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From Cycle News

INDUSTRY NEWS - The Future of AMA Pro Racing
By Henny Ray Abrams
Photo By Henny Ray Abrams (Photo © Cycle News, Inc. 2007)
Fresh Start 3/7/2008  

The future of AMA Pro Racing is now in the hands of the Daytona Motorcycle Group (DMG), a group led by Vice Chairman/Executive Vice President of NASCAR Jim France and Grand-Am President Roger Edmondson, who will call on their considerable experience to make the racing properties more successful than ever.

"We know it will be successful," Edmondson, who once ran AMA road racing, said at a news conference at Daytona International Speedway on Friday evening. "Once the France family decides to move forward on a project it does not fail. It may have some hiccups, it may have some problems, but it's not going to be allowed to fail. This is quite clear; I'm not a kid any more, this is the last mission for me. I don't want to walk out a failure either."

 Edmondson described the deal, which is from 2009 forward, but may have pieces that begin in 2008, as "an acquisition and it lasts as long as we're in business. So we are not licensing or borrowing or leasing AMA Pro Racing rights, we are buying them. We will replace the AMA as the sanctioning body for AMA Pro Racing activities."

The name will remain AMA Pro Racing, because the "general public considers AMA racing to be the real thing and rather than starting from scratch, I think our best interest lay in taking our brand and taking it forward. This is a departure from what the initial intention when Rob (Dingman) first started out, they wanted to divorce themselves from the sport because they felt in many ways the controversy that is attendant to racing was holding the AMA back."

Said Dingman, "We needed to have a firmer grasp on the legislative and regulatory issues that face us, our member benefits and services have become average at best and we just had a complete inability to market and promote our professional racing series. In the fall, in September, we launched a wide-ranging effort to rededicate the association to the core mission, to protect and promote the future of motorcycle. We revealed new goals and strategies to the AMA board and our first priority in this reorganization was to improve the image of the AMA brand through a redesigned role in racing. In other words, we wanted to step away from professional racing to the extent that we could so we could let our brand grow without being mired in the controversy of racing.

"As you know, even on your best day, a sanctioning body is controversial. We wanted to rededicate ourselves to being a membership organization, to provide member benefits and member services and to fulfill our mission of ensuring a bright future for motorcycling in America."

Though the DMG will take control of all racing properties, they plan to source out many of the various disciplines to others. The motocross property will likely be sublet to the National Promoters Group, a source within the NPG said.

"Many good companies made proposals," Edmondson began, talking about the 14 groups making proposals, "and now the next step for us to go out to those companies and conclude their deal, because their deal will now be us, instead of being with the AMA. There's a lot of good talented people who are ready to make investment. But to make the full investment to grow their particular discipline, they need to know that their property rights are intact and expected and every contract that we do will be a model after the Live Nation (AMA Supercross) contract."

The Live Nation contract with the AMA runs through 2019, but Edmondson said it might make more sense for Live Nation and the DMG to reach an agreement.

"We will certainly meet with the Live Nation folks in person in the near future and suggest to them that it might be more appropriate to take the AMA out of the picture and create a new contract," he said. Roy Janson, Live Nation's vice president of operations, and Todd Jendro, senior director of Supercross, were among the many guests who watched the Daytona Supercross from the Sky Suite of International Speedway Corporation.

Road racing was the crown jewel, which is all the DMG originally wanted before deciding to take everything. Dingman took a swipe at legions of AMA employees when he said, "Our road racing series has not been run as well since Roger (Edmondson) was affiliated with it. Since Roger ran the series, it has not been nearly as successful as it was back then. We actually made a decent amount of money at that point too, that we haven't been able to do since then." Dingman didn't provide financial details.

Most of the questions centered around road racing. Many of the teams were curious about whether the recently approved 2009 Superbike rules would be enacted. Said Edmondson, "I do not plan to blindly honor those rules. I do not. I need to review them. I haven't even read them. It might turn out they're the best set of rules in the world and if they are we'll adopt them. But I don't think we can know that until we get a little more time on the ground. I think it's going to be important that we again talk to the stakeholders and the manufacturers and get the read on that. Our vision for Superbike may turn out to be different than that set of rules. And if it is we'll adopt our vision and go from there. But again, we need to make sure that we do so understanding the issues and the unintended consequences of any decisions we take."

He continued, "I want to see this sport reach its potential." His example was Grand-Am, which has exceeded his expectations and is a truly professional discipline, with well financed teams and a variety of machinery from prototypes to more production-based. "I think that it's important that we find a way to move to true professionalism here. I'll give you an example: I don't think that one rider, one bike, a guy getting in a van to race for prize money is professional racing. In other words, the old division used to be that if you made a little more money than you spent, or if you had the potential to make more money than you spent, that was professional racing. Professional is when you leave home and your bills are paid for by a sponsor and you're representing a company.

"So our goal is to try to build this sport to a point where there are professional teams who are sponsored and who have an entity of their own, much like Richard Childress Racing is in NASCAR. And that's not just in AMA road racing, that needs to be true across the board. If it comes down to operational issues, obviously I think road racing first and everything else second."

Superbike will be the premiere class in the Daytona 200 as soon as 2009, he said, though he wasn't specific about what displacement a Superbike would be; it could be a 600cc or 1000cc. That decision will come within the next 90 days.

"We have no plans on the Motorcycle of Tomorrow," he said, using the analogy of the NASCAR Car of Tomorrow, an essentially spec car with different engines and cosmetics. "We're going to continue to base our racing products on motorcycles you can buy. You know, the industry's made a tremendous investment in carrying this sport; I'm talking about the manufacturers and distributors in this United States. They have really spent a lot of money to build the sport up to where it is, not only in fielding teams and designing products that can be raced as well as ridden on the street, but also in supporting the promoters, with sponsorship and hospitality programs and program ads and all those things. That asset is a head start we didn't have in Grand-Am."

Those sentiments were reflective of his desire to keep open the lines of communication with the manufacturers, something the current regime hasn't done.

"We will work with the people who are in the sport and we'll find out what their issues are, we'll make a list of them and we'll prioritize them based on our ability to address them properly," he said. "Some of them will be quite easy, some will require a lot of thought. Some will require outside funding. All of that has to be dealt with, but I can assure you that we will make every effort in every discipline to grow this thing."

Growth in the number of venues may come, but Edmondson has no current plans to change any of the tracks. He would like to penetrate some of the more populous areas of the U.S. that currently are ill-served by road racing.

"We have to remember that the party that is always overlooked it seems is the promoter, and that's the individual who takes the financial risk in all of this," he said. Later he added, "It would be absolutely dead wrong for us to abandon them. That doesn't mean we won't add to the schedule. I had a conversation with one of the most respected people in the industry this morning and pointed out that every time we introduce a new race, it puts a real financial burden on our entire economy." Edmondson admitted not knowing "what the numbers are right now in motorcycle racing, but the concept is the same – every time we go racing there has to be money to support it and we have to live within our means. I think that's been part of the problem that the AMA has dealt with. The AMA actually subsidized programs that didn't need to be subsidized because they couldn't stand on their own two feet. I hate to be harsh about it, but the real world demands that my checks clear the bank and yours too. I think we have to do this in a business-like way."




Ron Carbaugh