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At the post-season test following the final round of MotoGP this past weekend, there were some very different motorcycles on the track. Harley-Davidson Factory Racing Team riders Kyle Wyman and James Rispoli did some laps on the Screamin' Eagle Road Glide race bikes they ride in the MotoAmerica Mission King of the Baggers series in the United States.
Former racers Marco Melandri, Randy Mamola, Simon Crafar, and John Hopkins also turned some laps. Harley-Davidson CEO Jochen Zeitz was on hand to say that racing is somehow now important to the brand. Zeitz and officials from Dorna, the MotoGP commercial rights holder, took questions at a news conference, but didn't provide many specific answers, except that Harley-Davidson and MotoGP have an agreement to collaborate.
It seems like no one is sure where this will lead, but one possibility is that we'll see Harley-Davidson racing baggers doing demonstration laps at MotoGP events next year and possibly even a Harley-only race series in the future. It should be noted that the King of the Baggers series raced as part of the Grand Prix of the Americas round of MotoGP in Texas this year, so this isn't entirely uncharted territory.
Why this sudden partnership between strange bedfellows? Well, MotoGP commercial rights holder Dorna is always trying to find a way to build up MotoGP in the United States, and even more so now that Dorna is being acquired by F1 rights holder Liberty Media, a U.S.-based company. And they've no doubt seen the success of the King of the Baggers series in MotoAmerica.
Does any of this really make sense? Whatever you think of the idea of mixing racing baggers and MotoGP, I'm going to give you something to disagree with. Here are three reasons why it's a good thing and three reasons why it's a stupid idea. Start with the positive.
Baggers are better race bikes than you think
For anyone who has ever raced a motorcycle or followed the sport closely, the idea of racing a 620-pound bagger that weighs almost as much as two MotoGP race bikes can easily seem ludicrous. But while the baggers are definitely unorthodox, they are real race bikes, arguably more modified than Superbikes. In the few years the King of the Baggers series has been running with MotoAmerica, the baggers have made huge advances in lap times and reliability.
At Daytona International Speedway this year, where the baggers have room to fill their big lungs, three riders (one Harley-Davidson and two Indians) hit a top speed of 185.5 miles per hour, which was slightly faster than the top speed set by anyone in qualifying for the Daytona 200 (184.3 mph) and nobody doubts that those Supersport bikes are "real" race bikes. And it's not just top speed. Lap times at Daytona were just two seconds slower than the Supersport bikes and when the baggers ran in conjunction with MotoGP at the Circuit of the Americas in March, the best qualifying time was a fraction of a second slower than the Moto3 pole-winning lap. Nobody's arguing that baggers are the top class, but respect is due for the R&D it takes to get a big pig of a motorcycle like a Road Glide to lap that quickly.
Diversity of motorcycles raises the chances of capturing new fans
You and I may know that a MotoGP race bike and a Moto3 race bike are very different beasts, but to the person seeing motorcycle racing for the first time, they look pretty much the same. I believe MotoAmerica has been smart to increase the variety of classes because it creates more opportunities to snag the attention of new fans. Whether you're a kid who gets interested because the Junior Cup racers are on a Kawasaki Ninja 500 like yours, or you think the Super Hooligan bikes are cool, or you ride a cruiser and want to see the outlandish performance of the baggers, you might get drawn in. This is not about those of us who are existing fans (though some of us might enjoy it), but about building fans for the future.
Baggers are good entertainment
Why do we go watch motorcycle races anyway? For entertainment. And even if it's not the kind of racing you prefer, watching these huge, totally inappropriate, very highly modified motorcycles sliding around the track is entertaining.
"We're just defying physics with the speeds, the lap times, the lean angles," said S&S/Indian Motorcycles racer Tyler O'Hara, when I asked people in the MotoAmerica paddock why baggers racing has been a success.
And now, three reasons why this is a dumb move.
Harley-Davidson won't benefit by reaching the wrong audience
Under former CEO Matt Levatich, Harley-Davidson had ambitious goals for expanding sales outside North America. It set up distribution networks around the world. When Levatich was ousted and Jochen Zeitz took over, shutting down a lot of those foreign operations was just one of many ways the company reversed course 180 degrees.
Most of MotoGP's audience is outside North America. Millions of MotoGP fans from India to Indonesia, from São Paulo to Saigon, aren't going to buy a Harley-Davidson Softail that costs 15 times the average annual income just because some baggers are racing each other as a side show. How much will Harley-Davidson have to spend to reach millions of non-customers?
MotoGP won't benefit because it's not the same as MotoAmerica
If you've been to a MotoGP race weekend and a MotoAmerica weekend, you understand that while both are motorcycle road racing and both are a lot of fun, they are two very different experiences. There's no question in my mind that King of the Baggers has drawn more fans to MotoAmerica race weekends. You see them walking the paddock at MotoAmerica races, where they can be a few feet away from the mechanics prepping the machines for the races. But will the guys in the "I'm just here for the baggers" T-shirts really pay the steeper ticket prices, travel to get to the one U.S. round per year, and battle the much larger MotoGP crowds just to watch from a distant grandstand as baggers do a five-lap sprint race?
If my previous point mostly referred to the audience following on TV, this point also refers to putting U.S. fans in the stands. Because the show is so much bigger, MotoGP would get much less of a boost from baggers than MotoAmerica.
MotoGP fans won't be impressed by Harley-Davidson racing itself
If this goes beyond demonstration laps and becomes a Harley-only race series that runs alongside MotoGP, fans will quickly tire of it once the novelty wears off. They won't see it as real racing.
Harley-Davidson has a long — and, in my opinion, lamentable — history of racing against itself. Think back to the XR1200 spec series, or even further back to the 883 Sportsters that ran with the AMA Superbike championship. Harley's XR750 dominated flat-track racing for a long time, though some give the credit to the rule book, more than Harley-Davidson. Today, the company has essentially given up on American Flat Track. The King of the Baggers series is the only professional race series where Harley-Davidson actually competes seriously against another brand, and even that is artificially limited because only Harley-Davidson and Indian are allowed.
If this eventually becomes a series of Harley-only races, it will solidify its status as a side show not to be taken seriously. Racing is about competition and, as usual, Harley-Davidson doesn't want to compete. It wants to win by fiat.
So there you have my take. Three reasons this is a good idea and three reasons why it's stupid. Which ones do you agree with?
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