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/1545477
40 a representative of Kawasaki or an employee of Kawasaki and I'll represent it – I'm more than happy. It's a sport that it's all I've done for some time and I truly want to see it succeed. But we've also probably been asked as an AMA member and cardholder. McCarty: I wasn't asked for that. Preston: So I've got two invitations to be on the mem- bership. McCarty: Your next question, are we going to do that? Yes, I'm going to be on four of those things. And the rea- son for me is that I really believe there needs to be consis- tency when we talk about leadership, it isn't just leadership for road racing. We're all here to road race, but I think it's leadership across the board for the AMA. And the AMA Sports side that can do anything it wants to do when it wants to do it. The idea the AMA Pro side takes a left turn at the next stop sign and you never see them again - I think that's real- ly bad for the industry as a whole. That people kind of work for this side and think they can get everything going in one direction and then they get to the first sign and, "oh wow, that's totally different." I don't know that we should be grooming people like that. I think, like fuel – and all those different things – that can be consistent across the board - that's one of the reasons I wanted to be a part of those disciplines, the different ones for Yamaha to try to get that to happen. Miller: I think we're here maybe discussing road racing, but this fundamental issue of leadership is across all disci- plines. We have the same problems and issues going on in motocross and Supercross – similar ones – they're not as big. And I think part of the reason is in the other disciplines we have a promoting group that promotes those races - that that's their job, that's their responsibility. And when I look around the world and at the successful racing organ- izations, you have a promotions group that promotes races that's their expertise, that's what they do. They have a sanctioning body that sanctions those races and comes up with those rules. And Mike, a few years ago, had talked about a business plan. When he first talked about it, I said "what do we real- ly need a business plan for?" What a business plan is, is a vision - where we're going to go, what we're going to do. Those are some of the things that are on the top of my list, for AMA – an improved vision. How to grow the sport? That should be something that we should be looking at and I think they get caught up in worrying about details that one organization can't be the promoter and the enforcer of the rules, and the enforcer of what the manu- facturers wants and the aftermarket wants. You've got to spread that responsibility, much like we all do. We have engine experts, we have chassis experts, we have manage- ment. Everybody takes their role and they're experts in that. Right now in AMA road racing, we have one entity that's trying to do it all. So they're trying to make the track happy and maybe not the riders happy. And that's not the right way to do it. McCarty: Again I mention Gary Becker's name, he was a visionary for Supercross. He's brought the Tuff Blox in. He's the guy who framed things over the starting gate and over the finish line. He's the one that brought it to the level that it currently is. Chuck said vision - that's really the key word. Not only does the guy have to be organized, but he has to help with the vision on how to improve this sport. If we go to the races and there's nobody here, except television and the people in the pits, that's really not what we want out of this sport. Sometimes it takes a bit of vision to understand, "What does the consumer want to get here?" It takes a few years to build something, so how can we achieve that? That takes a vision on somebody's part, whether it's the promoter or the AMA to help out. These are things that work together that we deal with to try to help the promoter out. Preston: But again, I think we're all in agreement, it's leadership. When you have a leader, a leader has a vision and a leader tells you. [To Keith] You're the leader of Yamaha Racing. You know how you're going to go. McCarty: And the leader needs to build the team. In other words, you can't build the team with people who don't want to be user-friendly. And when you have a lot of that with the team that's in place, you know it wasn't very user-friendly to any of us, I don't believe. There was more conflict than there was listening and trying to understand and trying to solve it. The first word when you talk about safety, well we can't do that. We have these air fences, and they're great, they're a very great addition. But they do have loopholes. People can slide underneath them when they're put on asphalt or really hard ground. I had it happen with Anthony Gobert when John Ulrich was big on the crusade, here comes Anthony – slides under one, breaks his leg, his arm or something. And I'm talking to all of the guys about this: Why can't you dig a trench and set those things down in the trench? There was some conflict that someone didn't stake it or it wasn't done right. Just put it below the level of the ground so nobody can slide underneath. I know Tommy Hayden, I read it in the article in Cycle News, talking about his broth- er sliding underneath the air fence. Yeah, it saved his life, but it still broke his leg. The ultimate goal would be no injuries when the guy crashes. Some of this, it just takes a little bit of effort to work on solving it and talking with the tracks. Where we're going to put air fence, we need something, some way to solve that. Why has there never been a unified voice for all of the factories? I know when you were on the AMA board there was a conflict. Is it possible now, Don, that you guys could have a unified voice since that could then be more powerful, since it is, in fact, you guys who run the sport? Don: I should think so. I think we really do need some- thing, again, a representative from each manufacturer. We all have the same goal in common. We can only improve the betterment of our sport. Preston: Again, I think, I agree with you that we need it, but again, as Chuck said, we have to have a place to go and some direction and leadership to go to. We've all been on the advisory boards and we just talk to each other. And we're in agreement, but we can't get anything done. Like Keith has said, with Clear Channel, we have a group that's promoting and they're willing to come to us because they know we're part of their show. McCarty: Just the basic things, you know, for the Supercross community, we all suffer with the same things, 15 venues in 18 weekends, communication was so important to make this thing work easily. And between all the groups, we developed a book that Live Nation or Clear Channel provid- ed to us. It has truck maps, it has directions to and from the track - it has a pit map where everybody's parking. It has the hospitals where people go to if they get hurt. There wasn't one bit of information - team hotels in the area, restaurants in the area - that came from the informa- tion that we needed. Everything was in that book, so we could make our plane flights in advance. There was a schedule of the event. We get that very early in the year. That kind of moved over to the outdoors. The NPG [the motocross promoters group] group did the same thing. There are 12 or 11 dif- ferent promoters. They create the same packages, they provide it to all the team managers, private or factory it doesn't matter. And it goes off as a very harmonious event. Getting in and out and all the things in between. To me, that's just the basic format to even have a series. Not for an event, maybe, but for a series somebody has to pull that together. And it's not just road racing that suffers. We have Supermoto that's in its infancy, there's no track maps, there's no schedules. Again, that all starts at the top. Miller: I think also, too, it's important that you can't have one organization run all of it, because there's too many conflicts of interest when you're doing that. Because the guy's over there trying to make money for the organ- ization, but he's not worrying about track safety or he's not worrying about us the customer. He's worrying about making money, so that's the only thing on his mind. I made a note that the AMA, they're the sanctioning body. And their job is to come up with the rules that we follow and make sure that there's safety for the riders and that they Road Race Team Managers: Part I [ ] Tom Bodenbach Don Sakakura JULY 12, 2006 • C Y C L E N E W S