The Oakland Rodders

The Oakland Rodders

UP FRONT

David Edwards

WAS TALKING THE OTHER DAY WITH Lucian Smith, who runs a custom Harley shop in Florida. Smith is a dedicated gearhead with a background in aviation and off-shore powerboats. He also sold Harley-Davidsons for a time. Problem was, with the demand for Harleys so high, he didn't have much work after each year's new-model allotment had been scarfed up by eager buyers. When Smith suggested the dealership should build and sell custom Harley-clones to fill the downtime, his boss' reaction was lukewarm, so he quit in 1994 and opened his own business. Daytona Pro-Street now produces about 20 complete customs a year and sells another 40 as "erector-set" kitbikes, shipped to buyers in sub-assemblies.

We were talking about this burgeoning custom/clone Harley market, as well as the multimillion-dollar hot-rod car industry. "Here's the bottom line," Smith summed up nicely. "America is still having fun."

When it comes to hot-rods, at least, the fun has never been as grand. What started in the 1930s with a bunch of kids in juiced-up jalopies running flatout across California dry lakes is now Big Business.

"It's grown immensely over the past few years," says Steve Coonan, editor of The Rodder's Journal, a slick, allcolor quarterly dedicated to hot-rods and customs. "With baby boomers, especially, it's now become acceptable to celebrate hot-rods. There's something very basic, very mechanical, very appealing about a '32 Ford roadster."

Current high priest of hot-rodding is California's Boyd Coddington. His company, Hot Rods by Boyd, is traded on the Nasdeq stock exchange, and it's not unheard of for a Coddington creation to go for upwards of $250,000. As a measure of his success in particular and hot-rodding's in general, one of his cars was featured on the cover of the Smithsonian magazine, a tome usually reserved for stuffy historical artifacts.

Coddington recently crossed over into the world of custom Harleys, selling billet wheels, swingarms, rotors, sprockets, transmission and cam covers, triple-clamps and lower fork legs. Old-time hot-rod companies are getting in on the act, too. Edelbrock, which got its start making hop-up parts for flathead Fords in 1938, now

has a line of H-D cylinder heads, camshafts, pistons and carburetors.

"The deeper you dig, the more overlap you see in the two communities," says Coonan of the link between hotrods and custom Hogs. "Both are pure forms of American automotive expression. Both represent a healthy disrespect for all forms of authority."

To find more about this Harley/hotrod connection, I flew to Oakland, California, for the 48th-annual Grand National Roadster Show. What the Oscars are to acting, what the World Series is to baseball, Oakland is to hot-rodding. Scattered among the 200-plus showcars were 75 motorcycles, almost all custom Harley-Davidsons.

Happily absent were the so-called "body bikes" of previous years, overdone confections that were more a tribute to the tin-benders' art than real motorcycles. Arlen Ness won Oakland's Best Bike trophy this year with his silver, spartan "Luc-Ness Monster," a stretched custom built for Chicago Bulls center Luc Longley.

"My body bikes were for the shows, for my sponsors," says Ness. "My customer bikes are for fun."

There's that word again.

Oakland Harley-Davidson dealer Bob Dron, a hot-rod guy and chopper builder from way back, knows a little about having fun, too. His fully fendered "Heritage Royale" won Oakland's top trophy in 1994, but his latest concoction, dubbed the "Roadster Royale," is a throwback to the bob-jobs of the 1940s-heck, it's so sparse, he runs it in bare aluminum without a dab of paint.

"To get that hot-rod look, a bike better have an attitude, a character," Dron says. "The look, the art, gets lost on a body bike; the motor has to show, the wheels have to show."

One of the surprises at Oakland was Yamaha's entry of its Speedstar showbike (see Roundup, CW, February), a sweet, sanitary custom based on the new Royal Star. It's just the latest bit of evidence that Japanese bike-makers may be rediscovering the American roadster as a styling influence. While most Big Four cruisers simply paraphrase Harley-Davidson's retro styling licks, a few models have hot-rod overtones. Suzuki's Marauder 800 has only just hit the market, but it's already winning an audience. "It's enjoying pretty good initial sales; some dealers' allotments have already been spoken for," says a company spokesman. Honda's Magna 750 power cruiser has been in the lineup five years, selling an impressive 5000 units per season. "It's a lovely model for us," says a Honda PR person. "It's got a real clientele."

So does Yamaha's V-Max. Introduced in 1985, it may be the ultimate two-wheeled hot-rod. In fact, its maiden magazine ad (a six-page gatefold!) featured the bike with a flamed Deuce coupe and the words, "Any similarity to a hot-rod is purely intentional." In those halcyon days before a locust swarm of liability lawyers infested the land, Mr. Max was touted as "a vicious cycle," with horsepower "delivered to the street with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball taking out the side of a building." Here was a motorcycle, we were duly informed, "capable of burning enough rubber in any gear to keep tire suppliers on double-shifts for a year," one that could "outrun an F-16 right up until take-off." The ad concluded, "Simply put, if the competition had doors, this would blow them off." These days, with virtually no advertising support to speak of, the V-Max still sells about 1000 units per year. Yamaha's retro-cruiser Royal Starwhich uses a gelded version of the Max's mighty V-Four-has sold little more than twice that number, despite a multimillion-dollar ad campaign that included a 1996 Super Bowl spot. There's a message here.

Oh yeah, that old 1985 ad's tagline? "Built for the fun of it."