Indian punks Harley with clever launch ad

It's not often that ADWEEK pays attention to the motorcycle business. Why should they? Most motorcycle industry advertising is lame. But ADWEEK perked up this week when it noticed this great teaser ad for Polaris' new Indian.


Indian Motorcycle ~ "Choice Is Coming" from Pagoda Pictures on Vimeo.

This ad was created by Colle&McVoy, an ad agency based in Minneapolis. Ironically, Carmichael Lynch, another Twin Cities agency, produced great Harley advertising for decades. I'm not sure where this ad is running, but I assume it will air quite a bit between now and the worldwide unveiling of Polaris' 2014 Indian Chief, which will take place in Sturgis in the first week of August.

A smart concept and tight execution already distinguish this from most of the dreck advertising in our category. Licensing Willie Nelson also indicates that Polaris is taking the launch seriously. Is Harley?

Why can't American Honda make an ad this good?

ADWEEK recently raved about this brilliant, two minute-long commercial for Honda UK. As far as I know, that spot is running only in Britain (notwithstanding the use of Garrison Keillor for the few words of voiceover.)

This in not an ad for any one product or even any one division of the company. It's a view of the whole brand from 30,000 feet, which pays homage to the ingenuity of Honda's R&D and engineering. It's all about the engineers' imaginations; the background is, literally, a clean sheet of paper.

The spot's running on Channel 4 over there, where Honda is sponsoring a documentary series. The 2-minute length makes it impractical to run on U.S. TV, and frankly I hope that American Honda doesn't adapt it, because I'm sure they'll cut most if not all the motorcycles! But I'd love to see them run the full-length spot in American cinemas.

Anyway, the spot is loaded with stuff motorcyclists and motorsports nuts will appreciate, like the Honda RC143 125cc Grand Prix bike from the '60s, and the snippet of voiceover mentioning John McGuinness.

Enjoy!



Oh, to have a full corporate brand ad here in the U.S. pay such homage to the company's motorcycle roots. The ad does have some indirect American content, in the sense that it was produced by the London office of the U.S. agency Weiden & Kennedy.

Backmarker kudos to Honda UK marketing boss Olivia Dunn, and W&K's highly regarded creative team of Chris Lapham and Aaron McGurk. Apparently the creative team's working on an even longer format piece that will appear online.

I'll try to highlight that, too.

In the meantime, while we're on the subject of great ads, here's two minutes worth wasting, in the form of another Honda long-form ad, also voiced by Garrison Keillor...


And, for those of you who know I'm also a dog lover, a follow up to 'The Cog', in the form of this new spot. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. Or is it 'plagiarism'?

The Indians are coming! Bajaj (through KTM) to acquire Husky

MCN is reporting that KTM is about to acquire the Husqvarna brand from BMW. The deal's not signed, but apparently multiple sources have confirmed -- off the record -- that it's imminent.

KTM's a great, but small, company. It's easy to see the impending purchase of Husqvarna for what it is, another move by the big Indian motorcycle company, Bajaj -- which already owns a big piece of KTM -- to diversify it's portfolio of brands, manufacturing capability, and design talent.

India is the next destination for Husky, a brand that began in Sweden before being acquired by MV Agusta and moved to Italy, then bought by Germans. Phew! What a trip.

There was a time, back around the release of On Any Sunday and when Steve McQueen rode the iconic Husky two-stroke onto the cover of SI, that they were they baddest bikes in the desert (and my imagination.) That time's long gone, and the current line up has, overall, left me pretty cold. That said, BMW put a lot of money into Husky's R&D and production capabilities, and it will be an impressive 'add' for India's Bajaj Auto group.

This news comes a day or so after I got an email from EBR confirming that it will again race with sponsorship from the Indian 'Hero' brand.

As we've endlessly discussed, while the motorcycle business is moribund in the developed world, it's growing fast in markets like India and Indonesia. Foreign investment rules in India ensure that virtually any company that wants access to the Indian market must take on an Indian corporate partner. That's been true for decades, so Indian companies are familiar and comfortable with these kinds of joint ventures.

A few years ago, I wrote that "China is the new Japan" in the context of rising quality, originality, and sophistication of the bikes being made in China. It remains true that Chinese design and R&D is improving, and the bikes produced there are less likely to be straight ripoffs of previous-gen Japanese bikes. But over the last few years, as Indian companies have forged ties with design-savvy firms like EBR and now Husqvarna, it's become clear that there's more to India then the old Royal Enfield factory...

UPDATE

H4L did a little digging and came up with a quote suggesting the KTM-to-buy-Husky deal is actually between Stefan Pierer (KTM's CEO) and BMW, and may not involve Bajaj (directly) at all. We'll know more in a week or two...

Who says ESPN has nothing for fans disgruntled by NHL lockout?

A once-mighty movement with deep Southern roots now seems to be slouching towards obscurity, as does its core group of supporters -- 50 year-old blue collar white guys. Bi-coastal intellectuals and marketing strategy geeks look at it and say, if it can't appeal to women, young people, and the growing Hispanic demographic, it's an endangered species.

No, I'm not talking about the Republican Party, I'm talking about Nascar.

Or at least I was, until last weekend. The only time I see Nascar racing is when I'm walking to the water fountain in the gym on Sundays, if I happen to look up at the bank of televisions in front of the cardio machines. That's when I caught a glimpse of the bench-clearing brawl between Jeff Gordon's and Clint Bowyer's teams, at the end of the season's penultimate race in Phoenix.

"Wow," I thought. "The races end in wild fistfights now? Maybe Nascar really is a sport, after all."

Or, maybe they're so desperate to gain back fans that have been trickling away for the last few seasons that the powers that be in Daytona are making a pitch to win over hockey fans who have nothing to watch because of the NHL lockout.

But seriously, folks. This post's limited connection to motorcycle racing is primarily based in the fact that AMA Pro Racing is, after the Daytona Motorsports Group takeover in 2009, effectively a subsidiary of Nascar.

Motorcycle racing stakeholders have had an off-again-on-again relationship with DMG since it took over. On the off side, we shivered at the prospect of another Roger Edmondson dictatorship. On the on side, maybe American motorcycle racing could benefit from a little Nascar marketing magic. Flat track racing, in particular, seemed like a natural brand extension for the stock car series. But it quickly became apparent that the motorcycle properties were not going to get any investment from the auto side of the ledger.

In hindsight, that may have had something to do with the fact that Nascar's bosses took over AMA Pro Racing just as their car racing business hit the skids. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted Nascar's problems.

Talladega used to sell out its gargantuan 160,000-seat grandstands; last September, they were barely half full. Martinsville Speedway's actually removed thousands of seats it can't fill any more. And International Speedway Corp., (like DMG it's part of the France family empire) which owns about half the series' race tracks, has seen ticket and concession revenues fall by 40% over the last five years. Sponsors like Office Depot, Home Depot, UPS, Mountain Dew and (gasp) Dodge are reducing or eliminating their sponsorship involvement.

Nascar's far from dead. ISC recently made a $2.4 billion broadcast deal with Fox that ensures it will be a major entertainment franchise for the next few years (that deal would be a crazy wet dream for any motorcycle racing series.) But racing is not about one promoter getting one huge licensing fee. A whole ecology of sponsors, teams, suppliers, support series, and fans all need to be able to afford goin' racin' -- something that is, at the end of the day, pretty frivolous to almost all of them. Next year, Nascar embarks on a five-year plan to revitalize the sport and rebuild it's fan base, with a focus on youth and the future.

We may not know what the implications are for AMA Pro Racing, although it's safe to say that Nascar bleeding money is not good for us. There's a cautionary tale here, too, for MotoGP; the mighty stumble and occasionally fall. And, to bring this post around for a full lap, I'd say that if Nascar succeeds in broadening it's demographic base, whoever turns it around can expect a call from the Republican Party.

The other shoe drops at Suzuki, and idle speculation about the company's MotoGP status

It remains to be seen what effect American Suzuki Motor Corporation's Chapter 11 bankruptcy has on its motorcycle business in the U.S. It's possible that freed from the dead weight of the car business in the U.S., Suzuki's motorcycle (and ATV and Marine) segments will flourish again. Of course, it's also possible that Suzuki's car division was helping to defray some of the motorcycle division's overhead. Either way, the motorcycle division will have to live or die on its own.

The latest generation of the Suzuki Swift got generally positive press from European car writers. But, Suzuki's abandoned the U.S. market -- ironically, just as American car buyers are showing renewed interest in small, fuel efficient autos. Suzuki couldn't resist a cheap shot at U.S. regulators on the way out, citing "the disproportionally high and increasing costs associated with stringent state and federal regulatory requirements unique to the U.S. market."

Note that Suzuki's only getting out of the U.S. car business, not out of the car business altogether. It's got high hopes for continued growth in the Indian market. Suzuki owns 50% of Maruti Suzuki, which is India's largest automaker.

Meanwhile, I note that the other day, Dorna told Suzuki -- which had expressed an interest in a testing-the-waters return to MotoGP in 2014 -- that there was no coming back for a single season. It would have to commit to three years (2014-'16) which would bring their contracts into line with Honda, Yamaha, and Ducati. All of them are presumably contracted to compete through 2016.

Leaving aside the questionable strategic wisdom of having everyone's contract end at the same time (which wouldn't be my choice, if I was Ezpeleta) there didn't used to be much leverage in such contracts. Remember that Kawasaki basically blew MotoGP off at the beginning of the recession, and Dorna basically had to take it. Aggressively going after a manufacturer claiming, essentially, force majeure would not make the Spaniards seem like attractive business partners to any future OEMs considering entering the series.

When Kawasaki bailed out of MotoGP, it maintained a minimal presence in World SBK that started to show results last season and which really blossomed this year, with 16 podium finishes. But Dorna's hard line with Suzuki looks very different now that it also controls World SBK.

Ezpeleta hasn't said, "If Suzuki crosses us in MotoGP, we'll fuck them over in World Superbike." But you have to wonder if that's been implied. Suddenly, there really is only one game in town...

A note from the Dept. of Modest Proposals: I've got a great new name for Sears Point. It's 'Sears Point'.

Early last Spring, Infineon Technologies AG announced that it would not renew it's naming-rights sponsorship of the race track formerly known as Infineon Raceway.

The deal expired in May, so this past season's AMA race was held at 'Infineon Raceway' but the track originally known as 'Sears Point' is now going by the bland name 'Sonoma Raceway'. Of course, the track's owners would love to rename it again, subject to finding another sponsor.

I guess at one time, Infineon Technologies thought of itself as a big-time sponsor.  While the returns on a naming-rights sponsorship are influenced by many factors, it's unlikely that Infineon really justified the investment that it made here.

Buying naming rights is a funny business. Generally, the clients I'd recommend it to are ones that have a consumer brand, not companies that sell business-to-business like Infineon. It makes strategic sense when the venue's located in a city where the brand has real roots. It's easier when the facility is new and doesn't carry the baggage of a previous name. So calling Kansas City's new multi-purpose arena the Sprint Center is reasonable. If you buy the naming rights to an arena or a stadium with existing heritage,  you're going to struggle to get people to start using the new name. But, if it's a venue that is used 200 days a year, eventually people will associate it with your brand.

Infineon's an electronics manufacturer based in Milpitas, near San Jose. So the Sonoma track was kind of a 'home track' for them. Since the auto industry is one of the company's big customer bases, a track with a NASCAR race probably appealed to them. (Sears Point has a storied auto racing history, having hosted Indy cars and the NHRA, too.) But Infineon's stock  dropped by about 50% over the ten-year period that the track was known as 'Infineon Raceway'. I guess the company just figured it didn't make sense to continue the sponsorship, which I've heard cost a few million bucks a year.

Despite all that money, a lot of people kept thinking of it as Sears Point anyway. It was only in the news a few times a year, the track and its signage are off the beaten path (thus minimizing incidental exposure to the Infineon Raceway name). And after all,they'd been racing there for 45 years so there was a lot of built-up 'Sears Point' heritage.

I've never stopped calling it Sears Point or just 'Sears' for short. No one's ever asked me what I meant, or corrected me. That's why I was mildly surprised when the track called itself 'Sonoma Raceway' after Infineon's deal lapsed.

Why create a third name? I suppose the owners' rationale is that they don't want to reinforce the original Sears Point name again, since they hope to create a track identity under the next sponsor's brand. Or, maybe they worried that people would think it was sponsored by Sears, the department store chain. (The name actually comes from a geographic feature.) In any case, denying Sears Points' heritage makes the track less, not more, desirable to a potential sponsor. They should have gone back to the old name. If they find a new sponsor, they can call it 'Sponsorname Raceway at Sears Point'.

I suppose I'd better say 'when' not if they get a new sponsor. It's hard for me to imagine the track continuing in a business-as-usual way, with a multimillion-dollar hole in the annual budget. It's already been shut down at least once -- in about 1970 -- and has changed ownership something like nine times. In the last few years the Bay Area's storied AFM home club and great local organizations like Zoom Zoom Track Days have had their track opportunities diversified as new tracks have opened -- Buttonwillow, Thunderhill, Reno-Fernley. So it's not as if they don't have other places to race. But it would be a tragedy if real estate developers got their hands on Sears Point.

Anyone who's raced Sears Point knows how much the character of the track's defined by it's great elevation changes. That topography was not lost on the organizers of AMA motocross races, either. Here's a great clip of Brad Lackey and Bob Hannah battling in the 1977 Trans-AMA series race held on the hills above the track.

If Lorenzo=Obama, and Pedrosa=Romney...

The MotoGP season -- and the Presidential election season -- end in early November. And while it seemed as if both could be close races early on, Lorenzo and Obama now seem to be pulling out leads that are, event by event, looking more and more unassailable (thanks in no small measure to a.) Hector Barbera, and b.) 'Anne Onymous', whoever she is.)

Neither the 2013 MotoGP #1 plate nor the next presidency of the United States are decided, however. Which leads me to this survey.

Imagine, if you will, that the 2012 election is a MotoGP race of, say, 28 laps. Check the box that indicates the relative positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney (respectively the first African-American and first Mormon riders in Grands Prix.)

If you don't think any of these options reflect the current situation, please feel free to present your own scenario in the Comments section. Submitting your email address is optional, but one person who checks the most popular box, and another who submits the most insightful and/or entertaining comment, will be contacted about a prize -- a copy of my book Riding Man.

Schwantz = fucked

Dorna released a comment on the ongoing skirmishes between Kevin Schwantz and Circuit of the Americas -- the new Austin track where MotoGP would like to run a third U.S. Grand Prix. Just between the lines, they've fucked Kevin Schwantz off out of the deal.

It's impossible for me to know how central #34 was to the development of Austin's MotoGP plans. The implication of his pending lawsuit is that he was supposed to be a part of it -- maybe even that, but for him, such plans wouldn't even exist. But Dorna's made it pretty clear that, now that Schwantz has fallen out with COTA, it will side with the people who have a track. I suppose that makes short-term strategic sense; they can put on a race and let Texas courts disentangle the relationship between Schwantz, COTA, and Tavo Hellmund -- but if they side with Schwantz, they're fucked if COTA refuses to open the padlock on the track gate.

I bet you anything that Dorna's recent claim that its contract with Schwantz was nullified when he failed to meet a deadline to show a contract with the track is disingenuous. Just because Schwantz didn't have a contract doesn't mean they didn't have an agreement -- it is Texas after all, and as far as Kevin Schwantz was concerned, the deal closed when he shook hands on it. But once Dorna realized that Schwantz and COTA had fallen out, they probably breathed a sigh of relief when they realized that Schwantz' deal wasn't in writing and that in the absence of a contract between Schwantz (as promoter) and the track, Dorna's agreement with Schwantz would lapse.

Where does that leave Schwantz? In the short term, he's fucked. He'll have to prove any way he can, with witnesses and hopefully emails, texts, etc., that he really did have a deal with COTA. That will take years.

What does Dorna's handling of this say about them? I don't think it's too flattering. I mean, I totally get that they'd like to have a great new purpose-built venue in Austin. I'm not sure how solid either Laguna Seca or Indy's contracts are, but the North American market could easily support three or four MotoGP events, and in fact more events in the U.S. are one of the only hopes Dorna has to raise MotoGP awareness above the third tier -- to reach, say, that status of the X-Games. Texas has a great global 'brand' and it's actually easier to sell in MotoGP's main markets of Europe and Asia than either Laguna Seca or Indy. So they should want to race in Austin.

But if I was Dorna, I'd have told COTA, "Hey, we want Kevin to be involved, not an adversary." He's a charismatic guy, well known to local Austin media and beloved by specialist motorcycle media all over the world. Why on earth would you want him as an enemy? It would have been cheaper and strategically wiser to cut him a minority stake in the event.

If only my TT times could be as enhanced as Paul Ryan's marathon claim

Me. Lapping the TT course in 2002 at nearly 130 mph average speed, adjusted to PREF*
(*PRF=Paul Ryan Exaggeration Factor)

Paul Ryan's actual marathon time, something over four hours, is nothing to be ashamed of. But why claim, as he did, that it was under three hours?

After being caught in this blatant lie exaggeration, Ryan excused it as something he's misremembered. Frankly, I doubt it, and so does almost anyone who's run a marathon. If you've run one, it's almost always an important (26.2) milestone in your life, and you remember your time. If you've run more than one, you remember your PB. Maybe Ryan would argue that he's the rare first-marathon finisher for whom the achievement was not significant, but if that's so, why did he bring it up on the campaign trail in the first place?

I only wish I could get away with such a claim. My fastest TT lap came in a race in which I finished second-last, but if I inflated my average speed, in percentage terms, as much as Paul Ryan, I would have set the outright Mountain Course record.

Paul "I'm great with numbers, that's why the Republicans look to me for budget leadership" Ryan

At Suzuki, 2 + 2 = 0.2 (percent)

In my normal morning coffee news-prowl, I followed a link to a story on the 24/7 Wall Street site carrying the headline, 10 brands that will disappear in 2013.

Suzuki was on the list, which made me think, "OK, times are hard, but Suzuki's not that close to the edge. Or is it?"

It turned out that the story was about Suzuki's car division, and I think it must really be about the car division here in the U.S. At least, there's no indication in the piece that Suzuki's global car sales are disastrous. Still, for what it's worth, IIRC, after the Bush meltdown, American Suzuki blended the administrations of the car and motorcycle groups to a certain extent. That presumably means that the motorcycle guys are sharing overhead with the car guys, and that if the car guys simply pack up and vanish, the moto guys will have to cover the whole nut.

Suzuki's cars, small SUVs and crossovers have not managed to help its motorcycle successes, uh, cross over into the auto sector.

For what it's worth, here's what they had to say about Suzuki's failure to attract U.S. car buyers...

American Suzuki Motor sold 10,695 cars and light trucks in the first five months of this year. That was down 3.9% compared with the same period in 2011. The sales gave the manufacturer a U.S. market share of just 0.2%. One reason the company has trouble moving its vehicles is the poor reputation of its cars. In the 2012 JD Power survey of U.S. vehicle dependability, Suzuki’s scores in power-trains, body and materials, and features and accessories were below those of almost every other brand. One sign Suzuki is having trouble selling its vehicles is that it currently offers a very aggressive zero-percent financing package for 72 months on all of its 2012 cars, trucks and SUVs. Even with aggressive sales tactics, Suzuki cannot improve its position in the American market. Most of its cars sell for less than $20,000 and its trucks and SUVs for under $25,000.  Almost every other manufacturer with a broad range of vehicles has flooded this end of the market with cheap, fuel-efficient models. Arguably the most successful car company in the U.S. based on growth — Hyundai — does particularly well in this segment.

Read more: 24/7 Wall St. Ten Brands That Will Disappear In 2013 - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/2012/06/21/247-wall-st-10-brands-that-will-disappear-in-2013/#ixzz1yWxLW5SA

For my money, the ticket to Suzuki's success would have been to fit the now-discontinued Suzuki Aerio with the motor from a Hyabusa. Now that would've been cool. As it is, I still have to continue fantasizing about shoe-horning a 'busa mill into a Smart Car.

UK bike mag editors play musical chairs

I got a cryptic email this morning that suggests editorial changes are afoot at Bauer Media, publisher of the weekly motorcycle tabloid MCN, as well as the monthlies Bike and Classic Bike.

Hugo Wilson, who has been the editor of Classic Bike as long as I've been a columnist there, really transformed the magazine. I used to think that Bike was the best English-language bike mag -- and I still think it's the most influential one -- but in recent years, Classic Bike's overtaken it. In spite of Classic Bike's narrower focus, it consistently puts out the most readable and best-looking book.

In spite of a weak economy and the usual perturbations in the publishing world, Wilson proved that in motorcycle magazines, as in magic baseball stadiums, "If you build it they (readers) will come." Classic Bike's had steadily increasing page counts and readership.

Now, Hugo Wilson's been called to Bike. Ben Miller will take over the reins at Classic Bike.

In Wilson, Bike has a skillful and erudite editor. What remains to be seen is, will Bike take advantage of this change to institute a really modern publishing strategy -- yes, one that acknowledges the Internet as more than a way to occasionally pick up a print subscriber, or simply tease print content. It may still be hard (read: impossible) to meaningfully monetize the web side of a print/web hybrid, but if Bauer waits until it can see a path to profit on the web before it expands its web presence, it will be too late.

Everything I wrote about the web strategy for Cycle World applies to Bike. Now, it's time to adapt or die.

What "The Innovator's Dilemma" has to tell us about electric motorcycles...

Last week was a good week for traffic on my blog -- largely because my sarcastic post about the FIM creating a new, one-rider SuperLeague for Casey Stoner got hundreds and hundreds of hits when it became a topic for serious discussion on a big bulletin board. What would I have to write, for people to just know it was a joke?

Anyway, with that many gullible nitwits out trolling the net for motorcycle news, I am probably wasting my time with this serious observation about the emerging electric motorcycle category. (N.B. For once, I used a word other than 'nascent' to describe the e-bike phenomenon.)

Over the last week or two, I've noted the following bits of news from the e-moto world...

• The Brammo Empulse R was revealed, and it emerges that it will cost about $3,000 more than a BMW S1000RR.
• The first North American TTXGP race took place but nobody came. OK, two teams entered three bikes. Two bikes started; one bike finished.
• Daimler has promised to begin producing the Smart electric scooter by 2014

This costs as much as...

...this. The BMW is completely dominant by any measure. Does Brammo really think the Empulse R, at almost twenty grand, can be anything other than a rich tree-hugger's bauble?  

The first two items obviously relate to the high-end sportbike segment of the market -- a segment that, to date, really doesn't exist at all. Still, it's seductive to think of electric bikes coming along and jerking the filthy, polluting rug out from under the hidebound ICE sportbike world. Even I've been caught up in the hype that this will be the year an electric bike laps the TT course at 100 miles an hour.

But. Come on...

Brammo's still talking about 'over 100 mph' and '121 mile city range' in their press releases. Trust me, this will not be the bike that makes range anxiety a thing of the past. Ex-Zero brainiac Neal Saiki has a post on his web site about the skewed results for EVs in 'city' mileage tests.

For the price of the Empulse, you could buy the BMW, and cover all of your operating costs for a couple of years -- years in which you'd have an incomparably superior riding experience in every way. And what will really have been proved when the Mugen laps the TT course at 100+ next month? That it's as fast as a Manx Norton was 50 years ago, with half the range. And that if you could buy it, it would be an order of magnitude more expensive than the Manx was (corrected for inflation.)

Proof that I respect some Mormon Republicans. And yes, I'm aware that adding 'Republican' to 'Mormon' is redundant. 

All this leaps to mind because I was reminded of the theories of management guru Clayton Christensen when I read his profile in this week's New Yorker.

Christensen's book, 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is the most important business book written since the invention of the integrated circuit. Steve Jobs described The Innovator's Dilemma as one of his profound influences. Christensen coined the term 'disruptive technology,' and is -- at least arguably -- the expert on the adoptions of new tech that, uh, disrupts established sectors of the economy.

For the visual thinkers... I'd draw the red line slightly steeper, to acknowledge that at some point in the future it will likely pass, performance-wise, the technology being replaced -- that's true if only because the disruptive technology will, eventually, get the R&D spending. Or, here's a perhaps oversimplified take on it...

Christensen's take on disruption is that it follows a predictable arc, which is not dependent on the category being disrupted. He's studied examples from industries as varied as steel mills and steam shovels to hard drives and transistor radios. (The Honda Cub step-through was one of the disruptive technologies he identified and studied, too.) And in the Christensen model, the way disruption happens is that new technology displaces old technology at the bottom of the market, while it is still clearly inferior to the best of the previous tech.

The low-performance/low-price portion of the market is often happily ceded by established companies dominating the old technology, who think, We don't want to make that crap anyway.

Then, two things happen over time... First, the cheap new products attract a whole new group of consumers to the market. The first Sony transistor radios were cheap and portable, but their reception and sound quality was atrocious. Companies like RCA, that were in the radio business -- where are they now? -- didn't feel threatened by Sony at all. RCA couldn't imagine anyone buying a Sony, no matter how cheap, instead of an RCA tube radio, because the performance gap was so huge.

What RCA didn't see coming was that there was a huge, new market for radios. Teenagers, who were on the move, and wanted to listen to rock and roll music that their parents (who controlled the RCA) couldn't stand. They bought transistor radios by the million. That enabled the second thing to happen, which was -- those new customers funded R&D that enabled transistor radio performance to improve, and supplied a huge pool of consumers who, as they became more affluent, stuck with the technology they were familiar with.

If Sony had decided to go head-to-head with RCA, going for RCA's performance and price right away, it would have failed miserably. Honda, with the Cub step-through, also carefully avoided competing with the likes of Norton. At the beginning, Honda wasn't even going after motorcyclists at all.

At some point in the future, we may look back and say, "Remember when electric motorbikes stole a march on the old fossil-fuel-powered bikes?" The bikes that disrupted the old regime will, I'm betting, be more like this one.

That's why, after mulling it over, I think the news that Smart will produce its innocuous urban runabout is far more significant than the unveiling of the Brammo Empulse R. If Christensen is right, it's vehicles like the Smart that will prove to be the real disruptors. It won't matter that they offer dramatically worse performance than comparable ICE bikes, because they'll create their own completely new market.
I don't know what the Smart will sell for, but you can be sure it will be a fraction of the Brammo's price, and if Daimler is, well, smart, they'll lower performance as far as they need to, to sell it at a price that undercuts every other autonomous, motorized option.

The lesson from The Innovator's Dilemma is that change, when it comes, doesn't come from knocking off the top of the market and trickling down. (Where's Mission, by the way?) Change comes from knocking off the bottom of the market, and bubbling up.

March Madness, marketing ‘badass’

Now that I live in the Midwest, even I can’t avoid March Madness. (Yes, there was something else happening last weekend, besides Daytona.) Last Saturday night, I found myself out with friends at a sports bar while KU -- or was it K-State? -- played Detroit. Since I don’t actually own a television, I can’t tear my eyes off one when I am exposed to it, even if it’s just showing basketball -- a game that I have such a rudimentary grasp of, that I still think refs should call traveling infractions.

One cool thing for me, though, about March Madness is that its a pretty attractive advertising opportunity. As a once-and-still-occasional advertising creative director, I like to see what’s being run in high-profile, expensive advertising slots. I paid extra attention when I saw this ad run, for the Can-Am Spyder ‘Roadster’ trike...

Grudgingly admiring glances from badasses at a road house. "Look, I'm balancing on the fence rail, so I obviously could balance a real motorcycle if I wanted to." Harley-types 'flipping hands' as they pass on the road... It's all about convincing potential Spyder buyers that, yes, they'll be real bikers, whether they lean into turns or not. 

The ad, produced by Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago agency with a strong creative department which also crafts Corona’s “Find your beach” ads, is notable for a few things, not the least of which is, simply, that it’s running. At a time when motorcycle sales are still, overall, pretty much swirling in the toilet, the Spyder’s the only really outstanding success story in the whole motorcycle industry.

“Wait a minute,” I can hear you saying... “That thing’s not a motorcycle!”

Just what the Spyder is, or isn’t, has been the subject of debate since it first appeared for the '08 model year. Steve Thompson, blogging on the Cycle World site, concluded not so long ago that it was a motorcycle. To his way of thinking a motorcycle’s not defined by its single track and the way it leans into turns, it’s defined by the exposure of the rider -- to the elements and to risks that car drivers, ensconced in their air-bag-equipped cages, don’t face. I suppose you'd support that claim by pointing out that a Ural with a sidecar is obviously a real motorcycle, albeit a strange one. But I can't help but wonder if Cycle World would have put up a blog post that branded Spyder riders as feckless wannabes. I'm pretty sure I've seen ads for the Spyder in CW.

As a motorcyclist of a certain age, I can remember when Can-Am was without question a motorcycle brand. Although it was mainly emblazoned on dirt bikes, Can-Am flirted with road bikes, too. There were even a handful of 250 GP bikes made (with fore-and-aft parallel-twin two-stroke Rotax motors.) 

I don’t know why Bombardier’s experiment in motorcycles low-sided while its Skidoo and Seadoo brands fared well. The fact that Can-Ams are now highly sought after by the vintage MX set is evidence that bikes offered competitive performance; perhaps they were ahead of their time and were only appreciated later on.

With that in mind, I was bummed when the brand was resurrected for the Spyder trike, and not a proper bike. I grudgingly admitted that Bombardier Recreational Products had made the right strategic choice when I started hearing rumors within a few months of the launch that sales were an order of magnitude better than projections. (Actual figures for this new category are hard to come by. Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP) is not a subsidiary of the much larger, publicly traded Bombardier company. BRP is, if you can believe it, actually 50% owned by Bain Capital. Yes, that Bain Capital. Anyway, they don’t issue an annual report.)

You may not recognize him under that helmet and behind those shades, but that's Mitt Romney.

It’s safe to draw two conclusions from this rumination... One is that whether Bain -- and by extension Mitt Romney -- are vulture capitalists or not, the success of the Spyder in the marketplace probably created a few jobs on the Can-Am assembly line up in Valcourt, Quebec. And another is that judging from the comments posted on YouTube videos of the Spyder, the acceptance of the trikes by ‘real’ bikers will be slow in coming.

That won’t affect Spyder sales, though, since BRP’s not targeting motorcyclists as a primary audience, but rather the vastly larger market of would-be bikers. And if ads like that one can make them feel like real bikers, Cramer-Krasselt have done their job. Now, if only a real motorcycle company would invest this heavily to attract new riders...

A modest proposal: Tax the $#!+ out of gasoline

So, as another summer travel season approaches, the American media will whip itself into another paroxysm about rising gasoline prices -- the same way it has every summer for the last 30 years. Only this time it will be worse, both because rising fuel costs are a slight but measurable brake on the economy at a time when we need to be hitting the gas, and because it's a Presidential election year. Only this will be the worst Presidential election year because the Republican primary season may not end until the GOP national convention* in Tampa. That means that the disingenuous bastards running for the Republican nomination will be desperately trying to pin rising prices on Obama, and lying through their teeth about how their policies will result in Venezuela style gasoline prices here in the U.S.

The truth is, nothing the U.S. can do in terms of freeing up public land, offshore areas, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling can possibly have an effect on the price of gas at the pump in the next few years, and even over the long term the impact of incremental U.S. production on the world price for oil will be trivial.

I think that the average American could be made to understand that. (Even though the Koch brothers and their ilk have spent billions to dumb down the quality of political discourse in the U.S., and the proof they've succeeded is the fact that the GOP rank and file have not shown up at any of the recent Republican primary debates with buckets of hot tar and feathers, which is the treatment all of the current candidates deserve.**)

I used to think, I wish Obama would hire me to write a speech that explained why 'drill baby drill' is only a slogan, not a solution, vis-a-vis rising gas prices.

But I have an alternative idea, albeit one that's even less palatable than educating the electorate. Let's tax the shit out of gasoline. I'm not thinking we'd tax it as much as it is taxed in most western European nations (where current prices average about $8 per gallon) because the average American probably 'has' to drive further than the average European, who lives in a smaller country and has better access to public transit. I'm thinking we'd tax it at about half the European rates, raising prices to about $6.50 a gallon.

That would increase gasoline tax revenues by about $200,000,000,000. Yes, there are 12 zeroes in that number. That money could be earmarked (pardon the choice of words, but...) for improvements to road infrastructure and public transit, which is almost all spending that cannot be outsourced to the third world. Good jobs for Americans? Check

The higher tax load would have a number of other desirable effects.

It would serve as a damper on impact of minor price fluctuations caused by hiccups in international markets or seasonal demands. All the same forces that cause gasoline prices to rise in the summer here in the U.S. are at work on the European market, too. And fluctuations in the world price for oil impact their gasoline prices just as they do ours. The reason they aren't screaming bloody murder about a $1/gallon increase in gasoline prices killing the fragile economic recovery is that the fluctuations aren't nearly as noticeable in Europe, because they're masked by high fuel taxes.

A significant gasoline tax would allow the government to get out of the business of trying to regulate CAFE standards. We wouldn't have to encourage R&D in clean energy technology. The tax would make now controversial public transit projects like the California high-speed rail project seem like obvious choices that would inevitably return a profit to the public/private joint ventures that promote them. Raise gasoline prices high enough, and the market will sort that stuff out. (Or will those free-market Kochsuckers come up with some reason why, suddenly, their beloved market forces won't work in this scenario?)

A big gas tax increase would even reduce the long term health costs facing the U.S., since ample research has shown that in countries where people walk more and use more public transport, the population's far healthier.

It would even get the motorcycle business off its ass.

End of rant.

*None of the current contenders will be the Republican Party's actual nominee. When the current crop of fatally flawed candidates have finally rendered each other unelectable, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will be drafted in at the last minute. You read it here first.


**Ron Paul is not really a Republican, nor does he deserve to be tarred and feathered.

Advertising makes it happen. Now, who's got the 'nads to write the check?

I had occasion to revisit the nexus of my two previous lives -- motorcycles and advertising -- the other day, when I found myself writing about the nadir of motorcyclists' image in U.S. pop culture, in the early 'sixties.

Motorcycles were bad news after the breathless coverage of the Hollister ‘motorcycle riot’ in 1947. Those greatly exaggerated tales inspired The Wild One in 1954. Then, Hunter S. Thompson published ‘Hells Angels: The strange and terrible saga of outlaw motorcycle gangs’. It’s likely that Thompson’s account of life with the Hells Angels was almost as apocryphal as press accounts of Hollister had been, but by the mid-‘60s, the image of motorcycling in the U.S. could hardly have sunk any lower.

The American Motorcyclist Association wrung its hands and plaintively painted the outlaw crowd as ‘one percenters’, claiming that 99% of riders were regular folks, but the media sure weren’t buying it -- probably because that story didn’t sell newspapers.

It wasn’t the AMA that set motorcycles back on the road to respectability, it was Honda. Hollywood and the media had knocked motorcycles down, and Honda’s ad agency, Grey Advertising, knew that Hollywood had a role to play in redeeming them, too. Grey conceived the “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” ad campaign and pitched an audacious media plan to Kihicharo Kawashima, the head of American Honda.

Grey proposed running a pair of television commercials during the 1964 Academy Awards telecast. That would put two 90-second ‘nicest people’ ads in front of more than two-thirds of the U.S. television audience. Buying the two spots cost $300,000, which was enough to give Kawashima pause; it was the equivalent of the gross revenues -- not the profit mind you, the gross revenues -- on the sale of about 1,200 Honda 50s.

This is not the original, 90-second, 'You meet the nicest people on a Honda' ad. The original is not available on YouTube and in the spirit of full disclosure I should admit that while I've seen the campaign's print executions, I've never watched the original commercial. (Please, please, American Honda, scour your archives, digitize a copy, and post it!) 

The truth is, most people in the ad business felt that Grey Advertising was well-named. The agency had a reputation for safe, middle-of-the-road creative. That said, the strategic thinking behind the 'nicest people' campaign was worthy of Don Draper (and in one Mad Men episode, the fictional Sterling Cooper agency actually pitches the non-fictional Honda company business!) Overall, the real campaign played to Grey Advertising's strengths and Grey's tendency towards insipid creative was OK; the campaign was, after all, aimed at the middle of the bell curve. 

About a decade later, Grey was still at it. This ad, featuring a young John Travolta, acknowledges the first -- 1973 -- Arab oil embargo/price shock and the ensuing recession; the short-arsed motorcycle cop is probably a tip of the (half) helmet to Robert Blake in 'Electra Glide in Blue.'

Kawashima needn’t have worried. That ad campaign didn’t just plant Honda in the minds of millions of hitherto non-riding consumers, it helped convince the country’s media that it was not in their commercial interest to alienate the entire motorcycle industry. Life Magazine ran a famous photo of a drunken biker at Hollister in 1947 (the ethically questionable shot was set up days after the actual ‘riot’.) When Honda started buying full page ads in the ‘60s, Life’s editors stopped running negative motorcycle stories.

That $300,000 advertising investment really gave me pause, too. That was the equivalent of about $2,000,000 in 2011 dollars. I don't know, offhand, what American Honda's best-selling (current) motorcycle is, but if the company spent 1,200 x that model's revenues on a single night's advertising, it would amount to a lot more than two million bucks.

American Honda won't spend that much this year. Hell will freeze over before we'll see a breakout motorcycle ad in this year's Academy Awards or Superbowl. I get occasional press releases from manufacturers claiming year-over-year sales growth, and it's possible we've seen the worst of the post-2008 meltdown/housing bubble. But don't kid yourself; the motorcycle business is in the fucking toilet. Why is it that there's no chance American Honda will show that kind of leadership today?

Mister, we could use a man like Kawashima today.

I stole this pic from Honda's 'history' site. It's captioned as follows: Holding up the You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda. poster are Kihachiro Kawashima (then general manager of American Honda), left, and Takeo Fujisawa (then senior managing director of Honda Motor), second from right. I'm guessing the tall guy is from Grey Advertising.

For a slightly different take on Honda's rise in the U.S. (and a look at one of the 'nicest people' print executions) you can read this blog post by FrogDesign's Adam Richardson.

Intolerance is un-American

A few weeks ago, the manager of the grocery store where I work (on my day job, obviously. I don't practice motorcycle journalism in grocery stores -- that's what Starbucks is for) took me aside. He told me that someone in North Carolina had written an email to the store, complaining about the contents of some of my blog posts. Why would that particular fucktard write my employer and not me? Well, obviously, to harass me by encouraging my employer to fire me, or at least lean on me to silence me.

I didn't see the letter, so I have no way of knowing whether it was my liberal political bias that infuriated the writer, or whether it was the generally atheist and foul-mouthed nature of some of my 'rantier' columns that triggered this cowardly and un-American personal attack.

The manager of the store where I work seemed a little unsettled by even having to raise the subject. I got the feeling that this was something that had been discussed at the head office, and that maybe corporate counsel had weighed in. If that was the case, they'd certainly realize that there's nothing in this blog that could possibly be interpreted as hate speech, or seditious. Although Missouri (the state in which I reside and work) is a so-called right-to-work state (it would more accurately be called a employer's-right-to-fire state) and the company could legally have fired me on the spot, I imagine that the company realizes that firing an employee for exercising his right to free speech is not going to generate a wave of positive press.

I should point out that I've written some highly-politicized posts, and I've written posts in which I named my employer, but that my employer was never cited in any of those volatile posts. Nothing I've written about my employer could be interpreted as particularly negative.

So the fucktard in North Carolina had to read some post that infuriated him, and then dig through the blog to find some other post in which I mentioned my employer by name. Then, said fucktard had to figure out how to contact my employer and craft a letter which had the intent, obviously of either silencing me or punishing me for my views by getting me fired.

Nice, eh?

I should say that, thus far, my employer has been careful not to say "Don't write any more of that stuff," or "You're on report,"  or anything like that. In fact, the only thing I was told was, "You're entitled to your opinion."

I volunteered to remove any direct reference to my employer by name, and in fact have gone back through earlier posts and redacted the company's name. That makes it hard to even write about working, but then I had a brainstorm. Obviously, I have a bit of a potty keyboard when I'm writing here on Bikewriter.com; I figure, joke you if you can't take a fuck.

But when I used to make a living writing for other sites and pubs, if I had to insert swearing (for example as part of a direct quote) I used to replace the offending words with symbols drawn from math or other alphabets, the way comic book artists sometimes fill a speech bubble with swirls, exclamation points and daggers to indicate a character is swearing without running afoul of censors.

For example, I'd insert fake words like 'Ƒü©≮' or '$#!+'. People knew that those character strings meant 'insert swear word here' but had no idea they specifically meant 'fuck' or 'shit'.

It occurred to me that I could do the same thing vis-a-vis the name of my employer. If I insert this character string - ₮Ʀ@Ƌ’⋲® √⦰⋲$ - in place of my employer's name, people will know they should insert the name of some grocery store in there, but won't have any idea which specific business I'm referring to. I mean, those characters aren't even part of the regular English alphabet.

Let me make this clear: I love ₮Ʀ@Ƌ’⋲® √⦰⋲$. It's a great company that's built a great business by making grocery shopping fun and providing solid values to customers. Really, it's a shame I have to keep their name a secret now. I have a smile on my face every day that I walk in there. I work my ass off, even when assigned the most thankless tasks in the store, from processing spoiled food to cleaning the toilets. I have huge respect and admiration for the brand they've built, and am constantly fascinated by what I learn from them. I like my co-workers and enjoy my customer encounters. I have every reason to think that most of my customers support my employment and enjoy dealing with me.

That said, the writer in me is sorry that ₮Ʀ@Ƌ’⋲® √⦰⋲$ didn't actually just fire me once they'd mentioned the letter complaining about this blog. I mean, every now and then I write a motorcycle-related post read by several thousand people, but my political rants are typically read only be a few hundred people. Firing me for the content of this blog would be a public relations dream come true for me, and guarantee many thousands of new readers for my non-motorcycle writing. I guess, strategically, if the company was going to fire me, it 'should' have fired me for some other reason and never mentioned the letter, since now that I know about it, it opens up a host of First Amendment issues, to say nothing of a possible suit for libel (or do I mean slander?) against the sender. But I have no reason to think the company will fire me, or even really disagrees with what I've written. Why should they? It's all true.

Who is the North Carolina fucktard anyway? That's the interesting question. I'll definitely take legal steps to get the letter - if ever/as soon as - the fucktard gets the 'satisfaction' of getting me fired. I highly doubt that I'm the only target of this fucktard, and I imagine many similar letters have been sent. I imagine that even if the sender's information was redacted, I could eventually identify the sender by finding matching letters elsewhere on the web.

I doubt, in fact, that the North Carolina fucktard is really an individual fucktard. I'm too good at arithmetic and probability to think that amongst the few dozen readers of my typical political posts - many or most of whom agree with me - there's some individual reader who disagrees so violently that they'd go to that much trouble to silence me. It's possible, I grant you, but not likely.

It's more probable that some group like the Koch brothers have funded a group of kochsuckers who, using tools like Google Alerts, are searching the web for people like me, and then engaging in an organized harassment effort. If you were going to conduct such an effort, North Carolina would be a good place to base it, since it is an American Taliban stronghold.

Either way though, whether that letter was written by a lone nut job, or whether it was part of an organized fatwah, my only real comment is this...

Intolerance is un-American.

Oh, and by the way, Ƒü©≮ you.

For shame

With the onset of winter (and a certain degree of media fatigue) the Occupy movement has either cooled off, gone into hibernation, or is entering a new phase; pick one, depending on your point of view. But, before winter set in, I watched video footage of what might have been the movement's defining moment.

I write of the pepper-spraying of UC Davis students. The clip below begins with a striking image, of a portly cop casually spraying mace, with about as much apparent emotional involvement as you'd expect to see if he was spraying his roses for aphids. When it gets really compelling though, is when a large group of students surround the UC Davis police chanting "Shame on you!" The students first surround and then put the cops to rout armed with... camera phones.



As defining moments go, getting pepper sprayed while at an Occupy sit-in doesn't really compare with being shot at Kent State, but in today's far-more-mediated culture, that may be all it takes.


Moron helmet-cams. Oops, I meant 'More on' helmet cams

That footage, a recent op-ed piece from the L.A. Times, and the funny clip I posted the other day of the wild turkey attacking a motorcyclist, reminded me that I've been meaning to write about Anthony Graber, a Maryland motorcyclist who was busted for speeding by a gun-wielding off-duty cop. Whatever punishment Graber actually got for speeding and reckless driving was probably justified, because he certainly was riding like a fucking moron.

But.

It would not have made the news but for one thing: he was wearing a helmet camera, which recorded the bust. When he posted the video on YouTube, Maryland prostitutes, oops, I meant 'prosecutors' obtained a grand jury indictment against Graber on felony wiretap charges. He could go to jail for up to 16 years.

Here's (some of) Graber's video, which is still available on YouTube...



There's a lot that I find interesting about this. First, let me say again, Graber (who, at least prior to this incident was a U.S. military serviceman) was riding like a complete moron. Did he deserve to get pulled over? Hell yes. Did he deserve a monster ticket and/or loss of license? Definitely.

But what else is happening in the video? Enough to keep Sigmund Freud busy for a second career. First we see Graber speeding and wheelying through traffic. Let's be honest about motorcycles as phallic symbols; maybe that's not always the case but the whole wheelying-in-traffic thing... "Look at what I have between my legs, LOOK AT ME, WATCH, I can make it STAND UP."

God damn it, that's tiring.

When he takes that off ramp after his speeding and wheelying session and comes to stopped traffic, he just stops too even though he clearly had space on the shoulder to filter forward. Really?!? After breaking every traffic law you can think of, you just stop when you reach the first congestion point? Graber wasn't just riding like a moron, he obviously actually is a moron because one of the cars he passed was the off-duty cop we later see busting him, and it's obvious that on-duty cops were also on his tail, because there's a marked car visible a minute or two into the stop.

So far into the video, the universe is unfolding about as it should, but let's now dissect the behavior of the second moron to make an appearance in Graber's video, the off-duty cop who busts him.

Freud himself once apparently said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," and I guess sometimes a motorcycle's just a motorcycle, but pulling a big wheely as you pass a cop is basically challenging a guy who is more than likely an ex playground bully to a pissing contest (and let's not get into the high probability that the cop's already on a hair trigger thanks to 'roid rage' - an investigation into one New Jersey doctor found that he'd prescribed steroids and HGH to two thousand cops.)

The cop, who was just effectively cuckolded while driving his anonymous, effeminate car jumps out to confront Graber, who is still straddling his own giant, powerful substitute dick.

So what does the cop do? He pulls out his own substitute dick! Yes, he draws his gun on Graber.

OK, let's think this through for a second. Cops and the media have gone to great lengths to convince us all that they operate in a deadly maelstrom of violence almost all the time, and that amongst other things any traffic stop can become a life-and-death confrontation at any moment. Nothing could be further from the truth, in point of fact. Being a cop is nowhere near as dangerous as, for example, being a farmer. By far the largest danger in a traffic stop is, in fact, simply traffic -- something we motorcyclists deal with every time we ride.

But even if you grant cops the infinitesimally small chance the guy they're pulling over might pull a gun on them, IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN THE GUY'S ON A FUCKING SPORT BIKE!!!

This is not the first time I've heard of stunters being arrested by cops with drawn guns, and it's total bullshit. Have you looked at a modern sport bike? They're so densely packaged you'd be hard pressed to find a spot to carry a pen-knife, and if you could find one, it would take 10 minutes and, probably, an allen wrench to get to it. There was absolutely no chance Graber was sitting on a .45.

So what was the message sent by the drawn gun, if it wasn't a dick comparison? Was it, "If you pop the clutch and take off, I'll put one in your back"?

If all this wasn't pathetic - two morons who deserve each other - it would be pretty funny. I love the moment where the cop says, "Show me your hands." Hey, idiot, he's on a motorcycle. You can SEE his hands. He's not rooting around in the dark recesses of his car. Graber, hilariously, responds by taking off his gloves.

"My hands. Uh, sure, you can see my hands."

And now, the third moron enters the picture (figuratively speaking.) Yes, the Maryland prosecutor who charged Graber with operating an illegal wiretap.

You're fucking kidding, right? Wrong.

So what are the facts here?

1.) Graber's camera was ON HIS HELMET, IN PLAIN SIGHT
2.) He was videotaping in a public place
3.) U.S. courts have, over and over, upheld citizens' rights to videotape police actions
4.) You can be sure the Maryland prosecutors will happily use Graber's tape as evidence against HIM.

As Jonathan Turley, the law professor who wrote that L.A. Times op-ed piece noted, without a videotape Rodney King would have been just another guy with a prior record claiming that the LAPD had abused him. Cameras have become the public's best weapon against police excess.

To Graber, and that idiot cop, and the Maryland prosecutors who maliciously persecuted Graber in order to deflect criticism of the gun-wielding arrest, to all three I have this to say...

Shame on you.
Shame on you.
Shame on you.

Superbike dispels rules rumors? Not really. And a note from the Dept. of Unintended Consequences

A few days ago, I noticed an item on the RoadracingWorld.com web site, in which SBK director Paolo Ciabatti dispelled rumors that the Superbike World Championship would be shifting its rules package towards something resembling the current Superstock rules.

I presume Ciabatti's fairly terse response was in response to a direct question from John Ulrich or someone else at RRW. I obviously don't know what specific rumors JU might've heard, but ever since MotoGP released rules allowing 1000cc production-based (i.e., Superbike) motors to be used in the top-tier championship, we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. (Or, given the name of the director of SBK, perhaps I should say, the other slipper.)

Let me digress for a moment. Years ago, I was working at an ad agency that lost a big account. We were all called into a meeting and the President of the company began by saying, "First, I want to assure you that we're not planning to have any layoffs..."

As the meeting broke up, I turned to a co-worker and said, "Well, better update your resume."

"Why?" she asked. "He said there wouldn't be layoffs."

I explained that there is a whole class of corporate statements which, when made, always mean the opposite of what was said. And indeed, within days, I was told to cut a few salaries in my department.

That was exactly what I thought of when reading RRW's SBK statement.

Let's review the facts...

MotoGP is #1
There have been times in recent history when SBK threatened to usurp Grands Prix as the most popular motorcycle racing series -- at least in some major markets, if not the entire world. Think of the days when Fogarty dominated the series and SBK races were far more popular in the UK than Grands Prix. But year in and year out, MotoGP has worn motorcycle racing's daddy pants.

1,000cc production-based motors really do challenge SBK's role as the top 'production-based' series
With MotoGP as the top tier of motorcycle racing, World Superbikes are left to justify the 'World' part of their name. They've long done so by saying, well, we're the championship for production-based machines. Now that the same motors that power SBK bikes will be used to power some motorcycles in MotoGP, the claim that SBK is the top production-based series is, at best, arguable.

A bone-stock production literbike is already 'super'
Anyone who thinks that even a stock BMW S1000R or Kawasaki ZX-10 isn't a super bike is an idiot. So there's no reason that SBK couldn't swap the SBK rules package for the Superstock package. This would allow them to say they had a true world championship for production bikes, as opposed to production-based bikes. From the point of view of manufacturers, as a marketing tool (and that is exactly what racing is) such rules would if anything increase the value of bragging rights. This would leave the existing Superstock class without a raison d'être, but so what? It could be converted into a European showroom stock class, with lights and mirrors and everything. That would be cool, too.

ergo...

I guarantee that within a year at the most, SBK will announce a new rules package that will force bikes racing the Superbike World Championship to be far closer to stock than they are now. SBK will not publicly admit that they've been pushed into this change because MotoGP's CRTs have moved into the production-based niche. Instead, the justification will be cost control.

"It's just getting too expensive," they'll say, "to build a competitive superbike under the old rules."

But what will the real consequences of the new rules be? Probably not what they expect.

Firstly, you need to realize that what matters is the total economy of the series. There are a whole bunch of businesses involved; teams, broadcasters, promoters, tracks, and of course sponsors, etc.

While they don't all have to turn a profit in any given year, the total amount of money flowing into those businesses as a result of participating had better be at least a little bit more than the total amount of money flowing out.

Now, the vast majority of Backmarker readers are not big-shots in the world of motorcycle racing. But a lot of you have built a race bike or two. So you can't be blamed if you think that, as a club racer, a huge chunk of your budget is going to go into actually building your bike. And it would be easy to think that building the bikes is the biggest cost associated with putting on the SBK series, too.

You'd be wrong. I had an old friend who occasionally said the most ridiculous shit, but also was occasionally wise. One of the wise things he once offered up was, "Any sufficiently large difference of degree becomes a difference of kind." Running a world championship isn't like club racing, but at a different scale; it's a whole different kind of business.

Once you start flying to Australia for races, or transporting a two-story, two-truck-wide hospitality area with a full restaurant-style kitchen, or bringing a mobile hospital to the track, or bringing 15 camera crews and full production facility to the track... in the context of all those costs, what's actually spent building the bikes is almost trivial.

Let me offer up a valid lesson from club racing. At the club level, you typically have some kind of Supersport or Superstock class for bikes that are not too heavily modified. And you have a 'Sportsman' or 'Superbike' class where almost anything goes. Now, while you could spend an almost limitless amount on your Sportsman-class bike, because there are almost no limits under the rules.

But the fact is that competing in Sportsman is cheaper than competing in Supersport. Why? Because to be competitive in Supersport at the club level, you need to buy a whole new bike every time some OEM releases a new and much-improved model. Whereas, the Sportsman racer can keep tweaking on the same bike for years and years, updating it with parts being sold by frustrated Supersport racers who are parting out last year's bike to pay for this year's model.

Once SBK adopts a much more restrictive set of rules, manufacturers are going to realize the hard way that in order to win, they have to homologate an improved base model.

The cost of developing and homologating a new road bike makes the cost of operating a race team seem like chump change.

My advice to InFront Motorsports is thus, beware of the law of unintended consequences.

Is "Occupy Wall Street" the left's Tea Party? Lessons from (recent) history...

The Tea Party started out as a grassroots movement. But a playing field doesn't just have to be level for big-money pro sports like politics. It has to be astroturfed so it looks good under the TV lights. Once shadowy Republican supporters like the Koch brothers realized that the original Tea Party movement could be co-opted to re-energize the Republicans' base -- which had been demoralized by Obama's election -- they poured millions of dollars into the movement and, more importantly, through 'think tanks'  like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, they started orchestrating media coverage and feeding those 'grassroots' 'real Americans' their talking points.

The irony that the Tea Partiers are by-and-large aging, middle-class, and poorly educated -- i.e., the very people the Koch bros. are committed to squeezing to death -- has thus far been lost on everyone, but the Tea Party definitely worked for the Republicans during the mid-term elections.

So, I wondered, would Warren Buffett (or some other liberal rich guy) seize a similar opportunity presented by Occupy Wall Street? God knows that the Democrats could stand to be re-energized by a popular uprising of people with no previous political knowledge (and no obvious political or economic sophistication) now, just like the Republiban Party needed it in 2009. Would Occupy Wall Street become, in effect, the Dems' Tea Party?

Any hope that Liberal money would parachute a spin doctor into the Wall Street encampment to organize them was dashed a week or so back, when the nascent movement finally released a rambling, ranting manifesto. It read as if it was written by a high-school girl writing with a ballpoint with a daisy attached by rubber band, who had eighteen people looking over her shoulder and adding their two cents' worth; it covered just about every global ill from overpaid bankers to that low-oxygen 'dead zone' in the ocean, to the exorbitant prices for Burning Man tickets.

I hope the Democrats do co-opt Occupy Wall Street, but not for the same reason other people do.

Here's a lesson from history: You take a loosely organized movement -- a rabble, and it doesn't matter if it's  the Taliban, or the Tea Party -- and an organized group tries to co-opt that rabble, and harness its energies towards the organized group's ends, objectives, or interests -- the way the CIA co-opted the Mujahideen as an anti-Soviet force in Afghanistan, or the Koch bros. harnessed the Tea Party -- the same thing always happens. At first, the rabble gratefully accept support and progress is made towards the financiers' objectives.

Then, the rabble decides that rather than take direction, it will dictate policy. The Mujahideen morphed into the Taliban. The Tea Party stopped endorsing Republican candidates and started choosing their own. Virtually every Republican elected during the last cycle made that idiotic no-tax pledge in order to placate the Tea Party. Think about what that really means: every candidate basically tied one hand behind his own back before even getting to Washington; before even really learning what challenges lay ahead.

OK, this particular crazy may have dropped out of the picture but don't kid yourself, the Republiban Party is desperately trying to rein in the Tea Party before they turn the GOP presidential nomination into a circus. The Tea Party never really understood the history behind the Boston Tea Party, but as it evolves it resembles another famous tea party; the one in Alice in Wonderland.

This gets me to my point. If the Democrats try to co-opt Occupy Wall Street, the rabble will soon enough decide they don't just want advice, funding and organizational support. The rabble will want to dictate terms to Democratic candidates. And while the Tea Party may well prove to be the Republibans' undoing, the Dems' desperately need to pushed to the left after years of pandering to vocal right-wing grassroots (and astroturf) movements, despite the fact that the acolytes of those right-wing movements were never going to vote for them anyway.

I hope that Occupy Wall Street does co-opt the Democratic Party. Obama has spent the last few weeks experimenting with the tiniest step to the left; he's using stronger language in campaigning for the 'jobs' bill, and the 'millionaire' tax. But he still acts as if he's afraid of offending American households earning $250k or even a million plus per year. That's a group that (the two Warrens -- Buffet and Beatty -- excepted) isn't going to vote for him anyway!

In the last couple of weeks, I've heard the most ridiculous stuff go unchallenged. Some Republiban congressman from Colorado said, "Some people making a million dollars a year aren't rich, they're the guy operating the corner dry cleaner."

Obama should have jumped on that, and said, "What is this guy, on crack?!? The only launderers making a million bucks a year are money launderers. How out of touch are the Republicans to think that a guy  operating a corner dry cleaner is pulling in seven figures?" Then he should have organized a town hall meeting of dry cleaners and asked for a show of hands of the ones making over a million. They'd roll in the aisles.

And the Democrats aren't challenging the trite assertion that there are places -- Manhattan, Cupertino, or the Hamptons, for example, where an household income of $250k or even $1M doesn't make you rich.

Obama needs to say, "Look, I understand that if you live in an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York, or if parking valets in Silicon Valley aren't impressed with your Ferrari because its just a 'California' and not a GTB, and you're making half a million a year, you may not be rich compared to your neighbors. But if you are going to argue that you're just another struggling middle-class American, you need to vote Republiban, because you're not going to like what I stand for. I stand for you guys paying something forward, so other people can have the same great opportunities that America gave to you."

Obama needs to say, "Hey, if you think the earth is only 5,000 years old, and you want every school day to start with a Christian prayer, you need to vote Republiban, because I stand for the separation of church and state."

Obama needs to say, "If you don't think global warming's a problem, and that we're causing it or at least making it a whole lot worse, then you need to vote Republiban, because I stand for science and against a new Dark Age."

Obama needs to say, "You know what, we're going to put a public health care option back on the table. If you're happy with your massive insurance premiums, if you're happy with enormous copays, if you're happy with paying $400 for an aspirin if you go to the hospital, if you're happy with being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, if you're happy with Byzantine billing practices, just vote for someone else."

The Democrats need to realize that they've been way to careful to avoid riling a vocal minority who will never vote for them anyway. If Obama is afraid to come right out and take a stand against right-wing fringe groups backed by a handful of billionaires, then the Democrats need to put forth a nominee who will take that stand.

If it takes Occupy Wall Street to force that to happen, so be it.