Between the Races: Jeff Ray

Barber Motorsports Park is home to more than a fantastic road course: it also houses one of the world’s greatest collections of motorcycles in the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum. The collection ranges from 1902 to present day and reflects the varied forms the motorcycle has taken during that period, featuring everything from production motocross bikes to one-of-a-kind Grand Prix motorcycles in a gorgeous, five-story facility. The park is also home to the Barber Vintage Festival, which takes place October 9-11. We talked to Jeff Ray, executive director of the museum, to get the full run-down of all that the complex has to offer a motorcycle enthusiast.

RRX: How did the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum get started?
Jeff Ray: The museum started as a private collection about twenty years ago—actually, I’m having my twentieth anniversary of working for Mr. Barber associated with this project. It started as a car collection, but the gentleman who was heading up the shop at the time was a big motorcycle enthusiast. Whenever the car market was unstable in 1989 to 1990, cars were selling for a very inflated price, and we found ourselves trying to restore cars and build a collection in a very difficult climate. Dave Hooper, the shop superintendent at the time, suggested to Mr. Barber that he consider motorcycles instead of cars. The market was much more stable, and realistically you can fit six motorcycles in the place of one car in a storage unit. So, it made a lot of sense, and in 1991 we started focusing on motorcycles and growing the collection.

Mr. Barber’s tastes were basically just motorcycles, and, being a collector, his focus was to be the best of something. The best car collection had already been created and dismantled a couple of times, but there really wasn’t a comprehensive collection of motorcycles anywhere. The focus was to have the largest collection of motorcycles in the world, so we started buying bikes.

The collection started to grow, and about the time we got to 350 bikes in the collection, his accountants started to get involved. They said, “George, you really need to make this collection start working for you. Why don’t you create a non-profit foundation, and put your bikes in it? You can get a little tax help on that, and you can continue doing your project.” Part of that foundation was a museum. He reluctantly opened the collection to the public, but he was afraid that people would think this Alabama dairy farmer was out collecting motorcycles with their kid’s school milk money, and it would affect his business. We realized that we only had to open the museum three days a week to be considered a museum, and hoped only a few people would come out. We didn’t think that a lot of people were interested in motorcycles, so we thought we had a good game plan. The first year it was opened, we had 10,000 visitors come to see the collection.

In 1997, we got a call from the curator of the Art of the Motorcycle in New York for an exhibit. It was probably the largest exhibit held at the Guggenheim, and went on to Chicago and Bilbao, Spain, for six months. That gave Mr. Barber the insight that what we were doing was worthwhile, and that people were interested. So, when we got back home, we started looking for a place to build the museum—glass front, gift shop, and everything. We located a 650-acre piece of property with interstate frontage, and commenced building it.  While we were working on the plans for the museum, Mr. Barber decided it would be best to have a test track for the collection, because we are a living museum and we needed a place to run the bikes. The test track continued to evolve into a 45-foot wide, 2.8-mile road course that is regarded as one of the better road courses in the U.S. today, and that’s all part of the museum complex.

So, where we are at today is sitting with a 141,000-square-foot museum facility, 840 acres with the park complex, and we have about 250 acres developed with the Barber Motorsports Park road course. We have about 65,000 visitors to the museum a year, and a little over 350,000 through the park and museum. We are home to AMA Pro Road Racing, Grand-Am racing, and we recently announced that the Indy Racing league will run here in 2010. We also have WERA, NESBA, and the Kevin Schwantz School. The park is also home to the Porsche Sport Driving School, which is factory supported. So that brings you up to speed on the history, and where we are today.

How large is the collection these days?
The collection is about 1,250 bikes today, and that number continues to change. We have a combination of road race bikes, motocross, production street bikes, trials… we just have a motley crew of motorcycles. What we don’t do is group all the motorcycles together, like all the Harleys over here, and all the BMWs or Triumphs over there. We try to do a presentation through the eras. We have five levels of the museum, and it’s all open. When you come in, you can see all the way through the collection, out the back glass of the building. It’s pretty phenomenal. We also have a full restoration shop, but our goal is really the preservation of motorcycles, so we try to do more of that than restoration.

Is the museum still acquiring bikes?
The collection is still growing, we are actively looking at bikes, and if that rare, one-time opportunity comes along, we look closely at it, but if it’s a common bike that we’re just missing in the collection, we’re not making those acquisitions now; we’re going to wait. We’re watching the current economy very closely right now. The most important thing is to make sound decisions today that will affect our operation for the future.

How old does a bike have to be for you to look at it?
We would buy bikes that were built yesterday. We have been collecting motorcycles for twenty years now, and we have brand-new 1989- and 1990-model bikes that have never been serviced, fresh out of the crate. If you were to set out to restore a 20-year-old bike, where do you find the ability to refinish a frame that has clear coat on the stamped aluminum? Some of the plastics that they used are unobtainium; you just can’t get it. We buy brand new bikes today and put them away, knowing that twenty years from now, we may have an iconic bike on our hands that is brand-new, under storage. You can’t argue with original.

You have the Barber Vintage Festival coming up soon. What kinds of things will be going on at that event?
Well, it goes back to the origin of the collection. In about 1992, Mr. Barber said it would be really great to go vintage racing, to gain some credibility in the racing community. We found a home there in AHRMA, and really got to know a lot of people. When we opened the park here, we basically gave up the racing program to get into the museum and racetrack business, but we still had a lot of friends out there racing, and of course AHRMA was coming here to race. For two years they ran here, but there was something missing. Vintage race bikes are great, and we love to see them out, but there was nobody coming to see them. So we partnered with AHRMA and said, “Look, you guys put on a race program, but you’re not interested in promoting your product. Would you mind if we did?” They said, “No problem.” So we told them to bring the racing, and we would build a celebration around it.

So, this is going into our fifth year with AHRMA, and we’ve developed the Vintage Festival. It’s a celebration, it’s anything and everything associated with motorcycling and beyond. We have a motorcycle parts swap meet; there are 400 vending spots, and I’ve just been told that we have only one spot still available. There are no vinyl siding or sunglass salesmen out there; these are all motorcycle parts.

In the museum, we try to get involved with the celebration as well. We have a dinner that’s a fundraiser for the museum, and this year we have Kevin Schwantz as out guest of honor. Kevin will also serve as grand marshal for the event, so he’ll be here with his Suzuki GP bike doing some parade laps and signing autographs, so we’re really excited to have him aboard.

We have vintage motocross, cross-country, and trials are run here, in addition to the road racing. We have antique bike shows put on by the Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club, as well as shows put on by the Antique Motorcycle Club of America. There are a couple of other bike shows put on by different magazines that will be here. We have some demo rides by Triumph, and another manufacturer that still needs to be confirmed. We have a flyover by T-6 Texans on Saturday and Sunday, we have skydivers, we have Rhett Rotten and the Wall of Death which is an old ‘40s-style carnival entertainment venue. We have the Southern Fire Apparatus Association bringing out vintage fire trucks for a huge expo. There’s also camping, which is very motorcycle friendly. There’s also the Vintage Motorcycle Auction, which we haven’t done in awhile, and I think that there are 120 bikes right now, but the goal is to have 150, so that’s a pretty nice bike auction.

Every year, we try to have more things to do, to occupy your time through the weekend, than we did last year. It’s a celebration of motorcycling, and it’s a good weekend to be out.