An Immodest Proposal
An immodest proposal
UP FRONT
David Edwards
DRASTIC TIMES, DRASTIC MEASURES. THE state of competition at Daytona this year has convinced me of one thing: AMA Pro racing in its current, convoluted form needs to be scrapped. It's time to pull the plug, power down the life support, start again.
Over at the Speedway, there were Supersports and Superstocks and Superbikes, all of which look the same and sound the same. Superbike is the AMA’s premier class but it’s a mere bit player at Daytona, the trickest roadracers in America relegated to a short support race because track management deemed them to be tire-shredding menaces and mandated that the evil widowmakers would not run in “their” 200-miler.
Superstock I never quite understood. These are basically Superbike Lites, lOOOcc and running on slicks but with fewer mods allowed. Well, Suzuki’s Ben Spies qualified his showroom-looking GSX-R Superstocker with a time that was quicker than the entire Superbike field save threehimself, Yoshimura teammate Mat Mladin and Yamaha’s Eric Bostrom. Ten days later, seeing the folly in that, the AMA announced that Superstock would be going bye-bye after the 2008 season.
Supersport is a viable class, so much so that we have two of them! There’s the traditional, as in 600cc inline-Fours running on DOT-legal treaded tires, limited modifications allowed. Then there’s Formula Xtreme, the anything-goes class that is supposedly saving the Daytona 200 from itself. There’s a sliding scale of displacement breaks (450-600cc multi-cylinders; 595-750cc three-cylinders; 850-1350cc air-cooled twin-cylinders) that in theory should allow a wide range of models a shot at victory. Tn reality, 56 of the 61 entries were Japanese 600cc Fours, most of those in Supersport trim.
More confusion. The Supersport-polesitting Kawasaki ZX-6R ridden by Jamie Hacking would have qualified third for the 200-miler, despite not wearing slicks. Hacking did not enter the 200, though, because the factory Kawasaki squad isn’t contesting the class. Green glory went to the satellite Attack Kawasaki team of Steve Rapp and Ben Attard when factory Honda riders Miguel Duhamel and Jake Zemke-both in one-time FX appearances for ’07-dropped out with penny-ante mechanicals.
Still with me? No, I didn’t think so, which is the problem. If I’m confused and you’re confused, then what chance does the poor schmuck flipping channels in his underwear have?
Speaking of which, I was doing just that when the Daytona short-track came on. Forget viewers, the commentators proceeded to tie themselves into knots trying to explain how it was that we had two current national Number Ones in the same race! The history and intricacies of the recently formulated GN Singles and GN Twins divisions not exactly rolling off their tongues, which, again, is the problem.
Look, I owe the AMA and I owe racing. I’ve been a member since 1975, when I joined to go motocrossing (third-ranked 125cc Novice in the Maryland State Championships, still got the trophy). When I made journalism my career, it was freelance photos and stories from the Houston Short-Track and TT that gave me national exposure and my first byline in Cycle World. The strength of that work got me hired at Cycle News, where my “beat” was AMA flat-track.
I’m no peripheral fan, in other words, and it saddens me to see dirt-track reduced in status to little more than a backwater sport. So here’s my plan, or at least the basic structure: Let’s go back in time to when Daytona and the Grand National Championship meant something.
The Daytona 200 used to be the most important event in motorcycle racing. In the 1970s and into the ’80s, stars like Mike Hailwood, Phil Read, Jarno Saarinen, Barry Sheene, Giacomo Agostini, Johnny Cecotto, Christian Sarron,
Wayne Gardner and Patrick Pons-a veritable Who’s Who of GP racing-made the March pilgrimage to Florida to mix it up with top U.S. riders. It’s been printed here before but Peter Egan actually did look around a Daytona breakfast joint one year and remark, “My, this really is the International House of Pancakes...”
Compare that to this year when the roster was made up of five factory racers, five support racers and 51 club-level guys.
Bring back the prestige, Daytona. Superbikes have to be headliners, not some rag-tag middleweight flotilla of wannabes. Break the race into two 100-mile (or kilometer) segments if you have to, or stipulate smaller fuel capacities so pit stops and tire changes happen more frequently, NASCAR-style.. .whatever it takes. Finally, swallow your pride and lobby hard for your race to be included in the World Superbike series. Oh, and let’s flush Formula Xtreme-one 600cc class is enough.
Now for the AMA. Time to get your effluvia together, guys. We need one easyto-understand, packageable Grand National Championship. It should include roadraces, dirt-tracks and supermoto. Those three disciplines now run as separate series, something like 41 individual race weekends a year. Too diluting-for fans, factories, the press, television, sponsors. Bring them together into one series, just like it used to be in the glory days (remember On Any Sunday?), limited to, say, 25 dates.
Riders would get GNC points for Superbike and Supersport races, combined with points from short-tracks, half-miles, miles, TTs and supermotos. All of the latter would be contested on what is fastbecoming the Universal Dirtbike, the 450cc Single. The Big Four plus KTM and five smaller companies all have 450 Thumpers, and as you can read in this issue’s Roundup, both BMW and Buell are working on serious competition-oriented 450s. Add the Aprilia 4.5 V-Twin and there’s the potential for 13 factories to be involved.
For short-tracks, half-miles and miles, traditional, purpose-built “framers” would be allowed; TTs and supermotos would be run on stock-framed machines.
Yes, I hear the groans already. No more Harley-Davidson XR-750s. Hey, Milwaukee hasn’t made a complete XR since 1980; it has to be retired at some point. Like getting Daytona back on track and revitalizing the Grand National Championship, now seems like a good time. □
