Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1200048
AMERICAN FLAT TRACK CEO MICHAEL LOCK: PART 1 P86 Interview about how to ride a Twin, particularly on the miles, before they get pitted in battle against the superstars. So that was a big change for 2019, and although we started the year slowly in terms of Production Twins entries, in fact by the time we were three or four races in, the field was full. When you say full, how many bikes is that—a full race grid, or qualifiers, too? Sixteen bikes, so a full race grid. We had Vance & Hines team up with Black Hills Harley-Davidson who are one of the biggest Harley dealers in the country, and field a Vance & Hines bike in the Produc- tion Twins class. And they put Dalton Gauthier on it, who's a young guy but a remarkable talent, who'd been competing in AFT Singles. And he was spectacular, they put together a two-man team of him and James Rispoli, who you may know from rac- ing in the UK. Is establishing that class a nod to Harley-Davidson for having de- veloped a production-derived AFT Twins racer, rather than to go the 100% purpose-built racer route like Indian did? Yes, that's right, Harley are able to field that same bike with different specifications in both classes. So, in the AFT Twins class, they're allowed to run it up to 900cc, and in the Pro- duction Twins class, up to 800cc. But it's essentially the same bike, so it did give them this flexibility, and they took advantage of that. However, it seemed that at some races you did lack numbers in the AFT Twins class, while, as you say, being replete in the AFT TV viewership went way up last year. Absolutely so. You know, we've seen such a change in the sport in the last three years with the introduction of the XG Harley and the Vance & Hines factory team, and the proliferation of Indi- ans across the paddock, and the Estenson official Yamaha team. The sport at the top level has really elevated—it's experienced 10 years of evolution in just three years. And while that's been es- sential for growing the sport, it's also created some holes, one of which is precisely as you say, spectators are used to seeing bikes that they can really relate to, and riders they can really relate to. So we introduced the Production Twins, partly for that reason, but also partly because we've got this extraordinary growth in the AFT Singles class, where we're breeding a lot of new talent, and that talent wants to migrate up to the premier class, namely Twins. But it's not like MotoGP, where it's a relatively simple switch from Moto 2 to MotoGP, just a bit bigger and a bit faster. Here in AFT it's almost a fundamentally different sport between our single-cylinder motocross bikes, and the twin-cylinder purpose-built race bikes. So, Production Twins gives us an opportunity to allow talent to mi- grate up from the Singles class and test themselves out and learn