{"id":3847,"date":"2019-04-13T07:04:05","date_gmt":"2019-04-13T14:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=3847"},"modified":"2019-04-13T07:04:05","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T14:04:05","slug":"fixing-motoamerica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/04\/13\/fixing-motoamerica\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing MotoAmerica"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Motorcycle road racing in America has not met expectations for quite a while now. Our guys are no longer dominating GP racing as they did in decades past. MotoAmerica, our premier road racing league has made strides by reinstalling the 1000cc bikes as the premier class and bumping the 600\u2019s down to B-team. Hiring my Internet-buddy Andrew Capone as rainmaker for the series is another great move towards professional sponsorship and revenue generation. I\u2019ve never raced on pavement but I rank as an expert spectator due to the sheer number of road races I\u2019ve attended. I\u2019ve got a few ideas on how to make MotoAmerica better and I\u2019m not shy about cranking them out.<\/p>\n

From my cheap seats way in the back of the bleachers the first thing that needs doing is to make all racers have large, flat, standard size number plates with a stark contrast between the background and the number. These plates should be situated so that they are legible when the motorcycle is upright or leaned over. Copy how AMA flat track does it. I have no problem seeing the plates they use. So many times at Daytona I\u2019ve lost interest in a race because the stylized graphics on the motorcycles obscure identifying marks. Numbers that are fairly easy to read in a still photo become much more difficult to read when the motorcycles are trotting past at 100 miles per hour and the view is 100 yards away with a barrier fence between you and the action. A hard to follow race is a boring race.<\/p>\n

\"\"American road racers are never going to get back atop the pinnacle of GP racing until they test themselves against the world\u2019s best. It\u2019s expensive for a US rider to got to Europe so why not bring Europe to the USA? What if all the contract issues could be solved and MotoAmerica paid start money to a few of the GP guys? Pay Rossi to start a few races, Marquez or Dovizioso would be a huge draw. I\u2019m guessing the increased gate alone would pay for Rossi. This harkens back to when European motocross stars were paid to compete over here. American racers gained first hand experience on where they needed to be in order to defeat the best. There is no physical barrier preventing our top AMA racers from competing on even terms with world-class GP racers. Show our greyhounds the European rabbit and they will move heaven and earth to stay on their tail.<\/p>\n

Paying start money to stars will cost a lot so MotoAmerica should welcome any advertiser with money into the road racing world. Alcohol, cigarettes, recently legalized medical pot growers, even trailer park Oxycodone dealers should be allowed access to the audience for a price. MotoAmerica can be the expensive venue for all manner of sin-tax products to sell their wares. The squeaky-clean motorcycle racer thing cannot work. The general public will never engage with MotoAmerica because they think all motorcyclists are riff-raff. MotoAmerica should embrace the outlaw buried deep within every rider\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n

I have more ideas for MotoAmerica, lots more. Some of them un-publishable, some of them illegal or require three people. How about free programs to go with that expensive ticket? What if a few road races counted towards the flat track championship? Wouldn\u2019t it be a crowd pleaser to see a circle of FT guys show up to battle on pavement in a close flat track championship? Anyway, I\u2019ll wait here at Tinfiny Ranch for the inevitable MotoAmerica call asking me to join the team. I\u2019ll have to decline; monsoon season is coming and I\u2019ve got a lot of concrete work to do in preparation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Motorcycle road racing in America has not met expectations for quite a while now. Our guys are no longer dominating GP racing as they did in decades past. MotoAmerica, our premier road racing league has made strides by reinstalling the 1000cc bikes as the premier class and bumping the 600\u2019s down to B-team. Hiring my … Continue reading “Fixing MotoAmerica”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[235,66],"tags":[652,653],"class_list":["post-3847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazon","category-joe-gresh","tag-moto-america","tag-motorcycle-racing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3847"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3854,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847\/revisions\/3854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}