Daytona After Hours
DAYTONA AFTER HOURS
JON F. THOMPSON
THEY CALL THIS BIKE WEEK. TRUST ME; THEY’RE NOT kidding: This may be the largest dose of reassurance motorcycle riders ever are likely to see from a society which seemingly regards all motorcyclists with at least some suspicion. It’s 10 full days devoted to celebration of the motorcycle. This is where the faithful gather to consider a two-wheeled, internal-combustion icon and the lifestyle it represents.
For most of the year, Daytona Beach is an unremarkable resort town on the east side of the Florida peninsula, but during Bike Week, the town’s complexion changes as the snow birds, the college kids on Spring Break and the stock car race fans the town usually attracts are displaced by motorcycling’s Gathering of the Clans.
The clans gather at what are, for all intents and purposes, a pair of sub-cities, with Daytona Motor Speedway on the east side of town cast as the Citadel of Speed, and with Main Street in the role of the Siren of Style. If you come to Daytona as one of the squintv-eyed, latter-day gunslingers who pull the triggers of race bikes, you get up early and go to the track. But if you’re here for fun. for a beer or three and a look at the universe of the motorcycle in all its weird, wacky, wonderful forms, you stay up late and go to Main Street.
A minimum of 100.000 people this year did Main Street, all five, slightly seedy blocks of it. There is at once not much to recommend it and at the same time every reason for being here. Fifty-one weeks a year. Main Street, its brand-new, decorative tile streets and sidewalks notwithstanding, is a deteriorating shadow of past commerce, most of its storefronts vacant. The street’s few full-time merchants, and others who rent empty store fronts just to sell Harley-Davidson paraphernalia during Bike Week, hang on and wait for the deluge they know March brings. For with Bike Week comes a promise of financial security; some of Main Street’s few year-round merchants do 60 percent of their annual business during that time. By comparison, for all stock car racing’s visibility, its fans are a tight-fisted bunch. Said one local, “The car racers come here with a clean shirt and a $ 10 bill and they don’t change either one.”
Bike Week this year kicked off on March 3 with a dirttrack race at Volusia County Speedway and spiraled on. in ever widening circles of activity, through Sunday, March 12, the day of the Daytona 200, the crown jewel competititon event of Bike Week.
Where the most important race is the human race
I arrived March 7. stylishly late, and spent an uneasy night in a hotel filled with crazed college kids and understandably uneasy geriatrics. I hit the ground running March 8. a Wednesday, with a first cruise of Main Street, which, even at 9 a.m. on a morning three days before the Big Weekend, is curb-to-curb with Harleys, every age and type, from rat bikes to meticulously maintained. You want exotica? Are a twin-engined firebreather, an original, unrestored Indian or a trike powered by a Buick V-Eight, topped, drag-race-style, with a GMC supercharger exotic enough for you?
Walking Main Street isn’t necessary; wait until Saturday night and stand in one place, like in front of Pinewood Cemetery, across the street from the Boot Hill Saloon at the west end of Main Street, and eventually every motorcycle in town, stacked handlebar-to-handlebar in Bike Week’s prevailing ultra-gridlock, will rumble past your vantage point. Walking Main Street does have its attractions, however; these include watching airbrush artists apply their art to Harley gas tanks, finding enough leather garments for sale to have covered all the beef consumed in the U.S. last year, endless supplies of new and used Harley parts, death’s-head rings, T-shirts and maybe best of all, an unequalled opportunity to observe the marvelous and seemingly endless variety of the human parade.
Mostly, that parade seems composed of outlaws; biker dudes, biker chicks, even biker kids. Judging from appearances, if you want trouble, this is the place to find it.
But as always, appearances are deceptive. This is a mellow crowd, much more interested in fun than in fightin'. Reflecting the city’s recognition of that good nature, and of the motorcycle as a positive force, is the fact that the city’s new police chief, Paul Crow, has taken steps to insure that visiting motorcyclists will be greeted more cordially by his officers than they have been in the past. Anyone looking for trouble, he says, surely will find it. But he adds, “I’ve found most propaganda about bikers is false; I’ve found that 99 percent of them are just good people coming here to have a good time."
George Mirabel, executive vice president of the Daytona Beach chamber of commerce, placed the city’s interest in Bike Week in neat perspective: “Every year (during Bike Week) 100.000 motorcyclists come to town and spend $90 million. Nobody ever welcomed them and said, ‘Come on in!' We're starting to do that."
If it's a welcome Daytona visitors craved this year, they had to go no farther than one of the “Welcome Bikers" signs that dotted hotels, motels and shopping malls everywhere. But if they wanted a welcome, motorcycle-style, they needed to show up at one of the demonstration ride centers set up by the manufacturers. All were represented, but Harley-Davidson's arrangement was by far the most comprehensive and best organized. It was free-form in spirit, with riders allowed to follow a marked course at their own pace, with stock shrinkage prevented by a radio transmitter in each bike which constantly beamed the bike’s location to a powerful receiver.
How popular was the Harley demo ride? On one cold, rainy day, said public relations coordinator John Gaedke, 809 rides were taken on the 40 Harleys on hand—one example of every model Harley-Davidson builds. And that was prior to Bike Week's peak.
If Bike Week had its peaks, and it did, it also had its valleys. The Alligator Enduro, one of a cornucopia of competition events held outside the precincts of the speedway, represented the best of both worlds; lots of fun to watch, but a trial to participate in, unless you either loved adversity or possessed the luck and skill to have been one of the 400-or-so entrants who finished in the top 10. I hooked up with Pat Traficante of the Daytona Dirt Riders, the sponsoring club, who hauled me around to watch the fun at what he considered the best vantage points. The best of these brought us to a deep, swampy, water crossing studded with cypress knees and festooned with hanging vines through which riders, hot and sweating despite 45degree temperatures, had to flog their steaming, halfdrowned bikes. A local, clad in a feed cap and bib-front overalls, assured me this hole was home to a large alligator and a cottonmouth or two. “Aw, but they long-gone, they hear these motorbikes,” my informant allowed, a twinkle in his eye. And then he took a pull at his beer can. And laughed. If the wildlife was home, it didn't bother the enduro riders, though by the time most got to the finish, they looked as though they’d been wrestling 'gators and some undoubtedly felt snake-bit, reaffirming my belief that’s it a lot better to watch an enduro than ride in one.
Not all of the competition to be found here is of the traditional variety; some of it took place at a tavern called Finky’s, which promised a Miss Easyrider contest for the crowd which every year shouts itself hoarse on Atlantic Avenue yelling “Show us your tits" to women in the bumper-to-bumper traffic; and some came in the form of the All-American Motorcycle Rodeo at the Volusia County Speedway, in which Harley riders did barrel races and participated in other unnatural acts. I passed on both, opting instead for sleep and, during the daylight hours of Friday, the Pro Twins GP race at the speedway. This is the Anything Goes class of motorcycle racing; the bikes have to have two cylinders, two wheels and no more than lOOOcc’s of engine capacity. Most everything else is free. T his year, as last, a Ducati 85 1 ruled the race, but that may be changing. One of the more interesting entries was the Britten, a lightweight, ultra-fast but untried V-Twin from New Zealand. Rider Gary Goodfellow, whose race was over at the first corner of the first lap due to an electrical fault in the bike’s fuel injection system, told me afterward the Britten is faster than his Suzuki Superbike, which is very fast indeed.
If competition and fellowship are two of the lures of Bike Week, commerce is the other. It ranges from the organized commerce practiced at the speedway, on Main Street and at Robison’s Harley-Davidson, a dealership through which every rider in town must have passed during the week, to the less formal sort of commerce to be found at the Jam On Swap Meet at the Volusia County Fairgrounds about 30 miles east of Daytona.
This contained as many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities as anyone is likely to need, including the opportunity to purchase K-modeí Harleys (or any other Harley you might crave) whole or in parts, join the KKK or purchase a tattoo, the latter clearly the lesser of the two evils. Dan Constant of Bradenton, Florida, apparently agreed; he contracted with a tattoo artist named Sailor Moses, out of Biloxi, Mississippi, to apply Constant’s birth sign to his left bicep. For this he paid 75 bucks. Sailor Moses’ minimum price. Constant was having this done, he told me, because he’s the only one of his crowd not decorated with a tattoo. “All the guys I ride with keep raggin' me; I figure if I'm gonna ride with this gang. I'm gonna have to do something about it," he explained.
Do I want a tattoo? Maybe a nice set of Harley wings, or a heart and dagger, or the name Fifi? Uh. I think not; I’d have a hard time sliding the cost through on my expense report.
Besides, by now I'm reaching my limit at this endless smorgasboard of motorcycling; I'm about ready fora bit of (relatively) quiet time. But that’s not to be; CW Managing Editor Ron Lawson and I hook up and buy our way into the Motorcycle Expo at the city's convention center on Atlantic Avenue to cruise booths selling everything from personal watercraft to garments to aftermarket seats and suspension. I watch Lawson take his turn at one of the booths in a contest, balancing a non-running enduro bike during a short but very slow’ coast down a ramp. His time was 59 seconds. The record was 30 minutes and folks were standing in a long line, laughing and swapping jokes, for a chance to break it.
Come to think of it. the line to that enduro bike, and the other lines of traffic in the city this week, and the stunning mix of people in them, might just be the most enduring symbol of Bike Week. The people in those lines, like those in Sunday's massive parade between Main Street and the speedway, put Cycle Week in perspective as a celebration of the brotherhood, and sisterhood, of motorcycle riders, an admission that though we may have different styles w hich separate the cruisers of Main Street from thesportybike guys who hang out at the speedway, panting in technolust over the machinery gathered there, we’re all members of the same family. Throughout the city, throughout the week, the rumble of V-Twin exhaust notes combines with the smooth whine of inline Fours and the steady rhythm of vintage vertical Twins and the result is a joyous fanfare; call it Fanfare for the Common Rider. It’s a composition worth hearing.anexperienceworth having.0
