The Scene

THE SCENE

IVAN J. WAGAR

JON McKIBBEN became the fastest man in the world (one way) last year when he exceeded 287 mph in the Honda Hawk land speed record machine. That fact is pretty well-known to motorcyclists because of magazine reports of the endeavor, and Honda's efficient advertising campaigns.

One of the things that is not commonly known about McKibben is that he has been riding motorcycles to work for a couple of years, a daily round trip of about 100 miles of Los Angeles freeways and packed surface streets, and has survived. McKibben also is a rather competent road racer in West Coast AFM and ACA events, where he rides both production and GP categories regularly.

In other words, McKibben is a motorcycle enthusiast, more than most owners. During public appearances to relate his Bonneville experiences, he is just as happy to rap about a tour through Big Sur as he is to talk about the salt flats.

With the firm of Digitek, McKibben has appeared in court many times as an expert witness, and has intentionally rolled and crashed cars in order to gather crash information for a particular court case. A background of racing stock cars for several years, at places such as Daytona, has put him in good stead for deliberately going on his head in a car.

As a former engineer with one of the Big Three domestic auto firms, Jon developed considerable expertise in the area of vehicle handling and dynamics. In fact, when Digitek received a contract to develop suspension systems for one of the Department of Transportation Experimental Safety cars, it was McKibben who did the work. McKibben knows his way around the Washington, D.C. traffic scene like few other people. Frequently I have bumped into him in the Department of Transportation, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, SAE safety conferences, and just about any place where safety experts and legislators gather.

Those are a few of the credentials of the man presenting his gut feelings on page 54 of this issue. Jon McKibben has followed auto and motorcycle safety through the dark days of the Bill Hadden/NHSB (former director of the old National Highway Safety Bureau) era to the more sensible present day outlook on vehicle and highway safety. He has followed seat belts and motorcycles and airbags for cars.

While some readers will not agree with most of McKibben’s article, it is written from experience and foresight, and is one of the most objective views of motorcycle safety we have had the pleasure to publish.

Safety is a boring word. The very mention of any kind of safety usually is enough to make even your best friend turn a deaf ear. But our sport is a very vulnerable one, especially when we consider how much can be done to a car to protect the occupants, and how little can be done to the motorcycle, as a vehicle, to reduce the severity of injuries during the crash mode.

All of us old-timers like to think that all we need is to teach new riders and our problems can be solved. And statistics prove that good training and licensing will save hundreds of lives every year. But the training programs are slow in coming.

I hope safety education programs will be forthcoming soon, so that this column can go back to more fun topics like racing. But we will not stop hammering until good programs are in effect. Earlier this year I described some of the elaborate training schemes in Japan. It was during that trip that I told the Japanese firms that while I was very impressed, I was also depressed in that the U.S. subsidiaries of these very firms did not have safety programs.

I don’t really know how instrumental I was in rocking the boat, but it now looks like the dam has broken. American Honda has offered to donate up to one million dollars to the Motorcycle Industry Council for rider training, providing the other member firms match the sum. Honda, in other words, feels that with half of the market they should pay half the total to get training started in this country. It is a very generous and honest gesture on the part of Honda.

At a recent meeting of the heads of the big six firms in MIC (Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki, BSA and HarleyDavidson), it was agreed that a program would be developed to accommodate Honda’s offer. In addition to Yamaha’s participation in the MIC plan, that company has furthered their total commitment to rider safety by running a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal in the July 13th edition. And, believe me, a full page in Wall Street Journal is no small thing, for any industry.

The Yamaha ad relates to the fact that we have 4.5 million motorcycles in the U.S. at this time. And another million will be added by the end of this year. The ad tells how Yamaha developed a riding instructor’s program in 1967, and has made a total corporate commitment to motorcycle safety and training. Yamaha tells us in the ad that they will not only continue the program, but even expand it to accommodate the growing needs of our sport.

These two steps by the Number One and Two firms in the motorcycle business in this country are fantastic. Both Honda and Yamaha realize that if we do not cater to the training needs of the new motorcyclist we are all in for the type of legislation that Jon McKibben has warned us about. [Ö]