Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Kidd, Part One: Tenacity + Promotion eigning AMA Flat Track Champion Chris Carr and Ford's Quality Checked Certified Pre-owned auto division have made for a successful pairing by both parties' accounts over the past three seasons of AMA Flat Track Championship motorcycle racing. Carr and Ford have been winning, and they have grabbed the lion's share of headlines for the sport. Rightfully so, as Ford is the first Fortune 500 company to sponsor the AMA Flat Track Championship since R.J. Reynolds terminated its title sponsorship of the series after the 1992 racing season. Until now, Carr's Ford sponsorship has been great for his team primarily, but Ford's title signage could open more doors for riders with entrepreneurial skills and the tenacity to bloody their knuckles by knocking on those doors endlessly. During the late '70s, Texas racer Mike Kidd was able to open an armored door and land a highbuck, outside-industry sponsor. You might say it allowed him to be all that he can be. A former factory Triumph rider who lost his ride after the company went bankrupt, the likable Kidd was slogging it out just like every other flat track privateer when R Kidd, now 51 and the director of new business development for trade show magnate Advanstar. As if approaching a private corporation to part with big dollars wasn't already tricky enough, the prospect of landing a government entity effectively funded by citizen tax dollars to sponsor a motorcycle racing team seemed about as likely as the prospect of shooting a rubber band and hitting the moon. Always one with a flair for selfpromotion, Kidd felt he was up to the challenge. "They had just ended the draft, and so I knew that they were going to need to find new ways to recruit," Kidd recalls. '1>-lso, they had started sponsoring Don Prudhomme's funny cars in drag racing. 1made a contact through N.W. Ayer, the Army's advertising agency at the time, and I flew up to New York at the end of 1977, and it took me I I months to put the deal together." Timing with deals such as these is everything, so they say. Kidd's timing was honed to a sharp edge by sheer necessity, "I went through all of 1978 on my own, and I had the worst season of my career in 1978," Kidd says. "My bikes weren't competitive, and it was just hard to make ends meet racing just for purse money. Finally, it came Privateer dirt tracker Mike Kidd (72), shown here racing Hank Scott (14), landed a big-time sponsor with the u.s. Army in 1979. Kidd says that the deal was largely made possible by the involvement of another huge compony thot wos the series sponsor, R.J. Reynolds. he hit upon a better idea of his own that would launch him into greener financial pastures. "I had the idea of going after the U.S. Army," says 106 MARCH 23, 2005 • CYCLE NEWS together at the end of the 1978 season, and 1was sponsored by the Army for 1979 and 1980. landing them then opened the door to get good sponsorship from - Success elsewhere. I actually received factory support from AMF Harley-Davidson. It was through Dick O'Brien, and it did come out of AMF because the association with the Army was such a good program." Kidd says that the Army deal made sense to the sponsor because the demographics were right, but the biggest challenge was getting the Army to understand why it should sponsor a rider in a series that seemed to have few outside sponsors. "When I mentioned that R.J. Reynolds was involved through the Camel brand, that opened their eyes and seemed to be the link that they were looking for to know that they wouldn't be the only large non-motorcycle company to be involved in dirt track. RJR's sponsorship of the series really opened up the door for the Army to come on board." Armed with the new deal, Kidd was able to attack the 1979 season like a Sherman tank. He won three races that season, including the big mile events at Sacramento, California, and Indianapolis, Indiana, finishing fifth in the Camel Pro Series standings that year, a season result that he repeated in 1980 as well. But it wasn't all fun and games, wasn't a simple case of having the Army cut Kidd a fat check and then wait for a telegram with his results after each race. "Only half of it was racing," Kidd says. "The other half was PRo It was a lot of work. There were a variety of things that we did. For example, every market that we went into, I made contact with the local recruiting group, through the ad agency in New York, and I would come into town a couple days early and sit at malls doing autographs or make high school appearances and talk about my racing. I would spend 30 minutes or so talking about what it was like going on the road and making a living as a motorcycle racer, and then the local recruiter would spend about 20 minutes talking about the U.S. Army. I was in parades. It seemed like I was always coming in two days early and leaving one day late." Kidd's deal with the Army ended when the Army decided to cut back its sponsorship of all motor racing. Given plenty of notice, he moved on to a factory-backed ride with Team Yamaha. In a rather convoluted turn of events, Kidd would win the Camel Pro Championship in 1981 and then take his number-one plate to a new team the next year. Tune in next week to hear how that all went down. For now, this story is one with a moral. "I think now that Ford is involved, it should motivate the riders go out and put their sponsorship packages together," Kidd says. "We're starting to see that in supercross, the involvement of your Samsungs, Radio Shacks and other non-endemic companies get involved in motorcycle racing. With Ford coming on board in dirt track, I would hope that the riders should be able to use that as leverage to at least get their feet in the door to talk to outside-industry sponsors. When you bring a sponsor like Ford into it, these other companies already assume that Ford has done its homework in the series and found that it is a viable product to get involved with." CN

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