Failing upwards: In a slightly different world, we'd have President Knievel

Evel Knievel’s meticulously restored Mack Truck hauler is on display in the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka, Kansas. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but the museum is totally worth a visit and the $15 cost of admission. (Great photo courtesy Dan Wayne.)

“Hell, I never knew a broad that wasn’t a pushover.”

“When I die, you’ve got to bury me with my complete trailer, with my bikes and everything inside. But you’ve got to leave the big airhorn sticking out, so when I think it’s time for me to come back and do some good, I’ll just toot my horn and drive right out of the grave because I’m really Superman.”

I recently read “Evel Knievel on Tour”, a memoir written by Knievel’s PR flack, Sheldon Saltman, covering the weeks leading up to the daredevil’s ill-fated attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon.

The thing that struck me throughout this story was, if Evel had been born just a few years later, and to money in New York instead of white trash in Butte, he may well have become the President of the United States—because Evel basically was The Donald, before there was a Donald.

Both are white men, of course—that’s the only type of person that fails upwards instead of paying the price for ignorance. And both were (are, in the case of Trump) demonstrably terrible at the thing they nominally became famous for doing.

In Trump’s case as a real-estate developer, casino owner, and impresario of airlines, steaks, and God-knows what else it was one bankruptcy after another.

Evel one-upped him there. His failures weren’t just somehow overlooked, he became rich (albeit briefly) and enduringly famous for his failures. When I recently toured the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka, the founder walked me past the display related to Evel’s famous fountain jump at Caesar’s Palace and offered that, “If he’d landed this jump we would not be talking about him.”

Both were misogynists and serial philanderers; both wrapped themselves in the flag and claimed to stand for law and order while freely admitting to an early life of petty crime in Evel’s case, and open self-dealing as President, in Trump’s. They were both golfers prone to exaggerating their skills on the links.

Evel was Trump’s prototype as an idiot-savant when it came to manipulating the media of his day; he owed most of his fame and fortune to free coverage. Again like Trump, Evel railed against the press. After craving and currying coverage, he bitterly complained it was unfair. Also Trumpian: Evel was quick to imagine that when things didn’t go his way, it was because people in general and the press in particular were conspiring against him.

Both men’s lives amply demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect and powerful fools’ tendency to surround themselves with incompetence. Evel’s idiotic, low-tech, steam-rocket “Sky Cycle” was destined to fail, just as Trump’s strategy of handing Covid-19 response off to the states will doom the U.S. to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Of course, Trump won’t accept responsibility for that massive fuckup. Meanwhile Knievel realized too late that his Sky Cycle stunt was unlikely to pan out, but climbed in anyway—which illustrates the one significant difference between the two blowhards: Evel was no coward.

This fascinating book is almost impossible to find in print, but if you click this cover image you can read or download a high res scan of the entire text.

In the end, Saltman’s book—which was authorized, based on hundreds of hours of recordings, and the truth of which was never challenged—proved to be Knievel’s undoing. Not because Knievel’s millions of fans abandoned him, but because it indirectly led to Knievel’s sponsors abandoning him.

Even though Knievel and his lawyers had approved Saltman’s text, it is likely that Evel never really read it. (Sound familiar?) It wasn’t until the book came out that he realized how unflattering it was. Knievel could not control his temper; he attacked Saltman in front of witnesses, which led to criminal charges. Ideal Toy, which paid the daredevil millions per year in royalties in order to market Evel Knievel toys, immediately dropped him. Within weeks, he was bankrupt. The end was a long, slow, embarrassing descent.

Which brings me to that quote about burying him in his truck. Evel was a malignant narcissist too; he was jealous of anyone else’s fame. As soon as Trump emerged as a serious contender for the GOP nomination in 2016, Evel would have burst from the grave and loudly proclaimed that he’d had his name on jet long before Trump ever did and that he, not The Donald, deserved to be the President.

I’m not sure how Evel would’ve negotiated the Republican primaries, but I am certain that many of the people who voted for Trump in the general election would just as blithely have voted Knievel.

He wouldn’t have made a worse President.

Comparing re-opening the economy to the risks of driving

The debate over when and how to “reopen the economy” during this pandemic is a debate about acceptable risk. Many proponents of a quick return to normal cite the nearly 40,000 road deaths we seem to accept every year.

This comment from ‘Honeybee’, on a recent Times story about Covid testing failures, is typical of this line of reasoning.

“The virus is here to stay. It has a very low fatality rate for people under 65 who are relatively healthy. The rate isn't zero, but neither is the rate zero for riding in a car or flying on a plane. Stop this hysteria. Stay home if you are terrified. No one can infect you if you stay home.”

Conveniently, the number of Americans killed by Covid-19 so far this year is about the same as the number killed annually in traffic accidents. (36,560 in 2018, according to DOT FARS data.)

Of course in reality, the comparison of those fatality totals is specious. The Covid-19 deaths have all occurred in the last few weeks. Assuming an equal degree of exposure, Covid-19 is far more dangerous–even to young people–than driving.

Last but not least, you can’t go out and engage in risky behavior on the road, get in an accident, then go home and breath on someone else and cause them to have an accident two weeks later. The analogy between the risks of Covid-19 and driving is fatally flawed.

In spite of that, I would argue that we should treat the risks of reopening the economy the same way we treat the risks of driving. Here’s why...

Road fatalities and injury accidents are extensively researched and analyzed both by government agencies within the Department of Transportation, and by NGOs like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, with the result that very accurate models exist to predict mortality and morbidity.

Everyone gets tested

Driving is heavily regulated. We test and license drivers. We insist they’re all insured. In most states we safety inspect every vehicle.

Every state has a traffic code listing hundreds of rules. States, counties, and municipalities deploy hundreds of thousands of cops to enforce those rules, writing millions of tickets resulting in billions of dollars in fines. Every state maintains a database of violations, and cops in other states can easily access it. Even minor violations can dramatically increase the cost of mandatory insurance. Violating laws that wantonly put others at risk, such as driving while impaired, will result in imprisonment.

As individuals, no one is just ‘allowed to take their chances’ on the road. 

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Federal Highway Administration, along with Departments of Transportation in all 50 states, regulate auto safety and road infrastructure standards.

Every new car is crash tested. Auto manufacturers are forced to build in advanced technology from anti-lock brakes to air bags, with the goal of reducing the number of accidents and helping to make inevitable accidents more survivable. Taken as a whole, these safety efforts have cost us–consumers and taxpayers–countless billions. They’ve also made driving far, far safer than it otherwise would have been and saved at least 50,000 lives.

Of course, states have the latitude to make rules that reflect unique conditions and residents’ preferences. Texas is free to post a speed limit of 85 mph on Highway 130, and let motorcyclists ride without helmets. But statutes and discretionary funding give the federal DOT the ability to ensure that broadly similar standards are upheld across the country. That’s as it should be as American drivers freely cross state lines.

So yes, we really should apply the rules to ‘reopening the economy’ as we do to driving. Our approach should be data-driven, with the goal of maximizing public safety. The federal government has a responsibility to ensure that technology like testing protocols actually works. The research needed should be fully funded. Re-opening the economy should be well-regulated. And the rules should be enforced.

Just like driving.

Lille, 2002

Something about this self-imposed isolation has put me in the mind of 2002. After leaving the Isle of Man that summer I moved to Lille, where I wrote most of the first draft of Riding Man.

It was not the best time for me. I was suffering from post-TT depression, which I’d been warned about and is really a thing. I was living with a hypochondriac who never heard of a disease without suspecting that she had it. Ironically, I was the one who got sicker; my lupus flared up and to make matters worse, I had constant toothaches because I needed two root canals that I could ill afford to have treated.

I was living in a sixth-floor fin de siècle apartment. (I suppose I should say ‘we were living’ though I was often alone.) The Lille Opera house was just up the street. The apartment was huge and fabulous but very run-down. Its back windows looked out over the Vieux Lille’s large and well preserved medieval center.

Somewhere down on that block behind my apartment, there was a dance club that really didn’t get pumping until after midnight. On Friday and Saturday nights the bass thumped up all six floors until three or four in the morning. It crossed my mind every now and then to get up and at least see what was going on at that hour. But before I ever did, someone was stabbed or shot in the club, and the cops closed it. I didn’t miss the soundtrack.

Rolling over in my sleep triggered jolts of pain. So even after the club was padlocked I was often awake at two, or three, or four in the morning. If it was a school night, the city was dead quiet. But I still heard music.

Faintly, faintly. A piano; not a recording; it sounded like someone playing a few bars of music over and over, trying tiny variations. I know little of music but I envisioned a composer sitting at the keyboard writing a piece of music, trying this and that in the same way that I tried one phrase, deleted it and rewrote it, at my own keyboard.  And, it was beautiful.

It was so close to the threshold of audibility that I often wondered whether I was hearing it or just imagining it. Some nights, I went to the window and looked out over the medieval quartier, half-expecting to see a lone light in some garret, but it was completely dark.

So I went back to bed and wondered if it wasn’t music at all. Was my subconscious just trying to make sense of faint and far-off sirens; trucks and barges rumbling and burbling on their own schedules; bakers lifting roll shutters; rattled rats scattering trash as they dashed from cats? Any one those sounds individually inaudible, but collectively detectable?

It was unknowable. But in the intervening years I’ve concluded that I heard the work of an anonymous musician–because on my own, my subconscious could not possibly have composed an original score so beautiful.

Maybe I'm just in the distraction business. For the moment, that might be enough

For the last few weeks, I’ve been refreshing the New York Times home page, the Johns-Hopkins coronavirus dashboard, and checking the stock market 45 times a day. For now, Revzilla still wants me to provide content for Common Tread, but I can’t help but think that, A.) Most of what they sell is made in China and they could soon face a pretty big supply chain disruption, and B.) A major recession seems inevitable at which point few people are going to think, “I should buy a new crash helmet.” The sad truth is that in the U.S. at least, all motorcycle spending is discretionary.

At a time like this, motorcycle journalism seems like a less-than-essential part of a less-than-essential niche industry. I’d be more useful if I got a job stocking shelves at a supermarket.

Or, maybe not.

This post which, TBH, is really not my best work, was still seen by 27,000 people. I figure that all told, they were distracted for over month. Maybe that’s good for something.

The other day, Lance sent me a note mentioning that my recent post on the impending (now definite) cancelation of the 2020 TT had been Common Tread’s most-read post over the first few days of March. He mentioned that it had been looked at by 27,000 visitors to the site.

Of course, many people probably just glanced at it – perhaps they read a sentence or two – then moved on. But it triggered a bunch of comments, so some people read it all the way ‘through.

That got me thinking: If the average person spent even two minutes on my post, that works out to 27,000 people X 2 minutes = 54,000 minutes.

That’s a lot of minutes. 37½ days-worth, to be exact. At a time when a lot of us are sitting around at home, any distraction’s welcome. So that post, which only took me a few hours to research and write, provided readers with 900 hours of distraction.

For now, maybe that’s enough of a justification for me to keep writing.

64 is the new sixteen

My mom had three children, but only one she’s ever really had to worry about. That would be me.

I had a sketchy employment history. After a few years as a struggling freelance writer, I fell into a successful run of ad agency copywriter and creative director jobs in the 1980s and ’90s, but even if I hadn’t crashed that career, ‘creatives’ age out of the ad biz in their forties.

All that time, I also had a very dangerous hobby, racing motorcycles. That arc took me all the way to the Isle of Man TT – almost certainly the world’s most dangerous sporting event. When I hung up my leathers, I never really even hung them up; I tested motorcycles for magazines and websites. I’m still doing it – or at least, I was though 2019. I’m surely almost the oldest journalist in that niche. It is (was?) fun; motorcycle companies flew me to race tracks around the world. But it is almost as dangerous as racing and the ‘enthusiast publications’ I work for provide, at best, a hand-to-mouth existence. Basically OEMs treat me like a rock star but publishers pay me like a roadie.

You can imagine my poor mom thinking, “He’s 50, living out of a duffel bag half the time, choosing which credit card to pay off.” My friends from high school were paying off mortgages and planning to retire. I used to joke that my only retirement strategy was, “Pray for a miracle.”

Then, a miracle happened. I met and married Mary – an ex-ballroom dance champion who’d moved from competition to teaching and coaching. I told my mom that in hindsight, I would not have changed any of my crazy life choices; I no longer regretted decisions that I’d long thought were serious mistakes, all because that track had finally led me to Mary.

At the time, Mary and I were living in California, and my mom lived up in Calgary, Canada. So I’d spoken of Mary in phone calls, and Mary and my mom had talked. I’d sent my mom photos of us together. But it was probably a year or two before I actually brought Mary up to meet her in person.

No photo or description could have really prepared my mom for Mary in the flesh. My mom opened the door of her seniors’ condo to let us in, and involuntarily gasped, “Oh my God, you’re lovely.”

My mom who was then 80-something, and Mary, then 40-something, really hit it off. Each immediately felt that the other was family.

And over the next decade another miracle happened. Although Mary’s financial history had been at least as checkered as mine, we somehow got ourselves onto a sound financial footing. We moved to Kansas City to cut costs and though it took a while, Mary became one of the most respected ballroom dance coaches in the Midwest. I wrote a funny play for the local Fringe Festival; Mary starred in it and we won ‘Best of Fringe’ for our venue. A production company bought the rights to ‘Riding Man’. One of my friends told me, “If you two were a publicly traded company, I’d buy stock in you.”

The person who took the most joy in all that was my mom. We talked all the time about how great it was that Mary and I were building equity in our little home and, mainly, how happy she was that I was in a loving, stable relationship.

This isn’t a fairy tale. Considering my background – having raced in the TT – you might be surprised to learn that I was the financially cautious one. (People often think that motorcycle racers are adrenalin junkies, but most of us are actually control freaks.) That was a source of disagreements, and either or both of us could sulk for days.

Both of us are prone to bouts of depression, too. Early in our relationship, Mary went through a series of devastating blue periods and every time one hit, I stopped whatever I was doing to build her back up, and gently cajole her out of it.

I worshipped her through every up and down. Imagine the countless thousands of times that she left and then re-entered my field of view in ten years of marriage. Every single time that happened, I had to catch my breath a little.

In September 2019, I spent two weeks up in Calgary, helping my mom move from her condo into an assisted living facility. It was her choice; she was moving into a great place, while still mentally sharp and in remarkable health for a woman of 93.

Still, it was a difficult time for me. I had to sort, cull, and pack up a lifetime’s accumulation of stuff. Coordinate the move and get her reinstalled in the new place. All the while doing my best to protect her both physically and emotionally. There were a few times I nearly had to dive to move a box that would’ve tripped her.

Sixty may be the 40, seventy the new 50, but 93 is still 93. I laid awake wondering whether I was going to do all this work and have the move kill her anyway.

I’ve always been grateful for my mom’s robust health, but there were times during that move when I felt a little sorry for myself, and thought, “I’m too old for this, too.” It would have been a lot easier for me to have moved her if I was 50, not sixty-four.

My mom left many friends back at the old condo. There were people she’d played canasta with every Tuesday night for decades, and people who’d shared their door keys in case they were ever locked out or needed checking on. One by one, they came by to ask about the move, but the subtext of all those conversations was, “Neither of us can drive, so this is probably the last time we’ll see each other.” It broke my fucking heart, but I got her installed in the new place, and stayed for week while she began to meet new people. She has better social skills than I do.

Not long after I got back to Kansas City, Mary told me that she was leaving.

I always knew what I’d gotten into. She’s a beautiful ballroom dance teacher. Well heeled men fall in love with her every month. But this time it was mutual. Anyway, that may have influenced the timing, but it wasn’t the whole explanation. The world of ballroom dance is very traditional; men lead and women follow. As her business took off and mine – specialist journalism – was disrupted, I wasn’t enough of a leader in the financial sense. That was another part of it.

She watched me get sucked into feature film projects that almost always come to nothing and seem like a vain waste of time. I’m trying to edge back out of the motorcycle space and into mainstream journalism, so following the news is an important part of my job. The problem is, that doesn’t look like work.

If I was a good enough writer to really convey how I felt when Mary told me she was leaving, I’d be a rich and famous author and, ironically, she would probably still love me. (Perhaps I should say, ‘love me in that way’; I believe she still loves me in some lesser way.)

My second thought, after suicide, was “What will I tell my mom?”

My first instinct was simply not to tell her. In a strictly actuarial sense after all, she’ll probably only live another few years. The kindest thing by far would be to let her to die thinking, “At least Mark is happy.”

I thought I could keep coming up to visit every few months, as is my habit, and just tell her, “Mary’s too busy with work,” or “Someone has to stay and care for the dogs.” I discussed it with Mary, and she agreed to play along. After all she lovesd my mom, too.

But after a week I realized that my mom could live to be a hundred. I am not a good enough actor to pull that role off. As much as I wanted to protect her, I knew that there was no way I could – at least not for long.

So I telephoned her. She was glad to hear my voice for an instant, but immediately knew something was very wrong. I fell apart. My mom was devastated, but she held it together.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You’re going to get through this. The best part of your life is still ahead of you. Your sixties and seventies are great decades; your whole perspective on life changes. They were my best years, and they’ll be your best years. I promise.”

So picture a 64 year-old, ex-death-defying motorcycle racer in tears. And that old, old woman who defaulted, instantly and expertly, to being a mom.

If I’d been there she would have held me and rocked me. I might as well have been 16.

In praise of social distance

We’re all channeling our inner Italians, and preparing for ‘social distancing’ (and later, quite possibly, outright quarantine.) I have to say that social distancing and working from home is nothing new to me. Most days I sit at a keyboard, and the few face-to-face conversations I have are with two dogs who, as yet, have never responded. Well, that’s not completely true. If I ask them, “Who wants to go for a walk?” one of them responds by spinning around in circles, which makes it nearly impossible to put on his harness.

Anyway, the news of late has put me in the mind of an earlier, far smaller Italian disaster–the Mont Blanc Tunnel Fire. Regular readers will know that I basically wrote the legend of Pierlucio ‘Spadino’ Tinazzi, the hero of that fire. Many of you will know that last year, I had to walk that legend back.

Late last year, I held an event at Blip Roasters–a cool motorcycle hangout in my adopted home town of Kansas City. I told a small crowd the story of the fire, of journalists including me who got the Spadino legend all wrong, and then I described my efforts to correct the record. So now, if you have 30 minutes to kill (and who doesn’t, these days?) here’s a link to my talk which I recently uploaded to Soundcloud…

I sure hope that Tom Gauld doesn’t mind me appropriating this cartoon, which appeared in my Twitter feed today, and which seems perfect for this time. I, of course, want you to buy my books to while away your time in quarantine, but if you want more of Mr. Gauld’s deadpan humor, learn about his books here.

If you plan on spending more time at home this spring, you can read my original account of ‘Searching for Spadino’ in On Motorcycles: The Best of Backmarker. This book is 440 pages, so it will burn up a few hours for even the fastest reader. Click the cover image to go straight to Amazon.

Because you can’t spend the entire quarantine period out riding in the fresh air: This book contains ‘Searching for Spadino’ and over 400 pages worth of other motorcycle stories. “20 years of motorcycle journalism, without all the crap.” Click the cover to go straight to Amazon. Come to think of it, going straight into the Amazon sounds like a great virus-avoidance strategy too. But buying a book is cheaper.

Thanks. Wash your hands and remember: the Covid-19 virus is impossible to catch while you’re at home reading. (And you’re safe while wearing a full-face helmet, riding hell for leather, too!)

What I’d do with Harley-Davidson

If Harley-Davidson was going to stick with Matt Levatich’s strategy, they would have stuck with him. So I imagine we’re going to see a significant shift away from some or all of these ideas, which were the cornerstones of his strategy

• Harley needs to be in the business of building riders, not just motorcycles

• Shifting to electrics with the Livewire, electric bicycles, and IRONe kid’s ‘strider’ bike (ironically, that might be the most accidentally truthful brand name ever trademarked!)

• Updating the product mix with a new naked muscle cruiser and an ADV bike

• I’m sure there are lots of other aspects to it, but that’s enough to start a conversation.

So, what should The Motor Company do instead?

I put that question up on my Facebook page, and got over 50 thoughtful comments, some of which I’ll attach to the bottom of this post.

But first; anyone who has a simplistic answer to Harley’s existential problems is, well, a simpleton. H-D is tightly tied to the U.S. domestic motorcycle market, which is in a long-term structural decline that is irreversible in any time frame relevant to a publicly-traded company.

H-D’s domestic audience is–despite efforts to appeal to more women, minorities, and millennial/Gen Z consumers–overwhelmingly pale, male, and stale. Not very many people are buying new Harleys, but those who are, are buying their last new Harley. 

I would honestly not be surprised if the Board fired Matt Levatich because he refused to prune the company back and make it an acquisition target for Geely, or some similar foreign company. I wouldn’t blame them; it’s probably the best thing the company could do for its shareholders over the next five years.

One problem is, for sure, the short-sightedness of most contemporary investors

But I’d rather see Harley-Davidson survive as an independent company. So for what it’s worth–about what you’re paying to read it–here’s my strategic outline...

Existing dealers should branch out

The vast majority of Harley-Davidson dealers carry H-D only. This means that only people who’ve self-selected as “Harley types” will ever even walk in the door. This might’ve made sense 20 years ago, when there was a waiting list for every new Harley model, but it’s counterproductive now.

Corporate should free existing dealers to carry other brands–even encourage it–and look for successful multi-brand franchises that will add Harley-Davidson into their mix. A gal who thinks she wants a Kawasaki W800 might consider a Sportster instead, if she sat on one.

Rationalize the existing line

Who, besides Harley-Davidson employees and salesmen, think these are six different models?

Although devotees gnashed their teeth over the demise of the Dyna, the existing product mix still includes a bunch of models that are indistinguishable.

“Designed in Milwaukee™”

It’s time to cut costs on the bikes sold here, even if it means assembling them somewhere else. Apple products carry a coy, “Designed in California” statement, suggesting some cool factor I suppose, but no one cares they’re made by slave labor in China. A bunch of old reactionaries will fume, “I’ll never buy another Harley,” when they’re all made in Malaysia, or Thailand, or China... but those old farts weren’t going to buy another one anyway.

Harley-Davidson can keep one small assembly plant open in the U.S. where American craftsmen bench-build blueprinted versions of a few key models to a higher spec and visibly higher quality, which will be sold at premium prices.

Peashooter™ by Harley-Davidson

I think this comment is on the right track but I’d rather see a truly modern single closer to a Husqvarna Vitpilen. So, replace the Street 500 (a model I’ve never, ever seen in the wild) with a modern 450cc single. Give it a brand story that evokes H-D’s Class A racing success. This platform would include a sporty streetbike, a small ADV bike, and a hip urban cruiser with dual shocks.

Livewire? Kill it. But double down on electric vehicles with ‘Zero™ by Harley™’

Livewire was a good idea, but the company needed to act on it immediately. And the bike Harley finally released is far too expensive. How many are they even making? Two a day? Five?..

A better strategy would be to acquire 49% of Zero, which could use that cash to ramp up production. Zero would then have access to a much bigger dealer network.

Pan-America? FFS it had better not be the ‘Panned-America’

A big ADV bike would be great, with one proviso noted below…

I just Googled “Harley-Davidson Pan-Am…” because I wasn’t sure if H-D used a hyphen between ‘Pan’ and ‘America’. Google filled in this suggestion: “Pan-America weight”. That gives you some idea of the skepticism ADV riders have towards this model.

Matt Levatich made a very high-risk/high-reward play with the Pan-America. Yes, ADV is the U.S. market’s last buoyant, big-bike class. But it’s filled with highly evolved motorcycles that are stunningly competent.

It would be better not to enter that market at all, than to enter it with a bike that is not at least as good as the Tiger 1200.

Hearken back to the mid-oughts, when Triumph entered the 600 Supersport class with the Daytona, which was a a butter knife in a class of switchblades. Hard core sport riders were, like, “Pfft.” It didn’t matter that the Daytona was actually a great bike for most riders; 600 class buyers wanted bragging rights, and every other OEM in the class got it. They lavished more engineering on their 600s than they did on their superbikes. Well the big ADV class is like that now. If the Pan-America is just a good bike, it’ll be the Panned America amongst ADV aficionados, and Harley will give itself a real black eye.

Put the ‘sport’ back in Sportster

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard other-brand riders say, “The one Harley I think is kind of cool is the Sportster,” I could buy a latte at Starbucks the next time I’m in some airport on a two-hour layover.

Harley should leverage that appeal by benchmarking an entry-level Sportster against the Royal Enfield 650, and a mid-priced one against the Triumph Thruxton.

Oh, and one last thing...

If we learned anything from Harley-Davidson’s ‘Buell’ experience, it’s that the company–and especially its dealers–are resistant to change. I suspect Matt Levatich would agree! No strategy will work unless its effectively sold into the distribution network.

OK, I know I wrote “One last thing…” up there, but here’s one last, last thing from me, before I release you to a selection of comments from my Facebook feed: FFS if you’re going to sell a trike, put the two wheels up front where they’re supposed to be. If you want to sell a vehicle with this configuration, bring back the Servi-Car as a genuine commercial/utility vehicle for hipster bagel deliveries, or whatever.

Go on.

Continue reading below, to see more comments from my Facebook feed but first, help me to justify the effort I put into posts like this. Click on this cover, and buy this crappy book. It’s got a whole chapter on Harley-Davidson’s fascinating dead ends.

I’m not sure it needs to lean into corners, but it sure as hell shouldn’t roll over or understeer off the edge of ‘em.

re: Grooming H-D for sale to another company. Whenever this guy disagrees with me, he’s usually proven right.

“Uh, Erik… You busy?…”

Real innovation will only work if the company and dealers buy in.

Admit your market is aging, and build for it.

Oops, my anonymization was less than 100% effective, but I doubt if this writer is worried about being identified.

Stuart Garner's not the first grifter to own Norton

In its 122-year history, Norton has fallen victim to competition from Japan; mismanagement & intransigent unions; the challenge of commercializing rotary engines; even the collapse of Lehmann Bros. It was also owned by at least two fraudsters before Stuart Garner got his hands on the brand.

He doesn’t look guilty… OK, he does. This photo may give a clue as to how this story will end. Garner owned (and, I think, still owns) a game ranch in South Africa. If he gets down there, extraditing him will take years if it happens at all. And if he’s sequestered a few million quid in SA, that money will be safe from his creditors. So even if Garner were to be extradited, and do a few years in prison, he’d retire in comfort.

By my count, Stuart Garner’s at least the tenth person or corporate entity to own the great old Norton brand. Considering its recent past, I was not surprised to learn Garner was just another grifter.

A potted history of Norton ownership…

Norton was founded by James Lansdowne Norton in 1898. The company was formed to supply machine parts to the hundreds of small shops across Britain making newfangled bicycles and motorcycles. Norton made its first ’cycle in 1902, powered by a single-cylinder Clement motor. The first all-Norton motorcycle appeared in 1908.

Under new ownership

James Norton fell ill in 1911, and the Vandervell family took ownership (though James remained as co-managing director.) Thus began an extended period of commercial and racing success.

Under new ownership

In 1952, the Vandervells sold Norton to Associated Motorcycles in order to avoid steep estate taxes. AMC was another British company that also manufactured Matchless and AJS .

Under new ownership

In the mid-1960s, AMC went bust, and its assets were acquired by Dennis Poore, a British industrialist who controlled Manganese Bronze Holdings. (Among other things, his company made those famous London ‘black cabs’.)

Reorganized

Poore re-organized Norton as Norton-Villiers and invested in the development of new models including the much loved ‘Commando’. For a while, it almost staved off Japanese competition.

In 1973, Poore was asked to take over Triumph (which by then had merged with BSA.) Thus began the Norton-Villiers-Triumph period. In ’76, Triumph production ground to an almost complete halt as the company fought with its unionized labor force.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Poore kept the Norton name alive by reorganizing the company under Norton Motors (1978) Ltd. That company developed a new bike powered by a Wankel motor. (The development rights to the Wankel had come along with BSA’s assets years earlier.)

Under new ownership

The first air-cooled Norton rotaries were not without their problems, but they showed promise and a water-cooled version was developed. It’s possible that Poore just tired of competing with the Japanese ‘Big Four’, or that he realized rotary motors were destined to have trouble meeting upcoming pollution regulations. Anyway, he sold Norton to another financier named Phillippe la Roux who created another new company, Norton plc.

The Norton rotary race bikes were the stuff of legend. Steve Hislop’s battle with Carl Fogarty in the 1992 Senior TT is considered by many to be the hardest fought TT race of all time. Fogarty put in the first-ever 123 mph lap on a Yamaha, but Hislop won the race on a Norton rotary.

Although fans loved them, the rotaries were not a commercial success, and le Roux’s efforts to keep the company afloat included some shady dealings. He resigned while under investigation by the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry. In the early 1990’s, the Norton assets were sold by one of le Roux’ creditors.

Norton emigrates to Canada

The brand was next acquired by a Canadian named Nelson Skalbania, who was well known in western Canada as a real estate flipper who’d also bought and sold a number of second-tier pro sports teams. He must’ve had some good instincts, because he was the first guy to sign Wayne Gretzky to a pro hockey contract. But no one trusted Skalbania any further than they could throw him. He was finally convicted of a criminal fraud (unrelated to Norton) in 1997.

After Skalbania, the Norton brand was sub-licensed in at least four regions. It got increasingly difficult to determine who, if anyone, owned the rights to the name.

Norton emigrates again

That didn’t deter Kenny Dreer, a lifelong motorcyclist and mechanic, who fell in love with Nortons the first time he saw a Commando. Dreer started restoring vintage Commandos but by 2006, he’d assembled a small team that set out to design and build an entirely new 961 cc Commando. Dave Edwards, then the editor of Cycle World, was an enthusiastic early supporter.

“There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in Oregon,” Dreer recently told me. “From 1998 to 2007, we were in it for $12 million, but seven of that, at least, went to attorneys. When we designed the 961 prototype, we were working on fold out tables. We weren’t buying Aston Martins or castles.” The company’s most valuable asset was the result of all those attorneys’ fees: Dreer and his investor/business partner Oliver Curme consolidated all the Norton trademarks.

Dreer hated to see his effort wound down, but in 2008 under increased pressure after the collapse of Lehmann Bros., Curme forced Kenny’s hand, and put Norton up for sale. That’s when Stuart Garner bought the brand and the intellectual property associated with Dreer’s 961 prototypes.

“We just couldn’t raise the money to go into production,” Dreer told me. “It was sad, because we had a book full of customers. But in the end, everyone got their deposits back.”

Garner’s not the first grifter to own Norton, but he may be the most obvious one

He left school at 16 without a diploma, chased girls, played snooker, and rode motorcycles. He got a job as a gamekeeper at Foremarke Hall, a Georgian Manor house and estate that’s also home to a fancy prep school. Although he was only paid £16 a week, it was a great place to study upper class twits and learn how easy they were to scam.

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Next, a girlfriend’s father got him a job at a fireworks company. By the age of 19 Garner’d started his own fireworks business. He leveraged that company and made his first motorcycle investment, acquiring half of Spondon Engineering, a famous old British frame company.

Although he was only a 50% shareholder in Spondon, Garner managed to put the entire Spondon company up as collateral on a £1.2 million loan. His partner at the time told John Hogan, of UK’s Superbike magazine, that Garner probably forged his name on loan documents.

Garner used some of the proceeds of that loan to acquire the rights to the Norton brand from Kenny Dreer, who had spent the previous decade trying to resurrect Norton out in Portland, OR.

Around the same time, two of Garner’s associates were convicted of a criminal fraud in the UK, involving a tax scam that netted £1 million. That money was loaned to Garner, who was deemed not to have participated in the fraud, although his associates were convicted in 2013.

In 2012 and ’13, Garner had one degree of separation from another fraudulent scheme in which hundreds of elderly Britons were persuaded to transfer their pension funds into three funds which were ‘invested’ in Norton, and also in Donington Hall.

Donington Hall was an enormous mansion on the books as Norton’s headquarters.  It was really just Garner’s home. He put on a ‘toff in faded jeans’ air, allowing society journalists to profile him at home, and showing off his fleet of Aston Martin cars. Having used little of his own money, he’d managed to go from being a grubby gamekeeper at one mansion, to the owner of another one (with, yes, its own captive deer herd.)

“I was presentable and could talk to people,” Garner told ‘Derbyshire Life’. “And I found that if I was buying something, I could usually get it a bit cheaper than it was being sold for. Also, when it came to opportunity, I was able to see past what the next man can see. This is something no business school can teach you.”

Presumably what Garner meant was, he could see past the limitations of working within the law.

Under Garner, Norton has delivered several hundred bikes, but many more customers have put up deposits or even paid for bikes in full that were never delivered. Payments to suppliers were delayed to the point where some key suppliers refused to deliver the parts needed to build new motorcycles.

Scandalously, some people sent Nortons back to Donington for warranty work, only to have parts stripped off their motorcycles and used to build and ship new machines. It amounted to a Ponzi scheme done with fuel tanks and wheels instead of money.

Think of this as a Ponzi scheme, but using motorcycle bits.

The whole time that Garner ran Norton, the company’s board of directors played a giant game of musical chairs. Board members came in, saw what was happening, and quickly resigned their seats. Even as recently as last November, Garner circulated an investment prospectus that forecast delusional revenue increases, and a future IPO.

Just before the whole house of cards fell apart over an unpaid £300,000 tax bill, Garner tried to crowd-source an additional £1 million in funding, but canceled that effort when, he claimed, he’d received the money from a single anonymous source. Roger Willis told me that no one believed the ‘anonymous investor’ was real.

I’ve also heard that before the administrator closed in, Garner sold the rights and intellectual property associated with the 961 Commando to a Chinese company. If he sub-licensed the Norton brand, that was a final dick move that will greatly reduce the value of Norton’s most valuable asset, which is simply its name and logo.

Where will this all end?

The UK’s Serious Fraud Office will probably bring charges against Garner, but it will take time. The Pensions Ombudsman will have to deliver a report to the Pensions Regulator, which will in turn have to determine that fraud was likely. Then the Regulator will have to hand the case off to the SFO.

If you want my best guess, Garner will do a runner and head to South Africa where he owns (or at least, did own) a game ranch.