VOL. 51 ISSUE 7 FEBRUARY 19, 2014 P73
come about?
I saw some exciting opportuni-
ties in the industry that with Buell
being gone I could now look at
doing. It was a cool company,
we did a lot of neat things, but at
the same time it was also restric-
tive in other ways, because when
you're part of a really big corpo-
ration like Harley, your creative
spark has to be compounded
into the larger whole - so you
don't have as much indepen-
dence as you'd like. Sadly, it cost
a lot of people their jobs when
Buell was shut down, but Harley
had to do that because of the fi-
nancial disaster that they were in
at the time. But the good news
was that this allowed me to go in
my own direction. The leadership
at Harley could have been a lot
more obstructive about that, but
they told me, "We respect you,
we know you want to go in a very
different direction than us, so go
do your own thing, just don't step
on our toes!"
So now I was free to be very
high tech, to do a lot of engi-
neering things I wasn't able to do
with Buell. What you saw back in
2010 was the beginning of that
process that's allowed us to grow
so radically ever since then. Even
in 2011 there were just 10 of us
here, and just one year ago in
2012 only 30 – but now we have
110 employees here at EBR, and
that's before we begin manufac-
turing the new 1190RX very soon.
We'll add another 25 to 30 more
people in the production area for
that.
Against that number, how
many did you employ when
the Buell Motorcycle Compa-
ny was at its peak?
There were 185 people full-
time with Buell, and although on
the manufacturing end not many
of those have come back to work
for EBR, to those few good guys
who have done so, you can add
probably about half of the engi-
neers that I had before at Buell
who have come back here to
EBR. But we've also added more
- we now have a significantly
bigger engineering group at
EBR than we ever had at Buell,
around 60 out of the 110 employ-
ees right now. And it's an interna-
tional group – in addition to the
core American majority, we have
people from Spain, Germany, Ja-
pan and of course India working
for us here. We have one Indian
guy who actually works full time
for me, but we also have people
from India who come over and
do consultant engineering work
for Hero with us, ranging from
two to ten at a time. It's more
like a knowledge-sharing thing
– Hero has an investment in us,
so they send teams of engineers
over, to work with us and learn
from us. It's a pretty steady flow.
They have a big apartment here
they've rented where these guys
can stay.
How did your link with Hero
come about?
It started with me being intro-
duced a few years ago to Pawan
Munjal through a mutual friend.
He's a very bright guy, and we
got on straight away. He has a
very long-term vision, and he's
also an engineer, so it was a
good fit. Coming from different
perspectives and cultures, it was
really intriguing to me to get to
know each other, and I think to
him, too.
It must have been in the
stars that this should occur
right on the cusp of Honda ter-
minating the Hero Honda joint
venture.
That was actually part of the
reason for the introduction. This
Geoff May (99) and Aaron Yates will
ride the EBRs this week in a test at
Phillip Island and on February 23 in
the series opener.
