30 minutes with Dewayne Woods, Laguna Seca's shadow CEO

For more than 60 years, ever since Laguna Seca was first laid out and paved, it was managed by one organization, the Sports Car Racing Association of Monterey County. It is largely thanks to SCRAMP, a non-profit company with a huge volunteer base, that Laguna Seca now has a global reputation as a racing Mecca. But last November, Monterey County — which owns the land the track sits on — fired SCRAMP. The decision sent a shock wave through the auto and motorcycle racing communities.

Dewayne Woods is the Assistant County Administrative Officer in Monterey County. He was the most influential person in the County’s recent decision to remove SCRAMP and install A&D Narigi Consulting, LLC as the new management at Laguna Seca.

That decision’s been controversial, and some people have portrayed Dewayne Woods as a sort of Rasputin to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors. The implicit accusation is that Woods and the Board hand-picked a brand-new company run by a local political fund-raiser, and awarded that company a lucrative contract in an act of political cronyism.

To be honest, that is what I thought I was going to discover when I looked into the story. But now, I think I was wrong. Yes, the awarding of the contract looks like cronyism. But after a half-hour conversation with Mr. Woods, I am now far less worried about the future of Laguna Seca.

This is the transcript of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity

What does the County want from the new management firm, A&D Narigi Consulting, LLC, that it couldn’t get from SCRAMP?

Let me give you a quick background so that you have a good foundation.

In the county I function as the Assistant County Administrative Officer, and I oversee all the finances for the County. Along with that, I end up being involved in many aspects of the County, and especially when there’s a financial issue, I get involved.

In 2015-16, there was conversation between International Speedway Corporation and the County about changing management groups. I was not involved with that. Then, because of all the SCRAMP turmoil and politics, the County decided to go out for RFQ – request for qualifications – and the day they had those qualification meetings the County asked me to get involved.

So after my engagement, what I quickly learned was, there were three respondents. SCRAMP in late 2016- early ‘17, I started to negotiate with one of the groups [The Friends of Laguna Seca – MG] and I quickly learned the SCRAMP was insolvent in 2016. There wasn’t going to be a season in 2017 at all – no motorcycle races, no car races – SCRAMP didn’t have the money to pull it off.

So what I did as an interim, stopgap measure was, I negotiated with the County to assume full business responsibility for all aspects of the raceway. I bought them out, and then turned around and turned them into a management group under a temporary arrangement, which was for three years. It was really only supposed to be a stopgap, until we could get somebody else in there to run it.

[Getting someone else to run it] didn’t pan out, so there I was with SCRAMP and I said, Let’s give SCRAMP a go.

Who was the other group?

That was the Friends of Laguna Seca. The reason it didn’t work out was, they’d proposed to invest $15 million initially, $25 million in first five years. In Day One of negotiations I said, Show me the money. All the way through the negotiations, they couldn’t show me they had the money sequestered for the track.

At the end of the game I told them, If you don’t put $10 million in an escrow account, to show me that you have the wherewithal – and they said, We can’t do that until we have a contract. I said, I can’t give you the contract until you have the money. It was, which came first the chicken or the egg. That’s the reason that one didn’t work out.

I gave it a go with SCRAMP. The County really engaged with the capital improvement program for the first two years of that program. I took a wait-and-see approach and tried to help them develop into a viable, sustainable business.

What I noticed about a year and a half into that was that the leadership of SCRAMP, which was the Board of Governors and the executive leadership weren’t interested in the bottom line. What they were interested in was the sport, and the enjoyment. And there’s nothing wrong with that but if that’s all you are interested in, you should just buy a ticket and come watch the racing.

This is not the volunteers. They come up and do their thing, but you have to structure so much before that in order to have not only a good event but a financially viable event. A year and a half into it I found myself determining – and this will get you to the point of how I got to my recommendation – is that while I have no adverse feelings about anyone at the facility, business is business. What I found was, not even just the accounting and financial management, but contractual issues – they would have races and they’d have safety workers, but there were no contracts in place for the safety workers. If someone were to get hurt, everyone would sue everyone and there’d be no contract to guide it.

I would tell them six months in advance, Get this contract. They wouldn’t do it. So I ended up having to go in and negotiate contracts myself, whether it was with SCCA, or all the other groups, and make sure the insurance was in place, the indemnification language was there. I had to do it all myself.

Lots of times, I didn’t find out until the last hour that they hadn’t done these things. And again, it’s because they just weren’t interested in running the business, the were interested in the race. Whether it was contracts, or a contract we’d negotiated and making sure we held everyone to the terms, making sure we were careful about what we do to ensure that during the event we don’t have revenue of a million but we’d spend two million.

I was making sure they didn’t go off the deep end. They’d say, Well everyone likes this. I understand liking it, but you can’t have an event that leaves you a million in the hole; that’s not sustainable.

What I really learned is why they were insolvent back in 2017. The practices that they’d become accustomed to, they weren’t changing. I communicated very clearly, over about a year and a half with them, prior to this change, all the things they needed to change in order to make this sustainable. They just would not listen, or change. They were more interested in having a good race than a sustainable race.

Those things are not mutually exclusive, but if you don’t have both, you can’t have either. Another piece of it was, they had volunteers handling cash, and it would end up in peoples’ RVs, and they’d say, I’ll bring it over in the morning. That’s not how you handle cash. Even though you should trust them, and I have no indication they’re trying to steal, but you just have cash controls when you run a business.

You also pay your bills. I would start getting calls from vendors, who SCRAMP had not paid. I’d research it, Is it the County’s problem? Because we pay 30 days, net. And what I found is the bills would sit in peoples’ desks over there. They were too busy running the race to process the bills. The bills would be 90 or even 180 days old before they even hit the County for payment. By that time you have small vendors who are saying, Where’s my money? I’m not going to give you any more services. You can’t run a business like that.

The things I experienced were nothing new or different than what had gone on before 2017. The year-and-a-half that I invested in leadership in SCRAMP – and let me tell you, I invested in them and communicated with them – about what they needed to do to be successful, their culture would not allow it; it was just not who they were. They didn’t get the difference between running a sustainable business and being a volunteer.

Volunteerism is wonderful, but you don’t have the responsibilities that you have if you’re running a business. I couldn’t get the leadership to get there. They became resistant, and said, The County’s bad, The County’s making us do all these things. Well no, I’m just trying to run a business here.

That’s what got me to the point where I made a recommendation to say, We need to have someone in this role, in the business role, that can operate the business on the County’s behalf in a very sustainable way.

So I understand the timeline, was it late 2016 when you really stepped in?

Tim McGrane [SCRAMP’s recent CEO] started in July of 2018. By that point I’d realized the sloppy business practices. By that time I was alert to that. I’d hoped that the new CEO would make changes. About four months into his tenure, I realized he wasn’t going to make those changes. He fit into that culture.

We started communicating in a very earnest way in August, 2018. I really put down communication to the executives and Governors of SCRAMP what they needed to do to succeed and advised them that they were under evaluation.

You were saying that in 2016 SCRAMP was insolvent and that in 2017 the County bailed them out. Is that fair?

No. We didn’t bail them out. SCRAMP was a concessionaire; a stand-alone business. In 2017, they went out of business. We didn’t bail them out, we bought the business. We just happened to hire them to manage it going forward. At that point, their role and function changed from what it had been, historically.

So the County made the capital improvements after that?

In 2017, the County had a reserve that had been built up over the years for Laguna Seca, from funds that had been earned by the County at Laguna Seca. So those are the funds that I started investing in the facility.

Would SCRAMP feel that was really them? That that pool of money existed because of what they’d done over the decades? Would they have a sense of ownership over that?

If they did, they’d be misguided. I don’t think they would, because they didn’t even know those funds existed. There are two sides of the facility: there’s the event side, and track rental. The track rental had always been the County’s business. Those funds were earned and received from the track rental program.

By track rental, you don’t mean SCRAMP renting the track to put on events, but rather renting the track out for a driving school, or track day?..

Right. There are only maybe eight event per year, and SCRAMP puts on most of those. By track rental we mean the everyday use of the track the rest of the time when people come out for a school, or to bring a club out.

You’re aware that, especially on the auto racing side, there’s been criticism of the County hiring A&D Narigi Consulting, LLC and there’s no reason to think that this company can administer a race facility. Listening to you, I get that from the County’s perspective, what we need is for someone to operate the business. So are you confident or do you know that all of the technical skills required to put on an event – those people will be hired, from SCRAMP or wherever, to ensure that A&D Narigi has the technical skills to put on these events?

A lot of people have made these blanket statements, but they don’t really understand how the business works. I’ve had three years now to understand the business. When we talk about events, say the IndyCar race which I negotiated myself; I brought them back in.

When you negotiate these contracts, you know what the County is required to provide to these racing entities. What people don’t understand is that when IndyCars come in, we have no control of the track. The race is run by IndyCar. They deal with the sanctioning body, the safety crews, the run group, they deal with everything.

From our perspective, we’re not dealing with the race side, other than interacting with them if they need one of our staff to go out and clean something. We bring in other groups, like SCCA, they do the flagging; the ambulance, all those things are outside of our business.

Everything between the fences is IndyCar, from the fence back is us. We do hospitality, tents, catering, concessions; it’s like any other event. The things that we are really in charge of are synonymous with running an event, not a race.

We’re not in control of the race; the sanctioning bodies are in control of the races. When people say, You don’t know how to run a race... Let me tell you, SCRAMP never ran a race either, it is always the sanctioning bodies. We still have those people. Those people will be ther at all the races. Even the one race we own, which is the Reunion, we contract with a sanctioning body, HMSA, to run that event for us. So not knowing how to run a race is irrelevant. The people who always ran the races are still there and in contract.

When I spoke with Chuck Aksland, he told me that MotoAmerica’s deal was done sort of in-between the SCRAMP period and when the new management came in. Chuck told me that they did a deal with the County itself. Was that with you?

I did that deal. Every deal that’s been done in the last three years has been done with me. The last Dorna deal, I did. SCRAMP hasn’t been doing the deals for three years.

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So, I understand now that Laguna Seca has very limited responsibility for what happens between the fences at events, but what about during a track day or a track school?

That’s a different animal. We have a firm that we contract with, to do the flaggers. We make the track renter pay for the ambulance and fire service, and we have a track manager – as SCRAMP had – on site to manage and make sure that the track renter is safe and following all the rules.

That’s a lot different. The person who used to do that for SCRAMP works for Narigi now.

So that’s an example of a key position that’s just going to transfer over...

It already has.

Can you give me a sense of the ratio of revenue that comes from events, versus track rentals?

Are you talking margins, or gross?

Either. Both.

Track rental on an annual basis, is $4-5 million. We’re about a $20 million organization, so events bring in $14-15 million. That’s not profit, that’s gross.

In terms of margin, are track rentals more profitable then events?

Track rentals are much more profitable.

Would it be fair to say that track rentals subsidize events?

Historically yes. That’s not the way it should be in the future. Each event should, at a minimum, break even. So no one event or activity should subsidize another one. But the way SCRAMP operated, indeed the event side lost money.

Is there anything else you’d care to add?

Two things I want to leave you with are; one, if we run the business in a sustainable way, it will be here for the community and the volunteers for decades to come. And two, all the speculation about the County not being interested in having the racetrack is totally unjustified. This is a big regional economic driver. The County, through SCRAMP, had an economic impact analysis done, and the track brings over $80 million into the County every year. We’re fully invested in its success.

Mike Goodwin invented Supercross. Then, he crossed the wrong people

As the new Supercross season rolls around, I think back about ten years, to a time I maintained a pen-pal relationship with Mike Goodwin, the man who invented the sport.

Every six months or so, letters would arrive – either hand-written or typed on a manual typewriter with a worn ribbon – in envelopes labeled 'Indigent Mail'. His return address at that time was 'High Desert State Prison, Susanville', where Goodwin was serving a life term for the murder of Mickey Thompson, another motorsport legend.

Collene Campbell spent a fortune, and over a decade looking for evidence that would tie Mike Goodwin to her brother’s murder.

I think that the last letter I got from him arrived in about 2011. It was vintage Mike Goodwin. He opened by telling me he'd filed a 48-page felony complaint against the Los Angeles Deputy District Attorneys who prosecuted his case. He wrote that he might soon be out of prison, and in line for a settlement of up to $30,000,000 for his wrongful conviction. Then asked me to send him a couple of books of 'forever' stamps. Begging for stamps is a long way down from the heady days when Goodwin walked through race paddocks carrying a briefcase full of cash from the gate, and drove away in a Rolls-Royce or a Clenet. He was 6'3", 200 pounds, and he lived even larger than life; he once won a weekend of sex with porn star Gloria Leonard.

By the time I got to Southern California, Goodwin's good days were long over. I'll tell you about it, and hope that in doing so, I don't end my own days...

He was in jail in L.A. County awaiting his second trial. All I knew about it was what I read in the L.A. Times, which described the evidence against him as circumstantial at best. I was vaguely surprised when he was convicted. (For that matter, so was the District Attorney.)

The facts of Goodwin's rise as a Supercross promoter, the brief merger of his business with Mickey Thompson's (who was promoting stadium truck races), their falling-out, and the subsequent murder of Thompson and his wife have been written up often and well, so I'll just give you the executive summary...

Goodwin was a big, brash, aggressive guy. He wasn't a racer, but he rode dirt bikes for fun and had attended a few outdoor motocross races. He worked in the rough and tumble world of rock promotion in the 1960s. When he read about an indoor flat track race that had drawn 17,000 fans to Madison Square Garden in New York, he had a brainstorm: what if he put on a motocross race in a stadium? In 1972, he convinced the Los Angeles Coliseum to let him do it. He called the event 'The Superbowl of Motocross'. Marty Tripes won.

Goodwin wasn't the first guy ever to hold a motorcycle race in a stadium; there had been a couple of motocross races put on in soccer stadiums in Europe, and they'd already built a temporary track in front of the grandstand at Daytona and raced there. And of course, Speedway races had been held in stadiums for decades. But it was Goodwin who brought a rock promoter's hype and razzmatazz to the show. With his vision - and some elision - 'Supercross' was born. And until the mid-'80s, Goodwin owned it. Owned it? $#!+ man, he rolled in it.

Meanwhile, Mickey Thompson – the son of an Alhambra cop; an off-road (truck) racer and land-speed record holder who had promoted off-road races in the U.S. and Mexico – was trying to develop a similar series of stadium races for buggies and trucks. Thompson, like Goodwin, was an extreme 'Type A' personality whose on-track aggression had once resulted in a fatal crash. The two briefly merged their companies and you might have guessed they were destined to clash on personality alone. Within months, the lawsuits were flying. Goodwin lost. He managed to hide a few assets, but by late 1987, Thompson had put him out of business.

Then, on March 18, 1988 two guys on bicycles pedaled up into Bradbury, an exclusive suburb at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. They glided into Mickey Thompson's driveway as he and his wife were leaving their house, and shot them dead. They then hopped back on their bikes and rode down into L.A. They might as well have been dissolved by the smog.

Over the course of those lawsuits, Goodwin had more than once vowed things like, "I'll take him out", and since he had a history of threatening and intimidating people he did business with, he was an obvious suspect. But his alibi checked out, and there were no witnesses or evidence that tied him to the crime. Los Angeles County didn't think there was a case to be made against him.

Enter Collene Campbell, Mickey Thompson's sister. She made it her mission to put Goodwin behind bars for the killings. She was once the mayor of San Juan Capistrano, which sounds quaint. She looked like any rich woman-of-a-certain-age from the moneyed precincts of Orange County. That was deceptive; Collene was also a power-broker in the Republican Party in the OC, and the wrong person to have as an enemy.

It took over ten years (and the posting of a million-dollar reward for information) but Collene finally convinced Orange County to bring charges against Goodwin, on the flimsy premise that the conspiracy to commit the murders had taken place at Goodwin's OC home. There was, even at the outset, little physical evidence tying Goodwin to the crime. One of the L.A. investigators, Det. Mark Lillienfeld claimed that the bullets that killed Thompson were consistent with a gun registered to Goodwin, but that evidence blew up in his face when it emerged that the 9mm slugs in the bodies had six grooves in them, while the barrel in Goodwin's gun had five lands. The Hardy Boys would have concluded the slugs didn't match.

(As an aside here, let me note something: Remember O.J. Simpson's trial? People look back on that now as an example of money buying innocence, and of O.J.'s legal dream team outgunning the D.A.'s office. That's not the real take-away. The real takeaway was that the jury was stacked with people from poor neighborhoods who all knew that L.A. cops and D.A.s had been lying on the stand and fabricating evidence for years because that's easier than building actual cases. The defense argument that it was all a police conspiracy – which would have seemed preposterous in most other jurisdictions – was plausible, because after all, it was L.A.)

In the absence of evidence, Orange County argued that the murders had to have been ordered by Goodwin, because Mickey Thompson didn't have any other enemies. To the surprise of veteran court reporters, Goodwin was found guilty, although the conviction was overturned when the state ruled that Orange County had no jurisdiction.

Collene Campbell was not to be denied. Although her power base was in the OC, she convinced Los Angeles County to re-arrest Goodwin, and refile charges in L.A. By that time, Goodwin was broke and his defense was handled by Elena Saris, a public defender.

Again, the D.A. laid out a scenario in which Goodwin hired a couple of thugs out of south L.A. to go and do the hit (no one has ever claimed that Goodwin pulled the trigger himself.) They argued that, despite the absence of credible evidence tying Goodwin to the crime, it had to be him because Mickey Thompson didn't have another enemy in the world. I'm paraphrasing here, but Goodwin's defense was basically, "Did I say I was going to kill him? Sure. Am I an @$$hole? Sure. But I didn't do it."

By the time the jury found him guilty the second time, he'd already spent five years in jail. You think you have a right to a speedy trial? Not if you've crossed Collene Campbell.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought, I can believe Goodwin's guilty but I can't see a jury believing it beyond a shadow of doubt. I wrote Goodwin in prison and asked him if he wanted to talk about it. I didn't really have an opinion about his guilt or innocence, but like everyone else I was pretty surprised by the verdict that came down. It took a while to get his confidence; I knew people who knew him, and I got them to vouch for me. Eventually he wrote back to tell me he'd talk, and I applied for a permit to go and visit him. That permit wasn't granted. It wasn't even officially denied; for all I know, it went straight into the shredder. The next time I applied, it was denied. No reason was given. He sent me another application in the last letter. "This time, don't tell them you're a journalist," he advised. (What? They wouldn't remember?)

Even though I couldn't get in to see him, I looked up Goodwin's lawyers. I talked with a few people off the record, who'd known him during the Supercross/Thompson years. And four things struck me: The first was, I found it odd that neither of the punks who killed Thompson was ever arrested on some other beef, and offered up the Thompson killing in trade. The second was that all Collene Campbell got by dangling a million-dollar reward was an egregious story from someone who claimed to have seen Goodwin casing Thompson's neighborhood and then picked Goodwin out of a lineup thirteen years later.

The third thing was this... If you're a criminal defense attorney, basically, all your clients are guilty. So you defend them to the best of your ability because that's the way the game is played but at the end of the day after a guilty verdict comes down, you'll have a drink with the D.A. in the bar and say, "I'll get the next one." That wasn't the case with either of the lawyers I spoke to; even years later, they're still chafing at Goodwin's convictions. Both of them feel he was railroaded, and both of them are sure that political pressure influenced the trials.

Does Collene Campbell have the kind of juice you'd need to pressure a judge? Let me put it this way: In the second trial in Los Angeles County, Superior Court Judge Teri Schwartz wouldn't start proceedings unless Collene Campbell was present, even though she had no official standing. Once, the judge made Elena Saris wait until Campbell arrived before she could argue a motion. Campbell was delayed, because she was at another meeting. With George W. Bush. (That's a pretty good example of political connections, but it's nothing compared to stories I've heard but can't repeat. Kansas City's a long way from the Collene Campbell’s turf, but motorcycle journalism doesn't pay me anywhere near enough to justify getting on that woman's $#!+ list.)

Last but not least, I've always had this romantic notion that criminal trials were like the old Perry Mason TV show, in which the defense lawyer got the defendant off by proving - or at least accusing - someone else of the crime. On TV, that other person's usually in the courtroom, and confesses on the spot.

That's not how it works. Before your lawyer can present evidence to the jury that someone else might have committed the crime you're accused of committing, they have to get permission from the judge. And time after time, as the judge let the prosecution paint a picture of Thompson as a motorsports saint, without another enemy in the world, Saris was prevented from presenting evidence that, while Goodwin might have been one of Thompson's enemies, he wasn't the only one.

She couldn't point out that during the days when Thompson was promoting races in Mexico, there were rumors in the racing community that it wasn't just race vehicles and equipment coming back across the border. And in fairness, those were just rumors. But there was no doubt at all that Thompson's nephew (Collene's son) was deeply involved in the drug trade, and that he was murdered, too, in a – let's call it a misunderstanding – between drug dealers. Or that lots of people believed that Thompson fronted some of his races with money borrowed from mob loan sharks in Las Vegas.

Now, I have to lower my voice for this part... In the course of talking to people about this case, I've had some very interesting conversations. For example, conversations about other murders, and about the way contract killers work. These were conversations with people who made me think, OK maybe you haven't ever actually hired a hit man, but you know people who've hired hit men.

I've heard things that I can't write here, because they can't come from me. And I can't quote the people who've told me these things because they don't want to be on Collene Campbell's $#!+ list any more than I do. I've heard things that would make Oliver Stone salivate. But the only way I can ever tell you those things will be if I can get into High Desert State Prison to talk to Mike Goodwin, and I can quote him.

As of now, even though I've worked this story on and off for years, I've still never spoken to him. In our last exchange of letters, he wrote that he'd like to send me that 48-page documentation of prosecutorial misconduct, but that it can only be mailed to member of the California bar. The lawyers I've asked to receive it and pass it along to me have demurred. (I confess that I sort of lost track of the story when Goodwin was moved to a different prison, but I know that in 2015 A three-judge panel from the 2nd District Court of Appeal rejected his arguments that numerous errors in the case warranted the reversal of the two murder counts he was convicted of in 2007.)

I'm already sure of this, though: even if Goodwin's guilty, he did not get a fair trial. There are people - including most of the cops and prosecutors in L.A. – who are fine with a system that works that way. Sometimes I am, too. But I don't like being prevented from talking to him because I'm a journalist. He's been convicted; he's out of appeals. There's still a chance that he's innocent. Isn't his last recourse taking his case directly to the public? I think that if the California prison system denied my applications to see him because they knew I was a journalist, that it's a denial of justice.

If I can ever get in to talk to him, I'll tell you the rest of the story. Unless he gets out – which at this point would be a miracle, or mean he’s on the verge of death and the prison system wants to get rid of him before they have the expense of burying him.

I don’t expect a deathbed confession. I expect a deathbed protestation of innocence.

Motorcycles saved my life. Maybe they'll do so again

This is, perhaps surprisingly, a perfect size for a bike show.

A friend called me up one Friday a few months ago and asked if I wanted to go for a Sunday ride in the Kansas Flint Hills, to the Volland Store – despite the fact that it’s in a virtual ghost town, miles from anywhere, it’s now an art gallery that holds a small but lovely vintage motorcycle show.

“I’ve mapped out a route that looks interesting,” he said. That takes some doing, if you’re heading west on a day-ride from Kansas City.

We started out on K-32. On the way to Lawrence, the road followed the track of a massive tornado that blew through early last summer. Although it was on the ground for miles, it luckily avoided any heavily populated areas, and no one was killed. People are rebuilding. Huge trees that were snapped off halfway up the trunk and stripped of any branches smaller than your arm greened back up.

It was a fine fall day, but cool enough to make me wish I’d added a windproof layer under my Roadcrafter. I was grateful that the Ducati’s previous owner had fitted aftermarket grip warmers; I ran them at full strength.

Just outside Lawrence we hung a left on K-40, the backroad to Topeka. We passed by Lecompton (billboard: “The birthplace of the Civil War”) and a boarded up strip joint (sign: ‘Town Knockers Gentlemen’s Club’.) In Topeka, we hopped on the slab, riding eight miles on the very first bit of Interstate Highway ever made.

My pal turned his Africa Twin south, onto miles of what another friend, Salvo Pennisi, would call ‘strada bianca’; hard-packed calciferous dirt with a skiff of loose gravel. His Honda rolled on chunky dual-sport tires; I have Dunlop Roadsmart IIIs on my air-cooled Multistrada. It was a useful reminder for me to loosen my grip and let the bike have its head a little.

A bunch of small black birds were having a dust-bath in the road, and as my friend approached they flew up, along with many more that erupted out of the grass. Hundreds of them whirled – left or right? – too late to form a consensus, the flock split in two, parted by our motorcycles. It would have happened the same way in a car I suppose, but somehow being on a motorcycle connects you a little more to the landscape you’re passing though.

The Flint Hills were colonized pretty early, and those first farmers built with what they had on hand: stone. Beautiful old barns, houses, schools, and churches remain. They were built to last centuries, but the people have gone.

The Volland Store holds a charming and carefully curated motorcycle show for one weekend, every fall.

Blink, and you’ll miss Volland, which is about 200 yards off a little road that must be one of the most technical stretches of asphalt in Kansas. The bike show was brilliant. My friend and I agreed that a well-curated dozen or 20 bikes was more to our taste than some hipster extravaganza.

On the way back, we passed another motorcyclist who had what appeared to be a fun-fur pumpkin soft sculpture covering his crash helmet. At least, I think that’s what it was. We were in Kansas, though, so it could have been a guy wearing a hollowed-out pumpkin on his head for whatever reason.

Although it was too late in the day for coffee, we stopped for a tea back in Lawrence.

“Maybe there will be some cute hippie girls working in this one,” said my friend, by way of justifying his choice of café. (No such luck.) Still, as one-day rides from KC go, I suppose it was a ten out of 10. My friend had done everything he could to raise my mood, and he did. A little.

Some of you may have read an old essay of mine, in which I explained how motorcycles saved my life the first time

Back in 2012, on the occasion of Thanksgiving, I wrote…

Our sport is dangerous; that's not news. I wasn't one of those riders who thought, It won't happen to me. I thought about danger often. It was never dying that scared me, it was not dying that scared me. I've got some expensive Ti components (and I'm missing some cognitive functions; if you tell me your phone number, I have to write it down one digit at a time) but so far, I've come off lightly.

In fact, I'm able to enjoy simple physical pleasures not in spite of motorcycles and motorcycle racing, but because of it. It's not just that motorcycles haven't killed me (yes, I'm touching wood as I type this.) Motorcycles actually kept me alive.

I've never really told this story in much detail, but 30-some years ago, when I was a club racer up in Canada, I got sick. I had some kind of autoimmune disorder, which depending on which doctor I asked was either lupus masquerading as rheumatoid arthritis or vice versa.

You know the expression, 'off the charts'? My white counts were literally off the charts. I got a graphic output after one lab test and the bar graph went off the edge of the page. When I finally got in to see a specialist, after a long wait, he looked up from that lab result and said, “I wouldn't have been surprised to see you come in in a wheelchair.” 

I was lucky that when it came on, I was in outstanding physical condition; I'd been training hard my whole adult life. I had a lot to lose before I'd ever be incapacitated. And, typical of people with lupus, I found that while it was painful and utterly exhausting to keep working out, the harder I trained the less I felt the symptoms. Still, I could only slow – not reverse – the course of the disease.

Month by month and year by year, I lost strength and range of motion in virtually every part of my body. It was frustrating because I was club racing and learning to ride better, but I couldn't really capitalize on it. I had to be super-careful not to crash; the drugs I was taking made the risks of injury much higher and besides, just getting out of bed in the morning already hurt like hell. By the time I raced in the TT, in 2002, I was careful not to let my friends see how hard I had to struggle just to get into my leathers or let them know that I'd almost bleed out from a shaving nick. And after that... It was as if my body had been holding out just to let me live out that dream, because in the next year, symptoms took a turn for the worse.

During that year of precipitous physical decline, I found myself wondering, At what point would in not be worth living? My life had, for decades, been defined more by physicality than intellectuality or spirituality. I decided that at the point where I couldn't wipe my own butt, I didn't want to live. Let me tell you, it was seriously depressing and I frequently rehearsed, in my mind, a hunting accident.

Through that period, I really wanted to finish my memoir, Riding Man, and I was grateful that I could at least type. But the thing that kept me going was that I could still ride motorcycles. Maybe not well, or nearly at the level I once had ridden; getting a leg over the saddle was a real trick. You really don't need Too Much Information on this so I won't go into detail, but even though there days when I wasn't flexible enough to reach my butt, I still put in 1,000 kilometers in the alps, unearthing the story of Pierlucio 'Spadino' Tinazzi, the hero of the Mont Blanc Tunnel fire.

So I put off the hunting accident.

Before I reached that point, I found a doctor who changed my drug regimen to one that worked way better, at least in the short-to-medium term. The drugs I was taking were literally toxic – one of them is used to kill cancer cells in chemotherapy – but they radically improved my life. Once they really kicked in, I could ride OK. I could cycle and swim and, as before, the harder I trained the better I felt. For the first time in over a decade, I started to feel better and better, not worse and worse.

After a year and half in France, I moved back to North America, to San Diego. I started working at Motorcyclist, had health coverage for a while, and found a new specialist. By that point, I was an expert on lupus and rheumatoid arthritis myself, and we had a long discussion about which of those two diseases affected me. It didn't really matter, since I had a treatment that worked for the time being, and in any case, neither disease is curable.

After all that stuff, a miracle happened

My cool job fell apart, I got divorced and remarried a woman, Mary, that I adored. And I started to feel not just better, but... good.

My doctor and I developed a plan to wean me off drugs and, for the first time in well over a decade, my blood tests started to look... normal. I don't use the phrase 'miracle’ to describe my remission; that would be too strong. But my doctor – a very experienced rheumatologist – got a little teary when he said, “Don't call me again unless you get sick.”

The miracle was meeting Mary. And I know this much for certain: The thing that kept me alive long enough to meet her was my determination to stay healthy enough to ride motorcycles. The weights, the cycling, swimming, yoga; the glucosamine sulfate, the 30,000 aspirin, the prednisone, the methotrexate... all that stuff wasn't to ward off pain and depression and slow the progress of some mystery disease, it was, “This is what you have to do to ride.”

You know those idiots in the German-inspired half-helmets who wear those “Live to ride, ride to live” patches? Well, for me that was literal truth.

There was another great thing about marrying Mary

To be clear, I’ve never regretted falling in love with motorcycles, or becoming a motorcycle racer – even though those choices cost me a fortune, and hurt me. I’ve never even regretted quitting a great career and selling everything I owned to fund a one-shot ride at the Isle of Man TT.

I used to regret a shitload of other bad decisions, but those regrets vanished when I met Mary. I rationalized all the selfish, immature, rash choices; all the “start over, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 life changes; the whole crazy life track I’d been on suddenly made sense – every bad decision turned out to be justified – because it led me to her. In hindsight, she made me look like a genius.

As my friend and I sat outside at a café table, a bunch of kids walked past and asked us, “Are those your dirt bikes?”

I looked over at mine and realized that it had such a patina of white dust on it that it almost did look like a dirt bike. It was certainly a dirty bike.

There was a reason my friend lured me out. He knew that two weeks earlier, Mary told me that she was leaving

I was (am) fucking devastated. No, of course it hadn’t been a completely perfect ten years of marriage; if it was, she wouldn’t have decided to leave me. But it was ten years of worship, from me. Imagine how many times, in ten years, she left my field of view. Every single time she reentered my line of sight, I had to catch my breath.

One of my first thoughts was, What will I tell my mom – she’s a fragile 93 year-old who loves Mary like a daughter.

Then one of my second thoughts was, I just won’t tell her. But a third thought was, I’m not a very good actor and my mom certainly could live for years.

So I told my mom, and although she was brave on the phone, my family back in Calgary told me that after we hung up, she shattered into bits. In hindsight, maybe I should have waited a couple of months and told her in person, “Look, you can see I’m fine,” whether it was true or not. I think I’m a good enough actor to pull off that one sentence.

Meanwhile, my friends here in Kansas City are supportive; so is my family, though they’re far flung, and being the one that needs to be looked-out for is getting very old. I’m working out. I’m pitching stories. I’ve still got several film projects I’m trying to move along. I’m trying to get stuck into a new piece of long-form writing. I am doing what I can to try to create a situation – for me, in my life – that makes me curious to see where it will lead next. 

If I reach that point, it may be because motorcycles will save me again; it’s possible. I mean, that ride to Volland helped. A little.

If you want to help, too, I can think of a few good ways.

You could buy a book. Or send me a hot tip. Suggest a great, overlooked motorcycle story that makes you think, “Some journalist should cover that!” I’ve turned on Comments for this post which is a good way to reach me, but you can also ‘at’ me on Twitter, where I’m @Backmarker.

My work is pretty solitary, which is not good at a time like this. So if you’ve loved something I’ve written, email me. That never gets old.

Jim Van Eman examines a 1903 Erie, built by the Streifthau Mfg. Co, in Middletown OH.

Rocket Man's Diary

I miss the earth so much I miss my wife,
It's lonely out in space,
On such a timeless flight,

And I think it's gonna’ be a long, long time,
'Till touch down brings me round again to find,
I'm not the man they think I am at home,
Oh no, no, no, I'm a rocket man,
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone.

– Bernie Taupin

The life of a motorcycle journalist seems glamorous from the outside. A couple of Fridays back, I was flown to the Canary Islands to ride and report on the 2020 Triumph Rocket 3. When I got off the plane there was a person holding a sign that read ‘Triumph’; she drove me and a few other guys to a Ritz-Carlton hotel hanging off a cliff above the Atlantic. Xi Jenping – the Xi Jenping, as in the President of China – was one of the other guests.

The place was crawling with armed bodyguards, some dressed like tourists. A hotel employee said, “When Putin was here a few days ago, you would hardly have noticed.” Yeah. It was that kind of hotel.

The man at the front desk told me, “We’ve upgraded you from a room to a villa,” which translates from Spanish as, “President Xi needs the hotel, which is easier to secure, so we’ve moved the few shoulder-season guests into villas.”

Whatever. All I wanted was a bed, after traveling about 24 hours from Kansas City. In the good old days, OEMs flew us across the ocean in business class, but post-Great Recession, it’s steerage all the way. But there was nothing I could do to make my body sleep before midnight, local time, which meant I’d been awake about 36 straight hours.

Great, right? But if I’m rattling around alone, I’d prefer a ‘pension’ and a €150 per diem.

The ‘room’, of course, was ridiculous; the size of my house in Kansas City. People have spent months in space, in stations the size of the bathroom. There were seven large heated swimming pools in the complex. I had one almost all to myself right outside one of my two balconies. It would have been an amazing, beautiful, incredibly sexy place to be with a lover. But lying in there, desperately needing sleep that wouldn’t come, it was ineffably lonely and wretchedly excessive. If OEMs really understood motorcycle journalists, they’d put us up in far more modest places and quietly hand us a per diem. They’d save money and we’d make money.

Out of sympathy for the North Americans’ travel schedules Triumph at least had the good grace to fly us in with one clear day to acclimate. In the morning, I searched in the wrong direction for breakfast, and found a sprawling buffet serving mostly English families with small and vaguely terrifying children who – presented with a everything from Iberian hams and pickled herring, fresh fruit and every imaginable baked good, and eggs cooked nine ways from Sunday – asked harried servers, “Do you have Wheatabix?”

Don’t get me wrong; I love Wheatabix. But I’m always struck by the characteristic English way of speaking any foreign language, which is simply to speak English, but louder and with the careful enunciation of every syllable. DO YOU HAVE WHEAT-A-BIX?

No, Christo did not wrap the cliffs. That intensive, terraced farming of bananas.

After breakfast, I put on trunks under sweatpants, grabbed my swimming goggles, and descended a rough staircase hundreds of feet down a cliff, to a private cove. A few guests lounged on beach chairs, catching the sun when it poked through clouds.

I wondered about one couple speaking Russian. He reminded me of Jared Kushner; simultaneously slender and pasty, with that same callowness. She was a unique piece of eye candy with a rocking body almost completely covered in bold tattoos that resembled Haida artwork; an elaborately stylized pair of wings spread across her back in red and black, but I instinctively knew she was no angel.

Maybe he was a minor functionary from Putin’s clique, who decided to stay on for a couple of days’ vacation. Or, he could just as easily have been an accountant for some mobster, whose presence here so close to the Russian President’s stay was just a coincidence. All over Europe these days it seems that Russians are the new Americans.

I stripped down to my trunks and walked into the water. It felt cold enough for a moment that I questioned my motives, but I took the plunge and swam a quick few strokes to build up some heat. As cold-blooded as I am, even I got pretty comfortable, and began a long, slow exploration of the huge boulder reef that protected the cove.

A colony of sea urchins made me take care not to actually brush the rocks. I drifted into a school of tiny, iridescent fish while, below me, larger fish slipped into crevices as I approached.

Rudeness works, I guess. The guy in the background complained about the amount of Bailey’s he got, and the waiter returned with a very generous pour. (This tuna burger was delicious, BTW.)

I did that again, and when I got back out on the beach I realized that ominous looking storm clouds were now massing. I climbed the stairs, and walked up a significant hill to my villa for a luxurious shower. I called that a workout, and found a smaller and officially ‘no children’ restaurant for lunch. At the table across from me a grumpy German complained that the barman had provide him and his wife with skimpy pours of Bailey’s. Rudeness works; the waiter returned with more. I sat there and began writing my review of the Rocket 3 before I’d even laid eyes on it – putting the bike in context, and covering some of the new specs.

I saw it Sunday evening. The gaggle of rival motorcycle journalists predictably stalled out at the complimentary bar set up outside the conference room; I slipped past to spend a little time alone with the machine. A fellow Canadian, the hard-working Costa Mouzouris, also came in.

Costa gets some alone time with the new machine, before the press conference.

Then Triumph ushered in all the English-language journalists. A marketing guy delivered a preamble of multiply redundant superlatives, and assured us that there was no need to take notes because the entire Powerpoint presentation we were about to see was already on a protected website for us.

 It wasn’t. Triumph had a few accessories laid out for us to look at, but none of the stuff I would really have liked to see – no pistons, valves, or crankshafts. After a dinner of hors d’oeuvres, or tapas if I’m being generous, I got one last glass of wine and carried it back to the Villa, where I added a few nuances to the review in progress.

 I occupied about 15% of the bed for a long, long night in which sleep simply would not come. I gave up, and just lay there determined to rest my body whether my brain cooperated or not. It wasn’t the best way to prepare for a street launch.

Group 2 leaves the hotel for the start of the Canary Islands TT.

 After an early breakfast I suited up, hiding a set of Bohn body armor under the jacket and jeans my client had sent me to wear for the photos. I was happy to learn I’d been assigned the mid-control ‘R’ version, and not enthused by Triumph’s suggestion we all swap bikes back and forth. I’ve never liked a motorcycle with forward controls and doubted I was about to start.

 Triumph brings in ringers to lead street rides. They’re racers, mostly of the ‘real roads’ type. I was pleasantly surprised at the relatively sane pace set by my group’s leader, and told him so at the coffee stop. Unfortunately someone else complained that he was going too slow, so the rest of the day was the usual open roads madness, further complicated by the fact that the mountainous national park we rode across is a mecca for cyclists and hikers. I overheard one guy in another group say that he actually bumped an oncoming car’s wing mirror with his elbow. “That is not something I’d admit,” another one muttered.

 At one point, a woman looked the wrong way for oncoming traffic and stepped directly into my path. Luckily, my spider sense tingled a moment before she moved, so I was already off the gas and pulling the brake lever as I aimed behind her, at the part of the gap that was growing as she crossed the road. I made eye contact with guy accompanying her, and willed him to stand his ground. I guess I gave them something to talk about, and they gave me something to talk about.

Lilya, from Alicante, seemed disappointed when I told her I was only borrowing this bike for the day.

 The highlight of my day came at a dead stop, when a beautiful Spanish girl visiting from Alicante told me that she loved motorcycles and could she please just sit on it for a picture? It was the bike, not me, that caught her fancy of course but it was nice to at least feel seen.

Tenerife is so mountainous that in spite of its small size the weather’s often totally different on the other side. At the highest point on our ride we passed a huge observatory and then descended into clouds and cold mist.

In a first, for me, Triumph actually arranged to close a section of a public road for tracking photos. That took care of oncoming-traffic fears, but it was still the usual cluster-fuck of waiting your turn, interspersed with sketchy u-turns. Still photos were shot afterwards in the usual way, sharing the roads with traffic, and a lot more sketchy u-turns. As usual, I breathed a little sigh of relief when we got back to the hotel.

Triumph’s irrepressible Lance Jones seems happy to wait while dozens of journalists ride up and down a section of closed roads, for tracking photos and video.

 I might be among the slowest of motorcycle journalists on the road, but I always like to be one of the first with an informed review on the web. So, I skipped the fancy post-ride dinner. I ordered a club sandwich from room service, opened the bottle of red in the minibar, and knocked out my ride impression.

 I really, really wanted to sleep – because and in spite of the 0345 alarm I set in order to catch an 0415 airport shuttle on the way to a four-flight 26-hour travel day.

 As usual, the fuckups began right at check-in, where the first agent told me that Triumph hadn’t paid for my luggage, and that I’d not only have to pay €60 if I wanted to bring my luggage home, I’d also have pick it up and recheck it in Madrid – something none of the other journalists were told, even though we were all flying on the same airline. I decided to abandon it in Madrid if making that swap threatened the rest of my flight schedule. I’d just play dumb when I finally got to Atlanta and beg Delta to find my bag and forward it.

 Instead I ran about a mile through Barajas airport, dragging a 40-pound gear bag, checked it in with KLM and found myself with time to grab a coffee and check my phone messages. Or not. Catastrophic failure of iPhone 6, which on top of everything else would make coordinating a ride from the airport, or booking an Uber, that much harder.

The reality of these assignments is, if I’m not getting on or off a plane, or actually riding (a few hours ever few days if I’m lucky) my laptop’s open in front of me. It’s not as if I’m really experiencing some place new, just a new airport.

 The history of the American motorcycle industry in general, and the specialist journalists who provide content about it, can be neatly divided into two eras: before and after the Great Recession. I think all motorcycle journalists have asked, “Why do I do this?” a little more frequently in the latter era.

It’s still usually a rhetorical question. Even in the post-2009 reality of cheap-and-shitty travel bookings, most OEM-sponsored junkets are kind of fun and all of us secretly love being on that list of people who might be flown off to some exotic (or at least, warm) locale to ride a new bike before anyone outside the factory has even seen it.

This time, I really questioned my ‘career’ choices. In the days leading up to the trip I thought that a change of scenery would do me some good. But it didn’t, and by the time I got home, at midnight on Tuesday, I’d spent 26 hours in airplanes and airports and had not copped more than a few minutes of REM-at-best sleep since Sunday morning in the Canaries. I was well into the kind of sleep deprivation usually reserved for CIA black sites.

Why do I do it? Maybe the best answer now is, I can’t stop; I can’t replace it with anything that pays any better. Professional journalism’s days are numbered anyway. I’ll ride this job out as long as I can, but even at my age, I imagine the decision to hang it up will be made for me.

Of course it still seemed glamorous to my friends here. “What was it like?” they all wanted to know over the next few days. Only some of them cared about the latest Rocket 3, and since my review was posted before I even got home, they already knew. Most were curious about the trip, and the place itself. I had no real answer except, “The ocean was nice.”

As far as the trip went, the highlight for me was the swim. Ironically, it was the only time I’d really felt in my element for days but I was, quite literally, out of my element. Now, back home, I’m again at sea. Again, I’m swimming but here, I can’t see the shore, and can’t see the bottom.

For Hallowe'en: Three excerpts

As a motorcyclist, it’s hard not to be at least a little superstitious. Cruiser riders have to those little bells they dangle off their bikes, racers have the lucky socks they always wear.

When I lived on the Isle of Man, I almost always said ‘Hello’ to the fairies when I crossed the famed ‘Fairy Bridge’ on the way to Castletown. Two particular times stuck in my mind, and made it into my memoir, Riding Man. The first was the morning after the Manx Motorcycle Club’s annual gala dinner, when I met an Englishman who, in hindsight, probably was a clinical example of logorrhea, a psychological disorder in which the patient cannot stop talking.

Standing at the bar, afterward, I meet two riders, an old guy and his protégé. The old guy is Chris McGahan, an Englishman who nearly made a career of racing, back in the ’70s. Since then, he’s specialized as a real-road racer, doing the major Irish meetings, the TT and Manx GP, and a few public road races on the Continent. 

Chris, who’s probably in his fifties, looks like an ex-lightweight boxer who stayed in shape. Long arms, strong hands and shoulders; his most noticeable feature is a pair of large ears, the tops of which stick out horizontally like wings. “They call me ‘wingnut,’” he grins. In a room where men outnumber women at least 20:1, he seems to have two dates. (The MMC Annual Dinner was actually stag until the mid’90s.) The younger guy is Sean Leonard, Irish. “Dere’s noothin’ known about racin’ dat Chris don’t know,” Sean tells me.

They’ve hardly stopped drinking when they call me around 10 a.m. the next morning. They’re going to drive down to Castletown to meet a sponsor, then cut a couple of laps of the Mountain in a borrowed car. Do I want to come? 

Chris spins one yarn after another. Famous old racers, fast women; smuggling booze back across the channel from continental races, smuggling stowaways on the ferry to the Island for the TT; serious substance abuse continuing right up to the green flag. Choose one each from columns A, B, and C. He’s driving as fast as he’s talking. Suddenly, with Chris hurtling along in mid-sentence, Sean blurts, “Fairy Bridge!” 

No Island native crosses the little stone bridge without saying hello to the fairies. Sean says it, and so does Chris, injecting his “Hello Fairies,” in the middle of a sentence. I say it, too. They kind of laugh it off, like, “We don’t actually believe it…” 

Of course, the one time I neglected to say ‘Hello’, I was immediately punished for it…

In fairness, the big black birds have always worked for me. They’ve protected me on days I’ve seen ’em, and indeed, I’ve had some hairy crashes on mornings when I’ve not seen them. If you set out to debunk my talisman, you’d say, “The birds calm you, and you ride better relaxed. You’re tense when you’re aware you haven’t seen one, and you ride shitty tense.” That may be true. The scientist in me is a little subtler. I think that the birds are common, after all, and there’s probably almost always one to see. I think that when I’m in a state of relaxed awareness, alert to my environment, I can count on seeing one. That’s the state in which I ride well. When I internalize, when I’m looking in and not out, I don’t see them. That’s a state in which I ride poorly. 

Whatever the case, after the TT fortnight was over, I drove one of my visitors to the airport, and on the way home crossed the Fairy Bridge. Somehow, lost in thought, I failed to say hello, though I reassured myself that I’d said it on the trip to the airport and according to the letter of the legend, it is the first crossing of each day that is critical. Nonetheless, most Manx say hello on every crossing, and that had been my habit too.

As I was worrying through this very thought, I noticed a crow hopping in the road ahead of me. As I got closer and closer, I actually said, “Hey, take off” out loud. But it didn’t. I thought about slamming on the brakes, or swerving, and did a quick visual check to ensure the road was otherwise clear. Then I thought, “Don’t be stupid, they always wait to the last second to get out of the way.” But it didn’t. I hit it and killed it. I was fucking aghast. 

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(Jeff Bezos doesn’t need the money, but I do, so thanks!)

That sort ended tragically, eh? However a couple of years later, I had another experience at this time of year that was quite uplifting. It happened in the Val d’Aosta, when I was trying to understand the reported heroics of a motorcyclist, in the deadly Mont Blanc Tunnel fire.

It turned out I got a lot of the facts wrong, but in the telling, I may have got some larger truths right. This is an excerpt from my most-popular story, ‘Searching for Spadino’, as it appears in my anthology, On Motorcycles; The Best of Backmarker

I arrived in Val d’Aosta in the evening, checked into a hotel cold, wet, and hungry after  riding all the way up from Bologna in pouring rain. I showered, changed into dry clothes and found the nearest restaurant. I struck up a conversation with the waitress, and told her that I guessed my first stop would be the local graveyard, where I assumed Tinazzi was buried. She told me that the whole town would be in the graveyard the next day, which surprised me.

“Don’t you know what tomorrow is?” she asked me, then said “It’s the feast of all the saints and all the dead.”

The next day was All Saints Day.

I didn’t need to ask for directions. I just stepped out of my hotel―narrow streets like tributaries leading, not to a river but Aosta’s cemetery—and joined the flow of people walking slowly in fine clothes, carrying bouquets of flowers; occasionally a whisk brush, a blanket or folding beach chair; a picnic lunch. When we got there, thousands of people placed flowers, tended graves, quietly socialized; a military band played. At first, I trusted fate to lead me to Spadino’s grave, but when that didn’t work, I found someone who actually worked at the cemetery. The attendant knew of the heroic motorcyclist, but was certain that he was not buried there in Aosta.

As I walked out, I passed two cops in dress uniform, and noticed a tiny motorcycle insignia on one’s lapel. In a mix of English, French, and translation dictionary Italian, I explained what I was doing. The two cops debated something between themselves. Then, one of them gave me my first lead...

Read this story and many more

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(This book has a full 5-star rating. Over 400 pages to help get you through to next spring. It makes a great Christmas present, too!)

More from Michael Lock on his audacious SuperTwins proposal

I recently wrote a story for Revzilla’s Common Tread blog, about American Flat Track’s ‘SuperTwins’ FAQ memo. In preparing that story, I interviewed AFT CEO Michael Lock — an interview that took place after a perhaps-contentious meeting between Lock and key AFT team principals, in between the Buffalo Chip TT and the Black Hills Half-Mile race.

As I wrote in Common Tread, “whether you hate Lock or just fear him, American Flat Track is his fiefdom. I’ve heard team owners grumble they’ll go over his head to Jim France – from whom Lock’s power devolves. Michael’s put down such insurrections before.”

As far as I’m concerned, if you are just coming to this SuperTwins controversy, I recommend that you first read my story on the Common Tread website. If, after reading that story, you want to know exactly what Michael Lock said in our interview, read on…

Bikewriter: Were there racing series, or even other sports, that inspired this change?

 Michael Lock: We have benchmarks, motorcycle racing series that we deem to be successful. For me [commercial] success is the benchmark; flat track has been through the ringer over the last two, three decades; it’s no secret it had fallen on hard times, financially.

 Supercross is a benchmark in terms of its ability to attract fans, OEM participation and sponsorship. MotoGP, which I have to say I’ve followed ever since I was in short trousers. That’s a benchmark in terms of pushing back technical frontiers, emphasis on safety, commercial scaling into a global property.

 BW: You say, “the desire of our broadcaster to have a racing class ready for live television”. Has NBCSports expressed any dissatisfaction with the current show?

ML: No, quite the opposite. I was in Connecticut at NBC’s headquarters about six months ago for a motorsports summit. We were the smallest guys in the room, and I was talking to some senior NBC executives who expressed surprise that within two years, we’d managed to grow our audience from zero to 200, 250 thousand viewers per episode.

The surprise was that we were doing it with tape delay. These guys are experts, and said, “No one watches tape delayed sport any more.” The fact that we were able to build viewership with tape delay, particularly as we also stream live, really surprised them. They told me that to break out in the bigger leagues, the difference between tape delay and live would be a multiple of two or three. That would take us to half a million, three-quarters of a million viewers; that puts us with Supercross.

They’re not dissatisfied, but they said, “If you want to get to the next level you’re going to find it extremely hard, following the format you’ve got. Your current format’s already overperforming; you’ve captured all the people who want to watch the race, already knowing what result.”

BW: How can you package Production Twins to not appear as the ‘have-not’ series in this context?

ML: That thought’s been in the back of my mind since the beginning. It could easily be the stepchild. But we have a practical consideration that the step up from the 450 singles class is not only less power and less weight, but they’re adapted motocross bikes, so they’re somewhat of a compromise. The step up from that class to what are effectively prototype twins that are 50% more powerful, 40% heavier, and have different geometry and work in a different way – it’s a bigger step up than, say going from a 600cc Supersports bike to a Superbike.

So how do we help people step up? Production Twins was a logical stepping stone, it was more gentle uptick in terms of equipment and competition. I don’t think you want to be out on a mile track, with Bryar Baumann or Jared Mees on their FTR750s, while you’re still learning.

We needed to craft that class so that it would also attract AFT Twins competitors who were just not in the hunt; who didn’t have $100,000 to buy a couple of Indians. They’d be very good competition for the guys coming up.

It’s really got momentum. Vance & Hines have teamed up with Black Hills Harley-Davidson to put two Harleys in that class; they’re not the same spec as the ones racing in the Twins class, but they’re not far off, and they’ve brought sizzle to the class. We had the first race with those two Harleys at Black Hills, and it was outstanding.

BW: “There will be additional costed services as part of the SuperTeams contract” sounds ominous to teams that are already losing money, or breaking even at best.

ML: If we’re able to go live on TV, it will attract big audiences. And those teams will want to bring in outside sponsorship, which is something most have never really done. Aside from the factory teams, pretty much all the other teams have been self-funded by wealthy guys who love the sport.

That’s great, but it’s not very sustainable. We need a link to the outside world, to companies that want to be involved. We’re going to package it and take it to a bigger audience – that’s our job. Your job is fund it and to bring in sponsors to make it work. We don’t expect you to do it on your own; you’re going to need pitch decks and sponsorship documents, which most of them have never done before, but we have done, at the series level.

We’re going to offer them our design services and content, millions of still photos, video because we shoot everything, we have an in-house video department that produces features – which at the moment we do on behalf of the series but could easily do on behalf of an individual rider or team. We have an enormous database, digital marketing tools.

Up until now we’ve paid for all that and used it primarily for series promotion. We do also contract with individual teams; Vance & Hines, Indian, Estenson, and others. But it’s been on an ad hoc basis, on a buy-in basis. What we’re proposing is to make all that available and menu price them, so they can choose at what level they want to go in. All we’re saying is, we expect you to do some minimum level of marketing, so there will be some obligatory costs, but it will be pretty low level. We’re not looking to make money on it. We’re looking to give them the tools, so they can actually stay on the train.

The price [of those assets] is not going to go up, but we’re just saying everyone’s going to use them. At the moment some teams do and some don’t. And guess what? The ones who don’t, are the teams without any sponsors. We’re saying, ‘There’s no way you’re going to have a PR person or a marketing team on Day 1, but guess what? I’ve got a PR team, I’ve got a marketing team, and we can use the infrastructure. You won’t be able to buy it on the open market any cheaper, because we already go to all the races anyway.

I know that some people perceive this as a money grab. We’re not seeking to have the teams fund our sport; we need a truck partner, a beverage partner, a camera partner, a watch partner. I just want to make sure that the teams in the paddock are sophisticated enough to take advantage of that growth

BW: What is meant by the phrase “A set of criteria” when it comes to choosing which teams will be allowed to compete in SuperTwins?

ML: We’re looking for teams to demonstrate financial stability. There have been instances where teams get two-thirds of the way through the season and run out of money. If we’ve been telling their story, and they’re in the hunt for the championship, and now they can’t continue or do it adequately, that’s a big problem for the championship.

Also, what is the intended infrastructure. Some teams have one part-time mechanic, and oops, he doesn’t turn up one week; again, just not professional behavior. I can’t legislate that in all three classes, but we’re going to have to do that in the premier class. I want them to commit.

And we’re looking at the experience of the riders. If we’re in an oversold situation, that we’ve got more applications than positions to fill, we’ll look at the riders, to ensure that the best riders are in the mix.

BW: Would the ability to add another manufacturer influence your choice of which teams get a SuperTwins slot?

ML: We’ve made strides attracting manufacturers, but I would love to have BMW in our paddock; I’d love to have Honda in the Twins class. So hypothetically, an application with an OEM backer would be a factor.

BW: There are key team principals who you no doubt want on board: Gary Gray for Indian, Terry Vance for Harley-Davidson, Tim Estenson, Jerry Stinchfield’s Roof Systems team... Have any of those guys told you they’re in?

Well of course they’re all smart, cautious businesspeople and they want to see the contracts. I’ve been talking both on the record and off the record, to senior people in the sport, about this for two years and I anticipate that all those guys you mentioned with be there. I’d be shocked if any of them came to me and said, “You know what Michael, I don’t really fancy it.”

BW: So no key team principals are just now hearing about this?

ML: No! The first time I was live with this in public was at Daytona, during Bike Week, the night before our first race. We had a paddock kickoff meeting; I gave a presentation then to launch it, and all those guys were certainly in attendance. Unofficially I’ve spoken to most of them way before that.

BW: What would you say to lifelong fans, who used to love the drama of regional riders trying to fight their way through qualifying, and heat races, and semis, to see if they could make the Main? Or fans who love the idea of a guy like Willie McCoy, who just a few years ago could drive up from Texas in a van with his own bike, pit all by himself, and win the Springfield Mile? Flat track used to be a blue-collar democracy, but this will make the premier class an elite closed shop.

I’m acutely sensitive to that perspective, and I’m very aware of the rich and independent heritage of this sport. We are not ripping that up, because the Production Twins class, and Singles class aren’t going to be changed. So the plucky amateur or local guy has entry into those two classes.

But the sport has changed at the top, and not because of us. There are teams that have three or four Indians that cost $50,000 each, and they’ve got a smart guy who sits on a laptop, and three guys twirling wrenches like six-guns, and the Willie McCoy, bless him, don’t win anymore; they rarely get into the Main event because the Twins class has naturally elevated to a pro level. So we’re acknowledging that and harnessing it.

The SuperTwins class is the calling card to the outside world, and we need the outside world, because the motorcycle world has shrunk. In the days when there were 700,000 or a million new motorcycles being sold, and there were amateur racers in every small town tinkering on bikes in their garages; that doesn’t happen any more.

Flat track was always an amateur sport with a veneer of professionalism. It worked like that for 60 years, but the motorcycle industry has changed, and that’s reflected at the top of our sport. We haven’t restricted the size of the field, and yet the typical entry count for an AFT Twins race is 22-24 riders. Only 14 riders have done every round this year. 

The sport has organically evolved; what we’re seeking to do is encapsulate that in a format that everyone understands, and take it to a new level. But that’s the top of the pyramid. Production Twins is starting to feel to me what AFT Twins felt like a couple of years ago. So the guy who fancies trying to beat James Rispoli on a Vance & Hines-built Harley... he can do that in the Production Twins class. 

BW: What will happen to people who’ve bought FTR750s, who either can’t or don’t want to race in SuperTwins? Will there be a way for them to modify those bikes and become eligible for Production Twins?

ML: We had a meeting on Monday in Rapid City, with senior team owners and OEMs, to chew over some of the details of SuperTwins, and they asked the exact same question. One thing they proposed was that we create a sort of wild card system, where they could enter the races on the West Coast, or in the Midwest. We hadn’t thought of that, so we’re having a look now at ways we can allow teams that have the expertise and the hardware, but don’t want to make that commitment, to becoming a fixture on TV every week. I’m confident we can find a solution.

BW: It looks to me as if you want to produce a discrete, free-standing racing product that can be flown to a city anywhere in the world, the same way MotoGP flies in, to put on a show. In your mind, is there a future in which races regularly occur outside the U.S.?

ML: Absolutely! We have a season that starts in March and ends in September, and it’s fast and furious and keeps the teams busy and keeps revenues coming in to them. Then we have six months of the year when nothing happens. The top teams might relocate to Southern California of Florida, but the rest of them really struggle; they do off-championship races where there’s not a lot of safety equipment.

I would like to take all that investment, and put it into a jumbo jet and drop it in London, or Berlin, or Tokyo, and do exhibition races. We’ve spoken with potential sponsors who’ve said, they’d love it. It’s ‘NFL’ – uniquely American, and there’s a curiosity factor all around the world to see these guys.

In Lock's defense, while researching this story I built a spreadsheet counting the number of twins riders who attempted to make Main events at every 'big track' national between 2008-18 (this year's stats can't be compared because Production Twins changed the class structure.) Over that 11 year period, on average, the number of Experts showing up to race fell from mid-low 40s to mid-low 30s. There was a pretty strong trend in place. The total number of Twins/Experts showing up in 2019 is back to where we were in 2008.

For what it’s worth, although I don’t think anyone at AFT likes to see my number flash up on their phone, Michael Lock’s a pretty good interview, and I felt that he made a pretty good pitch for his SuperTwins idea. If I was an AFT team owner, I might be skeptical but I would not reject the idea out of hand.

I just feel that, as I explained in Common Tread, we’re giving up a lot of culture and history with this change. So we’d damned well better get something in return.

Want to support this kind of in-depth motorcycle journalism? Buy a book.

If you want my two cents’ worth, I think Lock’s SuperTwins plan may work, but that it probably doesn’t go far enough. I think the goal for AFT SuperTwins should be nothing less than an FIM-sanctioned World Championship. Possibly an eight- to 10-race series in which four to five races are held in the U.S. (much the same way MotoGP holds several races in Spain.)

Production Twins could then run as the top national series in (at least) the USA, Australia, Spain, and the UK — all of which could support a reasonable national series. That would give Production Twins a raison d’être.

Although the first Barcelona ‘Superprestigio’ short track race was not an unmitigated success, it proved that you could promote a successful flat track race in Europe. I think it’s time for an FIM-sanctioned World Championship in the sport of ‘American Flat Track’.

Carlin Dunne, in Earnest

Carlin Dunne was the best rider at Pikes Peak of the ‘paved’ era, and the fastest qualifier this year. He died within sight of the finish line at the summit on June 30, 2019. Photo from Instagram (Larry Chen?)

The death of Carlin Dunne, at Pikes Peak, serves as a reminder that racing motorcycles on real roads will never be safe.

Risk is what gives the decision to race motorcycles meaning. 

Riding Man is an exploration of this idea. I’ve excerpted a part of it below. It helps explain the appeal of motorcycle racing, which has little if anything to do with being an “adrenaline junkie” and rarely results in meaningful financial reward.

That leaves the intangible rewards. If you’ve been a racer, you know what they are.

Risk is what gives motorcycle racing those rewards. No, we don’t race in order to take risks. But if it was completely safe, none of us would do it. 

Here’s my message to all the racers who didn’t get hurt or killed yesterday. Carlin Dunne died for you. Not willingly, of course, but his sacrifice is what gives your sport meaning and what makes the experience of racing so profoundly different than the experience most other sports.

Hold him in your thoughts, because he and so many others who went before him will make your next race a profound experience. Their deaths will impart that much more meaning to the feelings you have when you pull off the track after next taking the checkered flag.

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

Hemingway is famously quoted (or, perhaps, misquoted?) as having said, “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” This is ironic, because as a motorcycle racer, I’ve always been jealous of mountain climbers, in the sense that they don’t seem to face the same resistance from society when it comes to justifying or explaining their obsession. If you grow up in Switzerland and then live in the Canadian Rockies like I did, you meet lots of climbers. I’ve known about half a dozen people who’ve summited Everest, and I’ve always been struck by the fact that we seem understand each other well. We both appreciate a kind of self-knowledge that comes from our particular risk sports. 

There are equally dangerous–even more dangerous–pursuits. You could choose to be a rodeo bullrider or base jumper. But the danger in those sports comes from the decision to participate. It’s something you confront once per event, when you lower yourself down from that eight-foot fence and wrap that rope around your hand. You nod, and after that your survival is up to the bull. For all the control you have over it, you may as well be playing Russian roulette. In fact most winning rides are, if anything, less dangerous than losing ones. But climbers and motorcycle racers need to make a constant series of decisions–we ask ourselves, “Where’s the edge?” and constantly need to confront the fact that after removing every possible variable we’re going to be left with this reality: the best performance is inherently the most dangerous one. This is the source of a unique kind of self-knowledge and an easy mutual respect between us. 

And yet, motorcycle racers get far less credit for this in society at large. No one seriously suggests that climbing should be banned. I blame this discrepancy on George Mallory. He’d attempted to climb Everest in 1922, and was on a lecture tour of America raising money for a second attempt. At every stop, he got the same stupid question from reporters, “Why do you want to climb the world’s highest mountain, anyway?” Finally, in exasperation, he snapped “Because it’s there!”  

For whatever reason, the answer resonated with the non-climbing public. Taken out of context, the phrase had its own Zen. 

Mallory did assemble the sponsorship he needed for a second attempt, in 1924. Whether or not he made it to the summit is one of climbing’s enduring mysteries. He never came back down and was never seen alive again. Considering the equipment of the day (for perspective, the TT course record was around 55 miles per hour at the time) his climb was one of the greatest achievements ever in mountaineering. Mallory’s record stood for 30 years until Sir Edmund Hillary became the first man ever to summit Everest for sure. 

A few years ago, after the course was fully paved and it was impossible to even pretend this was anything but a proper ‘real road’ race, there were a couple of fatalities on Pikes Peak and the organizers summarily decided to drop the motorcycles from the program.

At the last minute, they reversed that decision. They adopted a plan devised by Paul Livingston and backed by Ducati, to better prepare rookies for the hill. And they limited the number of motorcycle entries.

I imagine the death of the race’s star rider will make the organizers reconsider that reprieve. Pikes Peak’s no TT; the organizers have a very limited appetite for high-profile fatalities. I personally wish they could see past it, and preserve America’s last real, ‘real roads’ race.

Why should we keep racing at Pikes Peak? Because it’s there.

A five-race day at the TT?

The weather, and an abbreviated schedule, are actually making this safer. There are a lot of people on the Island who would prefer it if every TT was compressed, and Race Week became Race Weekend.

After a Practice Week beset by terrible weather, Race Week’s off to an equally fouled up start.

Wednesday’s races were pushed back, and the current plan is to run five races on Thursday. Supersport and Sidecar classes are cut to two-lap distances, while Superstock and Lightweights will run three laps. Only the TT Zero race will run its full scheduled distance <sarcasm>.

You read this here first…

While it is true that most people who live on the Isle of Man feel that on balance, the TT is a net positive, a substantial minority resent the road closures and chaos. And although the organizers have done a lot to improve safety, the only way to really improve it further is to cut the total number of laps. The weather cut laps in practice, and shortening those races will reduce the total amount of risk by about a third.

A lot of people on the Isle of Man will say, “Five races in one day? That was fine. In fact, if we did that every year, we could hold the entire TT over a weekend.”

There will be pressure to compress the schedule like that, henceforth.