It will always be like this

Kevin Cameron charts the cyclical history of motorcycles

My age now protects me against the ups and downs of motorcycling, but it wasn’t always so. My experience has been that the motorcycle never dies out, but assumes a new form in response to new conditions. When in 1969 I first started going to Daytona every March for the 200-mile road race, it looked solid and permanent to me. The rush of enthusiasm driving it (some of it my own!) was surely endless. Kawasaki and Suzuki unleashed their 100hp racers in 1972 and Daytona became The Race every manufacturer suddenly had to win. International riders and teams arrived, and there was Chris Carter with the languages to straighten out the entries of non-English speakers. Daytona hosted a big motorcycle show and countless meetings of commercial associations supporting this fast-expanding business.

Through the 1980s and 90s the race changed, but its importance was unshaken. Four-stroke Superbikes replaced the two-strokes, but now the big teams were arriving in 40-foot transport tractor-trailers. Book your hotels early or sleep on the beach. True, the British manufacturers were gone, never having modernised their product or the means of producing it. We shrugged – survival of the fittest. We were sorry to see them vanish but there was always plenty of novelty on its way.

Then after 2009 the Daytona 200 changed management, changed policy, and its importance leaked away. Ideas conceived as groundbreaking failed to work as planned. World Superbike and FIM GP events at US tracks like Laguna Seca and Indianapolis displaced Daytona in the minds of enthusiasts.

I’ve never been to the Isle of Man but the accounts of Mike Hailwood’s 1960s battles there with Giacomo Agostini tell us that no more intense or brilliant competition has ever taken place. Racing in the Island was forever – the TT and Brooklands Speedway had been the hot houses in which much of the motorcycle’s evolution had taken place. No more powerful racing tradition existed.

Then in 1976 – pop – Giacomo Agostini announced he would not ride the Island again – the risk of injury or death had become too great.

The paddock followed. The TT disappeared from the FIM’s GP calendar and became its own selfreferential spectacle, much as Daytona would do after 2009.

In the US, motorcycle sales had doubled from 1965 to 1970, and doubled again by 1974. We believers were sure that this was no fluke or fashion, but was motorcycling taking its rightful place among popular sports? Surely if the East German GP could attract 300,000 spectators, motorcycle racing in the infinitely more prosperous USA was headed for great things.

Yet even at the height of the Daytona 200’s popularity in the mid-1970s, I learned not to look up, or I would see how many empty seats there were in the stands. I realised that celebrity mud-wrestling was serious competition for US motorcycle sports.

In California a rival race track was built – Ontario Motor Speedway – from which great things were sure to flow because it was located next to Los Angeles, the centre of American motor culture. Too big, too well equipped, too well promoted to fail!

We raced there five times before business minds determined that property development would earn more from this land. On our last visit – this time for a photo shoot before the 1976 season – we saw the track’s many service vehicles sitting on flat tyres. The New York City area had learned the same lesson years earlier – nothing outdraws the big town.

The motorcycle’s big roller-coaster ride was postwar Europe. Germany rushed little motorbikes into production in the later 1940s as the most rapidly producible and cheapest of people-movers. In 1955, those huge sales collapsed – car production had been tooled and suddenly nobody wanted motorbikes. Japan’s two-wheeled industry started the same way, but failure was turned into brilliant success by switching the stream of production to the prosperous US market.

In 2008 the Great Recession hit the US and motorcycle sales dropped 60 per cent. At the same time came a turnover in industry management.

In 2015 one senior man about to head for his slippers and recliner chair told me: “All our top managers were motorcyclists first, but these new people are PR and sales trained. They don’t know what racing is and it doesn’t make any sense to them.”

Good-hearted folk trying to revive the once-upona-time glories of US AMA national racing were sure it just needed vigorous CPR, after which its heart would take up the beat. They’ve made progress, but it has been slow.

Shall I tear my hair and rend my garments? Nope – for every downturn so far, there has come a later flowering of the motorcycle in a different form or in a different place, in response to new needs. Right now, motorcycles are booming in Southeast Asia.