davidson. So, there were not as many entrenched interests, not as many alpha dogs with their own agendas, used to wielding power in closed-door meetings.

At the beginning of the season, Chris Carr told me he was optimistic. “Let’s give somebody new a chance,” he said, talking about promoting and marketing flat track. “They certainly can’t be any worse than what we’ve had.” Now, with a year of new management in the books, he’s still cautiously optimistic that this uniquely American sport is in the right hands.

As flawed as the AMA Superbike Championship had been, it was still perceived as a multimillion-dollar marketing tool by several manufacturers. A double-handful of riders were pulling in six- (even seven-) figure salaries even though racing—at least for podium positions in the Superbike class—was boring.

By comparison, flat track’s prestige, media exposure, sponsorship, and rider paychecks have been eroding since the ’80s, when the AMA split the road racing and flat track championships. I thought prestige was further eroded by splitting the flat track championship into a Singles class for the short track and TT races, and a Twins class for the half-miles and mile races; by doing so, the AMA effectively gave up the coveted Grand National Champion title. So maybe flat track’s stakeholders had less to lose in the DMG takeover.

That said, an AMA Grand National race still pretty much guarantees an amazing spectacle. Like, sitting in the stands, you could forget to breathe for two minutes at a time. By comparison, recent MotoGP races have been like watching other people playing on a PlayStation.

Selling the AMA Flat Track Championship to a wider audience—returning the series to its former glory—is the job that’s been handed to Mike Kidd, AMA Pro Racing’s Director of Flat Track. Kidd brings a ton of cred to that position. He won the AMA Grand National Championship in ’81. He later turned Arenacross into a commercial success and had a practice run at building a flat track series when Formula USA briefly promoted a rival national championship. He had been away from the sport long enough to have a perspective on it, and actually put together his own bid to take over the AMA’s championship.

When DMG’s offer to take over all the Pro Racing disciplines (except supercross) was accepted by the AMA, Kidd immediately contacted Roger Edmondson and offered his services. DMG jumped at the chance to install a guy with Kidd’s resume as director of the flat track championship. He’d had a season to settle in when I spoke to him on the phone from his office in Texas. Flat track’s a much more down-home product, less corporate than road racing. Befitting that, Mike’s chatty, plainspoken, and friendly. Here’s what he had to tell me:

I put a bid in to purchase AMA Flat Track about the same time DMG put their bid in. Once I found out Jim France and Roger Edmondson were involved, I basically pulled my bid, flew to Daytona, and said, “I’m your guy.”

I’d been doing Arenacross, and we’d lost our title sponsor—BooKoo energy drink—and I’d spent enough time away from flat track and wanted to get back involved. I had heard rumors that AMA was looking at getting rid of some of their properties and one of them was flat track, so I was going to make a run at that. But things turned out for the better, joining Jim and Roger.

I raced quarter midgets when I was young, and I was national champion in 1961, then I got involved in motorcycling and worked my way up through the ranks. I rode Hondas, Yamahas, and Harleys and had support from the U.S. Army. I won my championship in ’81.

I retired from racing in ’83 and opened up a company called Mike Kidd Promotions and started promoting events. I did road races, built up the AMA Arenacross series, and sold that to Clear Channel. We did our first national Arenacross event in 1984, and we built it to a series in ’85. It was initially based in Texas and Oklahoma, but we took it out to California. Everywhere we went, we were hitting homeruns, so we decided to turn it into a real national series. We were the first [motorcycle] series to be on Speed, back with Chet Burks in ’96.

I could foresee a lot of growth, so I sold it to Pace; they sold it to Clear Channel. I worked for them for seven years.

In 1992, the AMA hired me to be the race manager for flat track under Roy Jansen. He hired me to take over the flat track series, and I did it for a season. I thought I could do flat track in the summer, but that’s typically the time I’m booking events for Arenacross, and it was just too much. So I got out of that managing position and went back to being a[n Arenacross] promoter.

While I was at Clear Channel, we had a motorcycle division here in Fort Worth, where we produced CCS and Formula USA events. We had about twenty employees here in Fort Worth. During that period of growth with Clear Channel, we went out and bought Chris Agajanian’s Grand National events, and we took over some other events; we bought one from Ronnie Jones in Oklahoma City, and we put together the Formula USA dirt track series.

That kind of got my interest back in flat track. I left Clear Channel in ’04 and got back into this back in June, when DMG hired me. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about promoting series since 1984, from finding title sponsors, assembling TV packages, putting on sold-out events…. As I looked over at flat track, I saw a sport that I thought looked stagnant; it may even have been deteriorating a bit. I wanted to do something to get flat track back on a bigger scale, back like it used to be, because I think there’s no better show; I’m not saying this because I’m being interviewed—the racing is outstanding. It’s loud, we’ve got twins and singles, we run everything from miles to TTs, so the riders have to be versatile.

What we’re going to do is do a good job marketing flat track, so we can build attendance and get the manufacturers and aftermarket companies looking at flat track again.

Any sport needs somebody that can carry the load through the good and bad times. Harley-Davidson’s done that with flat track; they wrapped their arms around this sport forty years ago. They’ve carried it pretty much for forty years. There’s been other players that have come and gone—BSA, Triumph, Norton, Yamaha, Honda… there’s been a variety—but long term, Harley’s kept this sport alive.

There’s been rumors that we’re going to run Harley out, and that’s not our objective at all. Our objective is to keep Harley strong, because we know they’re going to be here for another forty years, but in the meantime, we’d like to invite other manufacturers to come and race. We’ve had long discussions with Harley about what it will take to bring the other brands in without deteriorating Harley’s ambition to grow the sport, too.

If you look back across all the motorcycle racing sports, one thing that made supercross so profitable and so big is that it was under one company—that’s Feld Entertainment today, and it was Clear Channel and Pace before that. They run and control fifteen events. If you look at motocross now, they’ve got Davey Coombs involved, and he’s wrapped his arms around that and got all the promoters working together—that’s a very strong, viable series.

When you look at road racing and flat track, we’ve got a lot of different promoters with a lot of different agendas. I’ve got promoters that, some of them, only do one motorcycle race a year. There has to be a leader; I want AMA Pro Racing to come in and show those promoters that we can all work together with one vision, the same goals: to build this thing into a business—not just a sport but a business. That’s going to take all the promoters working together, getting good TV packages, good marketing to a broader spectrum, instead of just marketing to the same people year in and year out. We need to look at a younger demographic, we need to look beyond motorcycle magazine ads and start seeing what we can do to build this sport the way R.J. Reynolds [tobacco sponsor] did in the ’70s and ’80s.

I mentioned that there still seems to be a steady trickle of interesting young riders coming into the sport, but that I’m not sure about fans, as the fan base seems to be getting older and older. Here was Kidd’s reply:

Let me tell you a story about that: I took one of our marketing guys from Clear Channel to Ronnie Jones’ event that we had bought in Oklahoma City, and we were standing there with about a three-quarter-full house, and we were watching the races and some time during the first race, he looked at me and said, “Mike, we can sell this.” And I said, “Yeah, but the crowd’s dying off.”

He said, “No, we can build it.”

I said, “No, they’re dying off.”

He said, “You’ve got to work with me; we can build it.”

Finally, I said, “No, they’re literally dying,” meaning the crowd is getting so old, we’re not getting the new blood. That’s something we’ve got to do, is start getting a younger demographic without running off our hardcore flat track fans that have been following this sport for years.

That’s why we’re going to—call ’em motocross bikes if you like—on the short tracks and the TTs. We’ve got a lot of motorcycle dealers who sell those 450 motocross bikes that are easily converted to flat track. I think you’re going to see a lot of younger kids coming up—maybe they don’t want to jump 120 feet—that like speed. They can convert one of these motocross bikes, start flat tracking, and get addicted to it. Then we’ll wean ’em off the singles and put ’em on the twins when their time comes.

As far as the participation of new riders goes, I see a bright future with those 450 singles. There’s lots of aftermarket companies making kits; they can be converted relatively inexpensively, and at the end of the season, you can put your knobbies back on it and go ride it in the woods. That’s going to help our sport.

This sport is dominated by guys in their 30s. We needed a younger class, which we now have by creating the “Pro” class. It was originally called Pro Sport, but we want it to sound simply professional. These are up-and-coming kids riding production-based 450s at every Grand National. Our goal is to take some of these kids and make heroes out of them. Every sport is looking for its next Michael Jordan or Nicky Hayden, and the way we’re going to do that is expose 16-, 17-year-old kids to the flat track community.

It’s easy to imagine developing some brand rivalries at short track and TT races, where all the riders are going to be on stock-framed 450s. The same is true for the Pro class. But over the last month or so, AGV Backmarker has been looking back over a period in the early ’80s—the last time there was really a serious rival to Harley-Davidson’s dominant XR750. Even longtime Harley loyalist Chris Carr recently told me he’d like to see some meaningful brand rivalries in the Twins class.

Mike Kidd knows all about that Honda-Harley rivalry that I was writing about last month. He was the key development rider for the Honda NS750. Tune in next week, and we’ll continue this conversation, on the topic of brand rivalry (amongst other things).