Honda Road Racerhead #10

For years, the road racing world has puzzled over how best to draw the bikers who show up for the Main Street scene at Daytona Bike Week into Daytona International Speedway for the road races. It’s an enticing goal, as the numbers for that group are impressive. Even this year, with the economy in a recession and the weather relatively chilly, the Daytona Beach roads are clogged with enough bikes, and their engines can be heard at all hours of the night (though attendance does seem to be down).

Unfortunately, drawing that crowd to the racing has been as elusive an objective as it has been tantalizing. As the legend goes, if you ask twenty Bike Week attendees about the races, nineteen are likely to respond, “What races?” That’s not an exaggeration, and many in the road race paddock sometimes ridicule the bikers in between complaining about their clogging of the roadways.

I’m guilty of that myself, and yet this morning while making my way east down International Speedway Blvd., I began to recognize some hypocrisy in that sentiment. It had probably been five years since I’d last crossed Broadway Bridge to the Main Street area where the bikers hang out; if I couldn’t bring myself to make that effort for free, why should I expect the Harley crowd to head west over the bridge in order to pay money to see what’s going on inside the Speedway?

This annual event is called Bike Week, not Motorcycle Racing Week or Cruiser Week. The concept is that it’s a celebration of all things motorcycles, but in this age of specialization, it seems like embracing the entirety of it is harder and harder to pull off. To navigate the Bill France Blvd. entrance tunnel under NASCAR Turn 3 is to enter a different reality, and while for us racing fans the scene inside is a welcoming oasis from all that craziness outside, the opposite is true for most of the people who show up to Bike Week.

This trend toward segregation doesn’t end there, as there are several other sub-genres in Daytona Beach the first weekend in March. The Hayabusa crowd flocks to the Hess station, some industry vendors get together in the convention center for the season-ending Cycle World International Motorcycle Show, and near Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, there’s even a dedicated Black Bike Week. Even within our own world of racing, we tend to break apart into increasingly smaller groups. I was amazed on my flight into Orlando on Wednesday to discover that the passenger behind me—an industry guy coming in for tomorrow night’s supercross—wasn’t aware that they were holding “street bike races” at the track all week! That might be an extreme example, but it’s very common for road race fans to miss out on the flat track races (even now that they’re held right outside the speedway), to say nothing of stuff like the GNCC race, the Alligator Enduro, the CCS road races, or the AHRMA road race, motocross, trials, and flat track get-togethers.

Obviously, I’m not suggesting that Bike Week attendees should feel obliged to run around Daytona Beach like headless chickens, and I actually think that some specialization is fine. Because the subject we cover in our magazine and on our website is a niche (motorcycle road racing) of a niche (motorcycle racing) of a niche (motorcycles), Road Racer X is as vulnerable as anyone to accusations of narrow-mindedness. That said, we’ve also got a motocross magazine, and the promotional arm of our company puts on everything from national motocross rounds to GNCC races to ATV competitions. I was an enduro racer in my competition days, and I covered motocross and supercross for Cycle News off-and-on for ten years prior to jumping into the road race scene. And despite this evidence of my open-mindedness, even I often find myself tuning out anything that’s not MotoGP, World Superbike, or AMA Pro Road Racing.

Obviously, it’s fine to have preferences, but hopefully we can recognize them as only that—our personal favorites—and not just tear down everything outside of our immediate scope. I’m not a huge fan of stunting, and I recognize that there’s a certain geekiness to the electric-motorcycle world, but I’m happy people are out there having fun with two wheels.

Too often, it seems that we make judgments based on how dedicated or authentic we deem someone to be. When Michael Jordan started a team, some people have even criticized him for having too much money or for not having put in enough years, and yet were it not for him, there’s not a chance that ESPN would be here at Bike Week filming a documentary for their “E:60” program, as they are (watch for it in a couple of months). That kind of mainstream attention exposes road racing to potential new fans, and hopefully they’ll be welcomed with open arms—not with too-cool attitudes. As the father demonstrates to his bickering sons in the allegory “A Bundle of Sticks,” we’re stronger together than we are apart.
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