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/1463762
VOLUME 59 ISSUE 14 APRIL 5, 2022 P121 things up and caught the industry by complete surprise." The key person who had the vision of getting F-USA on TV was a young filmmaker and racing enthusiast named Paul Winters. "I'd been hired by Keith Code to produce a video version of his fa- mous book A Twist of the Wrist," Winters explained. "I'd been a motorcycle rider since I was a kid but doing that project with Keith really got me involved with road racing in a bigger way." And with Formula USA, Winters saw, what to him was an obvious opportunity, to get the racing series on TV across the country. Since Winters was in the movie and TV industry, he was early to see a ma- jor evolution in cable TV that others hadn't quite noticed yet. "What was happening was all of these regional cable sport channels were being brought together to share content across the country," Winters said. "The company doing that was called Prime Network. I knew about dis- tribution, and I knew that you could get cable TV time. So, what you did was get a 46-minute show and you got half the [ad] spots. "Keith and I formed a partner- ship, and we went to Century City where Prime's headquarters were, to pitch putting motorcycle road racing on their network and literally at the pitch meeting they said, 'Yeah okay!' I mean they were enthused about getting a national motorcycle series on Prime." Code and Winters were al- most stunned at how quickly and easily the TV deal had been put together. As it turns out, getting a regular time slot on Prime was the easy part. What they then faced was the daunting task of putting together a production team, sell- ing advertising and getting ready to launch the program on Prime. "We didn't have much time to put this together," Winters recalls. "We literally sat down together, and we each had a list, and we start calling all the companies we could think of in the motorcycling industry. Fortunately, Keith had been in the industry a long time already and he knew a lot of peo- ple, so that helped. We started selling advertising packages." The untold story almost no one knows about Winters and Code's TV endeavor was, according to Win- ters, initially they went to the AMA to see if they wanted to have the AMA Superbike Championship featured. "But they just blew us off," Win- ters recalled. "They didn't actually believe anyone could get a com- plete road racing series nationally televised." The AMA had a couple of its Superbike races broadcast on TNN's American Sports Cavalcade, so perhaps there were conflicts and existing contracts that kept the AMA from entering the Prime Network deal. So that's when Code and Winters turned to Formula USA. "We didn't have to pay to be nationally televised, I think con- tractually all we had to do was give them some signage at the races," explained F-USA's Gonda. "It was a no-brainer for us." Winters said it was fine that they did the deal with F-USA instead of the AMA. "I mean you had those incred- ible unlimited machines, and it was all about the riders and the When Kenny Roberts brought his Marlboro-backed squad to Formula USA, it would lead to 500cc Grand Prix machines being raced against F-USA monster bikes creating compelling racing.