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/912289
AMERICAN FLAT TRACK CEO MICHAEL LOCK: PART 1 P48 INTERVIEW of "it does what it says on the tin." So we renamed it Ameri- can Flat Track, brought to you by AMA Pro Racing—you know, like Cadillac is brought to you by General Motors. This rebranding happened in 2017? Correct. And the class struc- ture changed as well—two cham- pionships, twins and singles. guys ride on twins every race, we're in, because we don't want to fall into the same trap Harley did the previous year, where Jared Mees won the Champion- ship riding a Honda 450 along- side an XR750, and Harley- Davidson didn't even turn up to the awards ceremony, because he'd just won it on a Honda. And I said, "This is madness." So Indian also saw that, and said, "If you change the class structure so that we can set up a factory team, and we can do it properly, and we can have X, Y, Z rider, every week on an Indian, we're in!" So there was a little chicken and egg, but you're right to say that a major catalyst for the at- tention we've had has been the return of Indian and the whole new narrative, which takes us right back to 1952. That did us no harm at all, and there was a cascade effect, because the rebranding and the new class structure, which enabled Indian to come in, also provoked Harley to step up their commitment to the sport. Quite apart from the fact that you were also satisfying Harley's objections by not having Jared Mees win the title on a Honda when he was in Harley's factory team. Absolutely! The by-product was that we satisfied all the dirt bike manufacturers by now hav- ing a dedicated singles class for their bikes. So everybody came out ahead—we should have done it decades ago. So, you change the class structure so Indian comes in, so Harley says, "Right, we're going to bite back." That creates an American narrative that goes beyond the motorcycle business, it goes to the heartland, it goes to the culture, at which point I can dial NBC and they take my call. Or ESPN, or Fox…. Continued next week. CN Jared Mees, the 2017 AFT Champion, has been a great ambassador for the sport of flat track racing. Right, so in the previous two years, you laid the foun- dations for what you've done this past season in essentially reinventing track racing at a national level. Did you predi- cate all of this on the knowl- edge that Indian was going to be coming in to take on Harley-Davidson, once again, for the first time in 60 years? It was a little bit of a chicken and egg situation, because we'd heard through the grapevine that Polaris through Indian were interested in flat track as a way of taking their competition with Harley-Davidson to a direct level. So I reached out and spoke to the people at Indian—some of them had been at Triumph while I was there! And they confirmed, yes, they were interested, so I basically took my Board presen- tation to them and said, "This is what the future looks like." And they said, "If you do that, if you separate the classes so that