2015 CHAMPION: Cameron Beaubier won eight races and the inaugural Superbike title.The first year of MotoAmerica as America’s premier motorcycle roadracing series has ended, and participants and management alike seem pleased. Even that master of grumbling and complaint, team owner/publisher John Ulrich, said the new series is worlds better than what it replaced. Even when making suggestions or, yes, while complaining, he said: “I felt that we were both on the same side.” People are also pleased by the presence of three-time 500cc GP champion Wayne Rainey as one of the four directors. The others are: Chuck Aksland, who after keeping Kenny Roberts’ teams running was oper-ations director at the Circuit of The Americas [COTA]; Terry Karges, executive director of the Petersen Automotive Museum; and Richard Varner, who loves Velocettes and achieved success in coastwise cargo operation by tug-and-barge combinations. DMG [Daytona Motorsports Group], the previous series, took the old view that goes something like this: “Superbike is an American invention, and Europe adopted it. If we say superbikes will become 600cc, by golly those Europeans will adopt that too. We are the leaders.” Enough little things were kept different about US Superbike rules to make it difficult for US riders to compete abroad or vice versa.
RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY: Here, Roger Hayden on a Yoshimura Suzuki GSX-R1000 leads the Superbike/Superstock 1000 field at a drenched Road Atlanta.US racing shrank back to its club-race beginnings under DMG management. The Daytona 200, once the worldwide Big Race that started every season with a bang, dwindled into a clubman’s Saturday 600 event, while European-style GP racing expanded to attract riders and spectators alike. What MotoAmerica has done is to reconnect US national racing to the international scene with “globalized rules.” The factories love this; when a bike is homologated for World Superbike, it is automatically homol-ogated for MotoAmerica. No, you don’t have to retune for some special, USA-only throttle body or quirky cam rule. Race parts can be sourced in larger numbers at volume prices. This helps everyone. American riders are thinking internationally, so DMG’s stated policy of “keeping ’em home” never could have worked. Racing has become a worldwide scene. The competition I saw at MotoAmerica’s season finale at New Jersey Motorsports Park was close and exciting, but the ideal is to have what British Superbike and the Spanish CEV series have: large numbers of riders pushing up through the ranks to form the competing groups at the front who rapidly learn from each other to become fast and smart.
UNPRECEDENTED: Yamaha won every MotoAmerica race in the four classes for which its bikes were eligible. In Supersport, Bobby Fong on the Latus Motors Triumph regularly battled for podium positions.Teams need to know what’s going to happen and that decisions will be made fairly. When I spoke with Aksland, he said they weren’t able to find an experienced race director in America, only ex-team members with leftover dislikes and loyalties. They brought in an English team who knows from experience the value of decisive and correct action, not the “old way” of retreating to the Goodyear Tower “for a meeting” while weather made all the decisions. At COTA, the new management held the start until it could declare a wet race. Memos are circulated to all, and they are signed (that is, someone takes responsibility). Richard Varner knows that factories and teams have been monitoring MotoAmerica all year. America remains a major market, so BMW, Ducati, Honda, and Kawasaki have all, in some sense, marked their dance cards. Will they step onto the floor next year? Varner said, “Everybody wants to go to a dance, but they want to be sure there’ll be a band.” It’s good to feel that US racing is back in competent, sympa-thetic hands. It’s good to talk with team managers and crewmen who are optimistic. But in the world we now inhabit, benef-icently renting racetracks and importing experienced officials is only a beginning. To succeed in the long term, motorcycle racing has to become a business that pays its own way. This idea has a long history.
FOCUSED ON THE TITLE: After 18 races, 22-year-old Cameron Beaubier won the Superbike title by just four points over good friend and Graves Yamaha teammate Josh Hayes. A perennial series champion, Hayes captured 10 wins this year to Beaubier’s eight.AMA muddled through the opportunity-filled 1970s when US motorcycling was huge. Each time racing people in the organization acted to manage or further it, conservative trustees saw meddling by “city slickers.” Many an initiative was neutralized by 1930s thinking. A step forward was taken in the 1980s by tapping into the experience and professionalism of the newly powerful club-racing scene. Roger Edmondson and his energetic Championship Cup staff improved and standardized AMA race operations. Edmondson also imported his new “Supersport” racing classes. These recognized that four-stroke production bikes had become raceable with only the simplest of modifications. Supersport was a revolution in racing because it armed privateers with plentiful and affordable bikes. This era ended in a lawsuit when AMA fired Edmondson but retained his creation: the Supersport classes. Edmondson sued and won a substantial judgment that the AMA could ill afford. When gradual changes in the AMA Board of Trustees made it possible, a separate, for-profit organization was created to manage racing: Paradama Corp. At last it appeared that motorcycle racing in the US could act in its own behalf, without interference. Not so fast. AMA now decided Paradama had committed “impro-prieties.” They voided that corporation, took racing back in-house, and carried out a widespread purge of persons with racing or Paradama connections.
NO MORE INDY: MotoAmerica raced with MotoGP and World Superbike at Circuit of The Americas, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, and here at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Sadly, the series will not return to The Brickyard in 2016. Here, Roger Hayden on a Suzuki leads the Yamahas of Hayes and Beaubier.Having lost membership and a large amount of money, AMA wanted out of racing, an activity it had never understood. Members of the former Paradama group and others sought to “buy or otherwise acquire” AMA Pro Racing, but the transfer predictably went to Daytona Motorsports Group (DMG), created under the umbrella of Daytona (International Speedway Corp.). Many in the Daytona paddock that first year expressed the certainty that, “NASCAR can’t fail. This is going to work. These people really know racing.” At essentially the same time, the US economy faltered in a big way. DMG’s aggressive policies—based on a fundamental misinterpretation of how NASCAR’s founder Bill France Sr. had operated—resulted in Honda and Kawasaki leaving the series. What had been broken was not mended by a following DMG reorganization and Edmondson’s admission that, “I underestimated the importance of the factories to racing.” Racing continued, but almost no one was happy. Honda and Kawasaki stayed away. How long could this standoff continue? Yet, as some pointed out, Jim France could, if he pleased, afford to keep AMA Pro Racing going indefinitely. He is a genuine enthusiast, so the situation cannot have pleased him. A fresh start was needed. That fresh start is MotoAmerica, but competent race direction is only a beginning. Television is the necessary key to US racing’s future and always has been. Teams need sponsors, but sponsors require exposure. Can roadracing get on screen by sheer merit, competing with celebrity mud wrestling? Can live Internet streaming give a leg up? Or must a sport of limited size like ours buy its way onto the small screen? This has been bike racing’s big question ever since AMA’s accidental success in the early 1970s—we’ve never quite made it.
YOUNG GUNS: MotoAmerica introduced an entry-level spec class, the KTM RC 390 Cup, for riders 14 to 22 years in age. Northern California’s Gage McAllister, a Supermoto ace, took the title.This is the classic predicament of the small corporation. To move forward, it needs access to capital. We motorcyclists have always been sure our sport could and must reach a wider audience, but that question remains open. There is a lot of competition for viewers. MotoAmerica’s choice of classes draws in new talent at the bottom through Supersport and the new, more accessible KTM RC 390 Cup class. The press conference remarks of class winners at New Jersey showed that these people are already international in both experience and outlook. I listened to conversations in which young riders described learning overseas circuits through online game simulations. Their on-track education will soon supply what is presently lacking in Superbike—depth of talent. British Superbike and the Spanish CEV series show how effective this process is at creating the stuff of future champions. US racing can draw on a much larger population of potential riders than either Britain or Spain, so with continuing good management we can hope to add some fresh names to the existing list of American MotoGP and World Superbike champions.
COMMAND PERFORMANCE: Jake Gagne (32), on the RoadRace Factory Orion Yamaha R1, won 13 of 18 races and the 2015 Superstock 1000 title. Superbike and Superstock 1000 race together but are scored separately.
By Cycle World
