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/543938
INTERVIEW AMA PRO FLAT TRACK SENIOR DIRECTOR RONNIE JONES P70 week on a red bike or a blue bike. He's on an orange bike and he's the faster guy and they like KTM—they can connect with him and become avid fans. But if you're a Harley guy and you go to all the miles and half miles and you become a big Brad Baker fan, and then you show up at the Peoria TT and you go looking for him and his Harley and you find out that he's a traitor on a Japanese bike, well that eliminates that brand loyalty. I think it hurts our sport. So we've got to clean that up. There's a couple brands out there clearly that have a bike for both classes, potentially Yamaha and, of course, Kawasaki. But that pretty much narrows us down. That limits us. So we've got to come up with something that's attractive to all the OEMs out there. Do you think also there's something about twins that just makes a better show for fans? If you go to the rodeo do you like to watch the calf roping or the bull riders? I like the bull rid- ers. The X Games—X is actually short for extreme—what's more extreme: our big twins or our singles? So I think that the fans will respond. I think that they do respond more to twins. I think it's why our schedule, the promoters that promote short tracks and TTs, dropped off the schedule gradually. Because they just can't get fans to come out and watch singles only. I think if we have a class where we've got the singles for the up-and-coming riders, but we've got the fire breathing class, I think you could possibly see some more short tracks and TTs come back to the schedule. Making the switch, obvi- ously this generation of riders hasn't raced twins on TTs or short tracks. Are there plans for maybe making some adjustments to some of these venues or also providing some testing time for the riders? Certainly we're considering that. Like you said, the riders that are on the track right now have never ridden a twin, let's say, on a TT. When I came into the sport, most of the guys rode twins on TT's, includ- ing Peoria. So you get guys saying, well we can't do that. But the reality is that Jay Springs- teen, Randy Goss, Dick Mann, Mert Lawwill and all the others did exactly that. So they say it can't be done or it would be dangerous, but the reality was that when they were running twins the racing was arguably, I would say, better. And nobody was screaming that we needed to get off those twins because they were dangerous. There really wasn't anything else. And then the TT 500 Ya- maha came out and somebody showed up with one and it was lighter, it didn't spin the tire, and it didn't make any noise. But it was real easy to ride and it went around the track faster than the twins. Next thing you know everybody's on one and coin- cidentally the crowd, if you use Both Wayne Rainey (center left) and Jones (center right) belong to the Class of '79; the pair are shown here at one of the reunions at Indy in 2009.