David Preston

Personal and Employer Rights Vs. Free Speech

Posted on December 20, 2013 by david

Personal and Employer Rights vs. Free Speech

Ah, the furor, the hand-wringing, the angst that have filled the social media over the castigation of a reality TV star to the wilds of ex-stardom over his statements in a magazine interview regarding his distaste for homosexuals and his apparent lack of awareness that there was racial inequality in the far gone days of his youth in rural Louisiana. Has he no right to free speech? Well, sort of yes and mostly no.

In his situation.

Not all employment situations coalesce with the right of free speech and the law in exactly the same manner. For one easy example, we have a Seattle Seahawk pro football player whose has seen his career come to a screeching halt due to his repeated use of a recreational drug, reported to be marijuana. The use of marijuana is currently legal in this state. Do the rules of engagement and attendant penalties administered by the league whose rules he plays under trump state law? Evidently they do. Is he in jail? No. Can he no longer play? No. Perhaps he can find work in the Canadian Football League or some other pro football organization.

The reality is that not all employment situations are bound by the same standards and rules. I have personal experience with these differences in both (so far) of my careers.

For over three decades I was a teacher. Many are not aware of this (including most teachers) but during my entire career public school teachers could be fired in at least most states for “violating the moral standards of the community.” This included actions that were legal.

The restrictions are even looser for private schools of a religious persuasion, as in this week’s firing of a popular Eastside Catholic administrator because he chose to marry his male partner last summer. Of interest to me is that the students walked out in protest of this yesterday. This needs to be taken with a grain of salt, as students love the idea of a walk-out, as for many it’s merely a handy excuse to get out of school. My interest comes from the fact that the gentleman was the Vice Principal. In most schools the VP is in charge of discipline, and is usually the least favorite staff member from a student point of view.

My favorite example a community moral standards violator is a man with the easy to remember name of Bubba Wardinsky. He was a career English teacher in New Jersey. For many years he had a summer job, and a lucrative one; making porno films in California. That was not illegal. When the story broke of his firing, the papers made note that he allowed his students to call him “Bubba.” I thought that was hilarious. The horror!

The following week brought the other end of the story. As he aged, he found himself less able to “perform” the duties of his summer job, and he turned to directing and producing. It seems he invited one of his female students to travel to California with him and star in one of his productions. That in itself may or may not be illegal, although I think she was under 18. Cue a law professor, but needless to say, his actions violated the undoubtedly hypocritical moral standards of his community. The fact that porn films are enjoyed everywhere, presumably even in New Jersey, was moot. He was gone.

My own experience was less lurid. Three male students one year who chose to “celebrate” their graduation by vandalizing their own school. I was appalled at their actions, and more so by the response of the school district, which was less than a slap on the wrist that allowed them to take their finals and walk at graduation. I was sufficiently incensed that I wrote each of them a personal letter. I had taught each of them in multiple classes, and had been the announcer at games they had played in for all three years. I felt I was justified in venting my displeasure to them in a personal letter.

Pretty much alone on that one.

The parents were outraged, and complained. The District hauled me onto the carpet and told me that either I would sign a letter of apology written for me or the case would be sent to Olympia for possible revocation of my license. I chose to not sign the letter.

In (at that time) about 25 years of teaching I’d never had my professionalism questioned, and never been threatened in this manner. I was devastated. The teacher’s union, the same one I’d helped transform from a tame teachers’ association to a force to be reckoned with during my two years as the local president, chose to lie down. Their response was that it would have been so much better if I’d not put anything in print.

Matters reached their nadir at a post-year faculty party, ironically one held at my home. I could hardly speak to the principal, although it was a weak-willed VP who turned out to be the bad guy. I think the principal did not want to be in a position of calling out one of “her” team, and offered me some vague words of comfort that fell to the ground with a thud.

The football coach offered valuable solace. He said “You mean to tell me this is the first complaint to ever go in your file? Man, you need to get a move on – mine is about an inch thick.” That made me feel better.

Eventually things got to the district level and someone looked at it and decided this was ridiculous. I was sent a letter stating that the matter was closed and that no further action was taken. I never forgot it.

The next fall the VP who’d led the attack and was so scornful toward me called me in and offered to let bygones be bygones. He said that he wanted to shake my hand and start the new year. I refused to shake his hand with some vehemence. The next day he was transferred to a junior high, and the last thing I was told (a year or two later) was that he’d been fired for inappropriate acts with a female student. Good riddance to him.

Nevertheless, I came within range of a possible hearing to determine my legal ability to teach based on expressing my own opinion to three graduating seniors. Freedom of speech? A bit tenuous here.

Teachers (many of them do not know this one either) also work under a legal standard called “in loco parentis,” which means that “in this location” the teacher is the “parent.”

Just one of the precepts that falls under this is the responsibility of teachers to protect their “children” from abuse. If a teacher even suspects that a student is being physically, emotionally, or psychologically abused, by anyone, that teacher is required to report the suspicion. That is true even if the teacher has no evidence at all.

If a teacher suspects abuse, or should have, and fails to take action, the teacher can be sued, personally, by the student, even if years later, for not taking actions on a suspicion he or she did or should have had. This is sort of a reverse freedom of speech. You can be fired for not speaking, even if you have no evidence but merely sense something might be wrong.

I had experience with this one as well. I had a female student who was absent two to four days a week. In a school where ten absences a semester led to an automatic failing grade this meant she had no chance of earning a credit in any class. She was an adopted daughter from Rumania, although her English skills were adequate. I asked her about the absences, and received vague answers and assurances she would do better. The parents did not respond to messages mailed home – several of them.

Finally, after repeated failures to reach the parents of change the situation, I called Child Protective Services. I did not know what was going on, but something was definitely wrong here. When I told the principal (a different one from the anecdote above) she was angry. She asked me if I knew that when a teacher made a report the CPS the principal was required by law to fill out a ten page report. I did not know that, and actually did not particularly care (I think you could say that many administrators found me to be a pain in the ass). Anyway, once CPS called the home the parents withdrew her from school and transferred her to the Bellevue School District. That removed her from my district, and CPS did not have enough reason (or enough resources) to pursue the case.

However, there is a happy ending – sort of. Five years later I received a call from a gentleman at CPS to thank me for what I’d done. It seems the parents had adopted the girl and were using here pretty much as a full-time maid. Once she was old enough to leave the home, they applied to adopt another child for the same purpose, and it was only the notes from my complaint that put a stop to it.

So in both of these instances, teachers do not enjoy the same freedoms as others. In one case, they can be threatened with loss of employment for writing a personal letter to a graduating senior they will not teach again, and in the other can lose their job for NOT speaking out when they suspect, or can be shown to should have suspected, any kind of abuse.

Contrast this to a friend I had in the early 1970’s. I was a junior high teacher and he drove a forklift in a warehouse. Our friendship was based on our cars. We lived a block apart, and we owned a 1958 Corvette and he a 1959. Both of them had needs and we enjoyed working on them together on weekends.

During the week, he would clock in each day, drive his forklift for 8 hours, and clock out. He was not identified by his company affiliation, and in fact I never knew who he worked for. I was identified as a teacher at Rose Hill Junior High by everyone in the neighborhood. He could say anything he wanted at any time to anyone and it would not come back to impact his life. On the other hand, I had been taught in my first college teacher prep class to never purchase so much as a case of beer in the same town where I worked.

He was very good at his job and made more money than I did. He went skiing or worked on his stereo system in the evenings, while I graded papers. I did not want to trade places with him, but the differences were interesting, and I often wondered what it would be like to clock in and clock out and never think about your job on weekends or evenings. Or to be held responsible for your words and actions 7 days a week.

When I left teaching to enter the motorsports business I invented a position where most people associated me with the company I worked for, all the time. I was usually wearing clothing that “branded” me, as well. I was very aware of this, and tried never to say anything or act in a way that would reflect badly on my employer. That was part of my job, and because my job also involved a lot of speaking in public and frequently published writings, there was always a tinge of worry perched on my shoulder. I did have a few incidents where my mouth, or pen, got me in hot water.

At Cycle Barn I had a couple of e-mail conversations that would not end. One customer wrote to ask why tire changes cost such and such at Cycle Barn but were cheaper at another dealership. I replied that dealerships offer literally thousands of products and services, and if you went through them all you could find dozens of differing prices based on a whole menu of choices and decisions. At the end of the day, customers were free to shop at any dealership, or multiple dealerships, based on what they wanted at the time.

This did not go well. This enraged him (I still do not know why) and he fired back an angry response. I answered that one sincerely, which also did not go down well. Soon he was sending me a hostile e-mail almost every day, and they gradually became profanity laced and personally insulting. I had no idea what to do, and simply kept them in a file. Eventually word of this got to the owner, who called to ask me what was going on. I told him I had no idea, but sent him the file of a couple of dozen e-mails. Next thing I knew I was in his office being directed to find out how to lose this guy as a customer and also how to evict him from our HOG chapter, since neither of us knew how that could be done.

I sputtered, “But Jim, this guy has purchased five new Harleys from you.”

His eyes narrowed to slits and he replied “What’s your point?” He made it obvious that money (a lot of it) was not a consideration when a customer was abusing an employee. That impressed me a great deal.

And so I researched how to cast this guy out of the HOG chapter, which merely involved a letter from the owner, which I wrote and the owner signed. When word of this got to the HOG chapter (there were actually two situations like this going on at the same time – I have left off the other one for brevity) all holy hell broke loose. Guess whose fault all of this was? It took a long time to get past these two situations, and a lot of opportunities to keep my mouth shut. Most people “knew” what had happened, and of course they really did not know and I could not tell them.

On another occasion I had a customer who’d become a good friend, or so I thought. He was a guest on my radio show, and a very interesting one. He came in to the store one day to chat, and what ensued revealed him to be, in my opinion, a racist and a homophobe. I asked him the change the subject a couple of times, and finally I erupted and told him that he was a racist homophobic pig and to get away from me.

Oddly enough, he chose to complain to the management about my tirade, and I was asked, politely, to write him a letter of apology. I don’t know what would have happened if I had refused, but I knew I had gone too far. (Although I would do the same thing again in a similar situation) I was representing me, but I was also being paid at that time to represent the company, and I was on company grounds. I wrote a letter to him apologizing for losing my temper, which was something I did regret. I did not apologize for the labels I’d attached to him, which were accurate.

One thing I liked about working for Cycle Barn was that when I wrote or said something that could be questioned, I was asked to explain my intent. That is critical, it seems to me. On one occasion I’d started a newsletter for a women’s motorcycle club I had formed, and I called the newsletter “Mary Jane’s Newsletter.” The first article was about my deceased mother and why I had used her name for the newsletter title. I sent it out and the next week the Director of Operations called me to complain that it was the dumbest thing he had ever heard of or read and who cares about my mother and so on. I showed him a printout of the responses received from many women customers, all of them positive. Some had been moved to tears by my essay. That ended that, but I always respected the practice of asking the employee for his or her version first before the cudgels came out.

There were a couple of incidents at Ride West, but those are still too recent to allow me the comfort of speaking about them. Besides, I am still sort of on the sidelines with Ride West and may choose to work for them here and there in the future.

In issues of free speech and employer’s rights, I think it is important to not only not bite the hand that feeds you but also not to bite the hand that may feed you in the future. The employer does not forego all rights to have a mission statement or philosophy or standards of behavior, etc. because they are paying you.

They do have the right to negotiate wages, hours, and conditions of employment, but after that things can get murky, based on the particular job in question. When you choose to take on a job where you’re representing a company, the company retains the right to have some control, even if after the fact, over how it is represented in a public forum. Once you are associated with a company or group, your words and actions are to a large extent not entirely your own.

Ponder this: Does the President of the United States have the right of free speech? Technically yes, but ironically and in the real world I would say that he (or she) does not. Every second of every day, the President is representing me, and you, and a couple of hundred million others. Everything he or she says, or writes, or communicates in any way at any time to anybody for any reason, is analyzed and pored over in detail and may become the next controversy. That goes with the territory, but there are many other jobs that bring similar situations in diluted form.

That is not good or bad – it just is.

Posted in Education, Rants and Raves | Leave a comment

A New Idea for Track Days

Posted on December 17, 2013 by david

Track Days and the Lead Cow

I have attended at least a dozen track days and similar events, and enjoyed them all. Having said that, I have never actually ridden my motorcycle on the track at a track day, for a reason I will explain.

The most professional and best organized of track days, in my experience, are put on by 2Fast. Mark DeGross has his events honed to near perfection. There is a tech and gear inspection, the plans for the day are well laid out, and a morning tour of the track with advice on each section is provided. One of the rules is you must tape off or remove the rear view mirrors for each session. I understand the logic for this, as you are to be focusing on what it coming at you. It is the responsibility of an overtaking rider to make a safe pass. I have rejected this, as I am unwilling to give up anything, particularly the rear view mirrors, that might help me avoid being a part of someone else’s accident. All too often someone charges into a corner with their right hand writing a check their talent can’t cash, and I might be shoved off the track as my bike is used as a secondary braking system.

When I first started attending these as a representative of Ride West BMW, we learned that it was important to have one person not ride at all. There was a lot to do in our pit area with providing shade and hydration and a chance to sit and chat for our customers. If we took a staff member who rode, the concentration and physical exertion levels were such that attending to customers was going to be done poorly or not at all, or at the other extreme, endanger a rider who was not 100% focused on the task at hand.

This did not bother me, for the reason above, and I enjoyed “running” our area and attending to customer needs. Probably sounds boring to most, but I always had a good time, which is one of the reasons I was good at my job.

I also attended several Advanced Street Skills classes put on by Puget Sound Safety. These differed from pure track days in a few key areas. Additional corners were created at various locales on the straights so that top speeds were held down, and so customers could have more corners to work on, which was the intent of the day. Also, you could leave the mirrors on. Last, you were allowed to pass, but only at a couple of locations on the remaining straights, removing the worry of someone carving you up in a corner. I LOVED these. I took the “basic” level class every time, as it left me time to be with customers, and the higher levels dealt with higher speed techniques than I am likely to use. I spend each day on my company provided BMW, essentially going as fast as I wanted for the whole day.

On one occasion I was on a BMW R 800R – a naked sport bike of middlin’ size. For whatever reason, everyone else in my group was either a beginning rider or riding a ginormous tourer or a cruiser with limited ground clearance. In one of the 20 minute sessions I lapped my entire group, which was a giggle. On the same day one of the instructors passed me on a Triumph Street Triple and gave me the pat on his butt signal that meant “follow me.” This was usually so the instructor could pull both of you over at a safe area and give you advice or point out what you were doing wrong. I thought I was going to be lectured for going too fast for my group but no. Apparently he was bored and just wanted to ride fast for a few laps. Away we went! Occasionally he would sit up for a few seconds so I could catch up, as a Street Triple is faster than an 800R, and he was a faster rider than me. Eventually he pulled off and waved and I continued. Great fun, and very educational.

I highly recommend both of these programs to anyone on any motorcycle. Probably several times for each.

However, there was always something missing, and it itched at the back of my mind. Until today. I think I have an idea to combine the two – the “Lead Cow.” I shall explain!

At 2Fast Track days a pink flag is displayed for the first two laps to remind people to take it easy and let the tires warm up. Usually this works, but sometimes it does not and there are a rash of crashes. Crashes are a pain for everyone, for the rider perhaps literally and for sure in the wallet, and in lost track time for everyone else while the detritus is scooped up.

Ta Da! The “Lead Cow.”

For those of you not filled to satiation with knowledge of the dairy industry, my research tells me (Research? Of course. You thought writing these was easy?) that a dairy farmer gets to know which cow in the herd is the leader. All he or she needs to do is train that one cow. Once training is complete, the farmer finds the herd and yells out something like ”Hey Bossy – food!” and the lead cow, as she is termed, will begin to amble toward the barn repository of said food. The other cows will follow obediently, not being blessed with the ability for lateral thought. i.e. the lead cow.

For track day use, The Lead Cow will be riding a motorcycle while wearing a vest emblazoned with the cheery signage of “Lead Cow.” This person will be on any sport or naked bike of 600cc or more, and will be an experienced rider who likes to ride at 70% or 80% of the bike’s capability, at most, and does not feel an urge to go faster.

Let’s say your track day group is divided into three groups, as most are, that we can refer to as slow, middle, and fast.

For all three groups, on the first lap, nobody passes the Lead Cow. Failure to follow this will result in a warning. A 2^nd offense and your day is done.

For the fast group, the Lead Cow will pull in at the end of the first lap. For the other two groups, the Lead Cow will pull over to the right on the straight at the end of the 1^st lap and those who wish can pass. From my experience leading street rides, I know there will be people who will choose to pull over to the right as well and stay behind the Lead Cow for two or more laps, or for the as long as the Lead Cow stay out. If you are new to track days or riding at some speed, it is a tremendous advantage to have an experienced rider at the front who is not going to do something stupid, as you can use his brake lights and cornering lines as guides. I had countless experiences with riders on my street rides who thanked me at the end of the day. They had ridden at a more rapid pace than ever before without feeling at risk. They found the pace I set to be perfect for them. I think the same would be true for many track day customers, who want to enjoy the freedom to go as fast as they want, without ever going so fast as to imperil their bike or person.

Obviously, I am thinking of me as a person who could be the Lead Cow. I get the most enjoyment from riding at a “sport touring enhanced” pace. My leathers are nine years old and the knee pucks have not been scraped in a corner, nor do I need them to. The only wheelies are pull are about 2 inches high and unintentional. My bike has a rev limiter that is rarely if ever triggered. I prefer to ride at a “sensible pace” that I can maintain for hours rather than seek the last micron of available traction or speed.

Instead of using the phrase Lead Cow, I dabbled with the concept of using a cape with the words “Captain Slow” emblazoned on it. I created one of these years ago for a Halloween Ride in a year where October 31^st fell on a Saturday. It was a bit of homage to James May of the Top Gear (and now Man Lab) TV shows. Mr. May is someone I admire greatly. The problem was that most people did not think it was all that funny. In fact, few people thought the idea of a Halloween Ride in costume was all that great either. As the stand-up comic Ross Shafer explained to me years ago, sometimes you write a joke that you think is quite funny, and the audience does not like it. He would tweak it and try again. If it failed three times he dropped it, even though he still thought it was funny.

On a side note, I had the same experience when I chose to lead a group ride on a BMW 650 scooter. I had no trouble at all running at my usual pace, but the customers clearly did not see the joy. Testosterone poisoning infects us all a times, no matter our age.

So yes, I could function as the Lead Cow, given sufficient monetary inducement, but it is a role that could be filled by any experienced rider on a fast bike who is willing to ride a fair bit off the maximum pace.

That’s my idea for today.

Posted in Marketing, Motorcycles | 1 Comment

Analyzing How the Seattle Seahawks Cheat

Posted on December 10, 2013 by david

Analyzing How the Seattle Seahawks Cheat

And very successfully too! Of course, they are not the only NFL team that violates the rules – they all do, with the tacit endorsement of the league. At the end of the day it comes down to money, but we’ll leave that for later.

There has been a lot of hoo-hah the past week after the coach of the San Francisco 49er’s ran his mouth to the media, repeatedly making the point that Seattle’s defensive backs hold eligible receivers on almost every play, and are penalized nowhere nearly enough for it by the referees.

The fact that he is correct was lost on most, and I don’t really think he cared. What he did was focus media eyes on the Seattle defensive backs, and to force the referee crew to pay attention. If you watched the game, it was apparent early on that Seattle’s pass defense is less “man to man” and more “extended tackle,” Sure enough, the referees, their attention focused on this by his comments, threw a lot of flags, and the enraged Seattle fans and some players chose to blame the San Francisco coach for the loss.

But… the San Francisco players also did a lot of holding. In fact, if you watch the game tapes of virtually any NFL game without allowing your bias for your favorites to be in play you will see that many penalties are being committed by players on both sides of the ball on virtually every play. The teams are now of such parity, by league design, that teams must go for any possible edge they can find. There are 22 players on the field. How many penalties is an individual referee going to see clearly in the melee of 22 oversized athletes moving at great speed?

I imagine the Seahawk’s man defense is built on this concept. On any given play, there are three to five pass receivers. A penalty flag is going to be thrown only if a player is seen to be holding one of those receivers. If all of them are being held, the play is a pass play only 50% of the time. They play a zone defense some of the time as well, where holding is less of a tool. If the play is a pass, it will be completed only 50% of the time, so the odds of being caught for holding a particular player on a particular play are slim. The referees might see holding of a player not directly involved in the play, but the odds favor the sinner.

Things are even drearier in line play. Offensive and defensive players are holding all the time, and much worse, confident that their sins will not be seen. Have you noticed that when linemen are called for a penalty they very rarely look upset or even mildly surprised? It’s part of the day’s work.

What is the philosophy behind having referees? When I played (ducking and weaving through the dinosaurs) I think the referees were there primarily to catch mistakes that might give an advantage. You were offside, but not intentionally. Players knew the rules and played by them. I never committed a foul deliberately, and I don’t think most others did. For the most part. I can remember being appalled when a senior who was always going on about what a “Christian” he was lectured the younger players on how to grab a tuft of grass and dirt and throw it into the opponent’s face mask when the ball was snapped. But we were playing a game.

The NFL, like all major pro sports, is no longer a game. It is a business. Imagine a football game where fans of the opposing team are allowed to stand in your huddle and scream obscenities to distract your team from focusing on, or even hearing, the play called. And yet we now have stadiums designed with that in mind. The Seahawks “12^th man” promotion, which is about the most clever marketing device I have ever seen (invented at Texas A&M but MARKETED by the Seahawks) has become quite literal. By designing a stadium where fan noise in channeled toward the field, and by educating the “12^th man” fans on when to make a lot of noise, the Seahawks have made their fans a 12^th man literally. The fans have an enormous impact on the game, as shown on the Monday Night game a few weeks ago. Delay of game penalties on teams that cannot communicate, blown offensive plays, and on and on… the fans are literally in the game and affecting its outcome.

Long term – this cannot be good, The Guinness Book of Records for loudest crowd noise has been broken several times recently, twice in Seattle. When stadiums are designed to enhance noise and the fans ability to disrupt play becomes an asset you move further and further away from the game of football and more and more to a Thunder Dome display of spectacular things where the only rule is to never get behind in breaking all the rules. The trouble with marketing the spectacular is that you have to continually top yourself. Eventually we may see “snuff football” where opposing players are literally killed – to roars of approval. That sounds far fetched, until you look at the current head in the sand approach to the debilitating effects of more and more concussions on the players due to larger and larger athletes colliding at greater and greater speeds.

Could this be fixed? Sure, and quite easily. But first you would have to figure out – who wants to have it fixed? Every time the Seahawk fans (or any other group of fans) disrupt a game, the sale of licensed NFL jerseys goes up. The players are currently trading their physical well-being and quality of life over time assets for astounding sums of money. The only people making more money for less risk are the owners and league officials. Why would they want change?

If you follow car racing you can trace a similar arc with NASCAR “stock” car racing. In the beginning, about six decades ago, you had young men careening around an oval carved out of a pasture in hopped-up 1940’s cars that might roll over driven solo, not to mention in packs of 5 to 20. As the years passed, the cars got much faster, left any concept of “stock” in the museums, and drew larger and larger crowds. All this time “cheating” was rife, and sort of celebrated. When NASCAR became big time and the money took over, the cheating was chased with authority and everything became very sophisticated. The cars were no longer referred to by brand, as underneath the bodies they were all essentially the same, but were referred to by their sponsoring company. “The Tide car is in the pits, while the Skoal Bandit takes the lead…” and so forth. Eventually, the prices got out of control and the cars became too much alike. We have passed the crest of popularity for NASCAR. They are still hauling in farm wagons of cash, but the revenue stream is shrinking and they know it. A campaign to make the racing more exciting and the vehicles more representative of car brands is under way.

If someone wanted to “fix” football, here are a couple of easy ideas.

Fan noise: a 15 yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty any time a sound meter picks up a decibel level deemed harmful to the game, and to hearing. 110 should do.

Player involvement: make the players in the game stay in the game more. Many of today’s players, particularly the linemen, can really only stay in the game a few plays at a time. Their closest parallel in sports in the sumo wrestler, Impressive spectacle, but you would not expect a sumo wrestler, on an NFL lineman, to run a 100 yard sprint. Or 15 plays in a row. Fortunately for them, the game now features “packages” on offense and defense, so most players are not in the game all that much. Yes, the QB will be there for all of the offensive plays, as well the half back and maybe the fullback, although they are often shuttled in an out as well.

An NFL game has 60 minutes of clock time and takes four hours to complete. Nobody plays both offense and defense, so you are on the field, at most, for two hours. Of those two hours, 75% of the time a play is not in motion, so your considerable athletic talent is used for less than 20 minutes. This creates monster human beings or amazing height, weight, and power – but little stamina.

To bring more of a game back into play, install a rule that when one team has the ball, both teams are limited to a total of 10 substitutions for the entire time of possession. Imagine the strategy now! Do you leave your defensive linemen in the game for 12 plays in a row while you change backfield personnel depending on down and distance? You can only make 10 substitutions and you do not know for how many plays. OK, I’ll offer free subbing for a punter or field goal kicker.

Imagine the horror. And yet not all that long ago it was common for the starting team to play both offense and defense for the entire game. That required people who could maintain high metabolic rates over time – which to me made them better athletes and the game better.

But again, is it still a game? If it is a business, how much money are fans willing to invest for the emotional lift of seeing “our” team succeed?

Is cheating really cheating if it helps our team? Of course it is. Do we care? The evidence suggests not.

Posted in Marketing, Rants and Raves | 3 Comments

Merry New Hap News for 2013

Posted on December 2, 2013 by david

Merry New Hap News for 2013

We’ve decided to relate our 2013 adventures in non- chronological order, because… We have a grandson! Arthur Indigo Jennette was born in early September, and is of course the best looking and smartest grandchild in the history of the world, at least as far as we can tell. We had such fun visiting a 3 week old Arthur in October. Oh, and parents Dorine and Dorje were there as well!

Even better, Arthur will be moving to Santa Cruz just after Christmas. Dorje is switching the focus of his career from UC Davis to UC Santa Cruz. We’ll be jetting down to assist with the big move. That means Susan will hold Arthur as much as possible while David may offer to drive a truck once or twice.

David’s particularly excited for the move because 1.) There are a lot of great motorcycle routes from Bothell to Santa Cruz, and 2.) He retired on October 31^st!

He’s spending time writing a 3^rd “Harrison Thomas” novel, cleaning the house, and playing with a Triumph motorcycle that has pretty much sulked in the garage for 3 years while his former employer provided a new BMW motorcycle. Truth to tell, he likes his Triumph better.

Susan, being younger (and cuter) has a few years before she retires, so it’s a boon that she has a delightful class of 4^th graders, and a wonderful staff to share the adventure. Already this year, on a girls’ weekend out, she has learned to “do shots!” She also has a kept man to clean up the house, run errands, and drive her to work on occasion.

Susan’s adventures for the past year included jetting to Milwaukee for the National Triathlon Championships, where Will set a personal best time in each of the 3 legs, cheered on by Susan and Will’s “significant other” Alida, whom we adore. Alida got her feet wet (sorry) in a relay triathlon in the fall as she did the swim portion of a sprint relay. Will tore up the bike portion, and their friend finished it off with the run. Will also ran the Portland marathon in October, where the four of us (and Alida’s dog) enjoyed a fun weekend.

Baby Arthur had an impact on most of our activities this year. In the spring we spent time with pregnant Dorine, had a mini-vacation for just the two of us in Sausalito, and enjoyed a visit with Meghan and Richard Lewis and family in Los Gatos. We also flew kites at an ocean beach with the creative name of “Ocean Beach.”

We refer to this week as “eating our way across Northern California.” A mutual shared case of airliner flu when we got home erased the penalties of our gustatory excess!

In July we journeyed to Lake Tahoe for an incredible 4^th organized by Meghan and Richard. This included a stop at the National Youth Volleyball tournament in Reno to watch both Sam and Quinn play, and then a weekend at a rented house on Lake Tahoe with gathered family members from the Lewis, Tracy, and Jennette branches. We had a day on the lake, a surprise baby shower for Dorine and Dorje featuring two dozen hand-decorated “onesies,” several fine meals by grill master Richard, and so many other delights.

In lesser news, we spent all of May and most of June watching our kitchen get a serious remodel and a “wallectomy” – after living here only 36 years! The results are a daily cure for the trauma and expense.

David had a terrific “final tour” of a summer, attending 5 motorcycle multi-day events in 5 weeks. In an end of career surprise, he was sent to Orlando, Florida for a big motorcycle show, and had the opportunity to go to dinner with old friends Jim and Jeanne Kenaston.

For 2014 we hope for continued good health, motorcycle trips, teaching the children, finishing at least one more novel and oh yes – did I mention we have a grandson! In the meantime, we continue to be grateful for all we have.

All our best to you and yours,

Love,

David

Stay in touch!

E-mail: Susan Preston.Susan@comcast.net

David David@davidpreston.biz

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Most Useless Gifts of the Holiday Season

Posted on November 26, 2013 by david

The Most Useless Gifts of the Year

Received a fascinating catalog in the mail yesterday from “Hammacher Schlemmer,” who tout themselves as the “America’s Longest Running Catalog.” For 165 years! Wonder what the 1848 version looked like?

Full respect to them for retaining the historical name, and not allowing someone with a degree in marketing to change it to a more modern swingin’ name like “H and S Bling” or whatever,

Have no idea why it was sent to me, as I’ve never purchased from them in their entire 165 year history. I presume that one of the many enthusiast mags I subscribe to sold them a mailing list. In any case, I’ve always been fascinated by design, whether industrial, graphic, automotive, or other. I love seeing how creative people can give the world items that combine function, performance, and beauty. In another life, or granted a different skill set, I would have liked to pursue design as a career.

In any case, the “H and S” catalog (as I’m too lazy to type the entire thing several times) appears to be the result of a convention of gifted designers who all got really drunk and then brainstormed products it would be fun to manufacture. While some of the items in the catalog are functional, hardly any of them are actually needed… by anyone.

No problem there, as I worked at motorcycle dealerships for 13 years, where a frequent inside comment was “we do not sell anything that anyone actually needs,” which is more true than false.

The cover has a marketing technique I’ve never seen before. An item with no identifying caption or page reference, and I could not figure out what it is or what it is meant to be used for. You have to read the entire catalog to find it – which I did – at the back. Curious? I’ve done the same thing here. Keep reading!

So, if you’re looking to purchase a gift for someone who actually does have everything, let me present a selection of gift ideas from this catalog – many of which had me laughing out loud. I’ve selected only my top ten from a catalog of 88 pages, so you can imagine the other delights within!

A real London taxicab from the 1980’s. $ 40,0000.00

Voice activated R2-D2 replica. 15” tall. Requires 4 AA batteries and four D batteries. $ 199.95

Remote controlled tarantula. This would make me a widower in less than 5 seconds. 1” by 6” The 8 legs move independently and the eyes light up. Powered by a remote. Requires four AA batteries and two AAA batteries. $ 29.95

Climbing wall treadmill. Powered by the weight of the climber, this 10 foot tall workout offers hours of fun, with LED displays to show time and height scaled. Yours for a reasonable… $ 9,000.00

A carbon fiber money clip – be the first on your block! $ 149.95

The best talking watch. To differentiate from all of the lesser talking watches. And why would I want a watch to talk to me? Because I am blind? How am I reading the catalog? AND, comes with a “distinctly male voice” because that is, er, important? $ 99.95

The full bottle wine glass. Holds an entire bottle of wine! $ 19.95

The “fashionista” Christmas tree. A lighted fake 5’ tall Christmas tree in the shape of a dressmaker’s dummy. Because… $ 249.95

Star Wars robes – because what would be more romantic than a loved one in an R2-D2 OR Chewbacca robe? $ 99.95

Best for last! The Formula One speaker dock. An iPhone speaker dock made from the exhaust manifold of a retired Formula 1 race car. It does not say it was actually USED on a Formula 1 race car, and from the photos the product appears to be untouched, but you can choose your favorite design, such as the ’78 Cosworth DFV, the ’06 Renault RS 26, the ’07 Ferrari, “and others.” The speakers are mounted in the four openings of the headpipes. Yours for a low, low: $ 8,500.00

There you have it. Not the usual “ten best” gift ideas or anything like that, but ten gifts that you can be assured the recipient has never seen before.

Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Posted in Marketing | 1 Comment

The Best Farkle Ever

Posted on November 21, 2013 by david

The Best “Farkle” Ever?

Farkles are accessories and other products added to motorcycles that may or may not add value and function. According to the Urban Dictionary, the word comes from combining “function” and “sparkle” to create “farkle.” Farkles include appearance items, performance enhancements, and “tech toys” of all sorts. There is no limit in terms of creativity and that elusive concept called “taste” in the creation and sale of farkles. Riders will disagree as to what is a farkle and what is a necessity. For me, living in the Northwest, heated grips are a necessity, not a farkle. Many modern motorcycles do not come with center stands, but they make cleaning and chain adjustments so much easier that (again, to me) a center stand is a necessity. Some will argue that a GPS system is a necessity, but, as I have droned on about on several occasions, a GPS system is not only a farkle but in some ways reduces the function of the motorcycle, or at least the rider. People who rely on GPS very rapidly lose their ability to figure out where they are or decipher the likely future layout of the road system ahead.

For verification, I once wrote a screed on the inadvisability of GPS for this reason and received a wonderful response from a US combat helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. He’d begun his career with non-GPS machines, and when the GPS units became mandatory found himself losing a hard-earned skill of reading terrain, speed, distance, and location by using his eyes and brain. So there!

Some farkles are, to me, just silly. Why you would want to hang braided ropes of leather or whatever on the ends of your handlebars? At one time some colleagues took a set off a cruiser that had just been traded in and installed them on my Kawasaki ZRX 1200R. Now there was a stupid sight. But, tastes do differ, and I am not immune to the attraction of silly in come cases. Keep reading…

A farkle that succeeds due to a brilliant marketing idea are “spirit bells.” These are small silver bells you attach to the bottom of your bike, usually a cruiser and usually a Harley. They are meant to ward off evil spirits. The marketing genius is that the package clearly states that they only “work” if given as a gift. Most people would not purchase such a silly thing for themselves, but at a gift – perfect. If you want to be different, buy one and mount it on the bottom of your sport bike – instant rarity!

I will posit that I own the coolest farkle ever. It was a birthday gift years ago from my friend Harvey, who went to an amazing amount of bother to design a set of “muff cozies,” a phrase derived by combining “muffler” and “tea cozy.” Confused yet?

A Triumph Speed Triple has twin exhaust pipes mounted high on the sides at the back of the bike. Harvey came in to work one day and, while I was busy at my desk, made very careful measurements of the size and shape of the rear of the exhausts, which are sort of oval. He also noted the bike’s paint color, which Triumph calls “scorched yellow.” He then shipped the measurements and many color pictures of the bike off to “Tinker.” If I recall, Tinker was his future mother in law who lived in a cabin in a remote area of Idaho (as opposed to the massive city-scapes of Idaho), and Tinker liked to knit and was very good at it. Alas, Tinker has since passed on, so her invention is unlikely to ever be mass produced.

She created two knitted cylinders in exactly the correct color, one to go over the end of each pipe. She affixed tiny British flags to each one, each with a small silver tea pot. As the crowning touch, a black braided cord attaches to black pom-poms on the back of each one. The muff cozies slide over the pipes and protect them from – not much. A curious and small squirrel? If you can look at them on the bike and not laugh or at least smile, there is something wrong with you.

My friend Jeff wanted one for his Honda CBR and Tinker duly knitted one up for him. Alas, he forgot it was on one day and it blew off on the freeway. No such problem for me – a Speed Triple evidently has enough mass to the exhaust pulse that if you leave them on and start the engine they will be “poofed” off and land about ten feet behind the bike.

I had great fun with these at a couple of shows where Cycle Barn had a Triumph display. I would ride up on my Speed Triple, which has many other accessories/necessities/farkles, and make my own bike part of the display. Then we would put the Muff Cozies on and sit back and watch. People would stroll by and almost always pause and look for a few seconds. You could almost feel their brains grinding away as they tried to decide if these were the dumbest things ever or the latest rage and that they should have a set for their own bike. Like the Triumph, the Muff Cozies have been sitting for three years while I was riding other bikes, but now the Triumph has been restored to pride of place in the garage and wears it’s Muff Cozies with pride. This way, every ride starts with a smile Now if I can just remember how to upload a furshlugginer picture or two… Copyright 2013 David Preston

Posted in Equipment, Marketing, Motorcycles | 2 Comments

The First Few Weeks of Retirement

Posted on November 18, 2013 by david

Retirement: Phase I

I retired a little over two weeks ago. Not on a whim, but as something I’d been preparing for over a span of 18 months. It’s been an interesting transition in so many ways, and some of what I’ve experienced might be helpful to others.

So what’s it like?

The first thing you notice is time. How much you have now and how little you had when you were working. I’ve been employed in one or more jobs since I was 16, a span of half a century. I’m used to having to be somewhere at a certain time to do whatever, and fitting the rest of life into whatever hours remain. When we had children at home and I was working full time and often a part-time job or two, there was little time left.

Now I notice both the quantity and quality of time available to me every day. With the time to make choices, the existence of ample time changes the prioritization of the choices

One resultant change I had not foreseen is my attitude toward chores. I used to hate most of them and now I find them palatable and at times pleasant. Turns out what I really resented all those years was not the tasks themselves but the time they took away from things I’d rather do, such as write, or read, or hike, or ride a motorcycle. With time to do as much of what I want to do pretty much whenever I want, everything changes. Yesterday I spent several hours power washing our driveway, front walk, and steps. Could not have imagined enjoying that previously, which is probably why this chore was about a year past when it should have been done.

Your second revelation may concern how trained you are to work and to look for work. Since the age of 16 I’ve been unemployed for exactly one month, and for two weeks of that month I knew when the next job would start. Most of us have deeply engrained training to get up and go to work, even more so than for a specific job. Breaking away from that mental and social training creates a remarkable transition. I’ve come across all sorts of jobs I could apply for, and my first reaction is to ponder how I could do that job and what it would mean. When I think about it further it usually turns out to be a job I do not want to do. Sometime later it will occur to me that I do not need to apply for a job. This happens every day, and the only change so far is a gradual reduction in the elapsed time from when I think of a job to the realization that I would not like it to the repeated epiphany that I do not need to apply for it.

That could change in a few months if our financial situation proves to be not sufficient. There’s also the possibility that someone will reach out and try to hire me, although at 66 I think the odds of that are remote.

A 3^rd consideration that will come into play are the family members you live with. So far Susan has been ecstatic for me, and appreciative of a list of household tasks that have been slid to my side of the board. Still, it bothers me a bit to kiss her good-bye each morning and watch her drive off to work with a jolly revving of the Fiat’s engine. I would think that at some point the working partner would resent the retired half, at least emotionally. For now, she has been completely positive and encouraging, urging me to take as much time as I want to do whatever, or nothing. I think my feelings here relate to my earlier training in work, and some manly man issues about getting out there and earning your keep. I’ve never been troubled by the concept of a wife making more money than I do, but the concept of my not earning any money at all creates a sense of guilt that I hope will fade quickly.

The overall feeling for me so far is a sense of luxury. Not that I am surrounded by gold-plated trappings of wealth. It is merely the notion that I can do many things today, or none, and either way it will be fine. I highly recommend retirement, in other words, if other considerations have been taken care of.

Oh yes, and sleep. You have probably read articles about how most American adults are sleep deprived. When you retire, you have some making up to do! I think I have slept more in the past two weeks than in any comparable two week period since puberty. I can sense now that I am “caught up” and can return to a normal life, except for the minor fact that I am in a new version of “normal.”

The stimulus for thoughts of retirement came from our financial planner, who told me well over a year ago that I could retire any time I wanted to. He based this on our combined assets, as well as the results of an in-depth interview about what kind of life we wanted to enjoy in retirement. Since we are rather simple folk not too likely to be taking up luxury travel, he ran our wishes against the facts of our status and computer projections for stock market performance for the next 30 years based on the last century or so. In other words, he was not just blowing smoke.

Or so I hope. If it turns out he was wrong and that only becomes apparent in five or ten years we will be in a sorry place, but I trust his judgment and data. Susan intends to teach for a few more years, so my retirement became a point of discussion to be mulled over at length.

I also did some casual research by talking to customers at work that were friends and already retired, and this led to some false assumptions. The good news was that ALL of them said:

a. Retirement is a great idea.

b. Don’t worry about the money.

c. Do it as soon as possible.

The misleading part was that I thought that when you retire you needed to be careful about taking on other jobs, even if part time, because if you earned to much you would end up paying a large sum to Social Security. That is what was mentioned to me repeatedly. As it turns out, this is only true if you retire before your “full retirement age,” which for people of my age is 66. It used to be 62, and has been raised a few times as those pesky retirees keep living too long and receiving too much money! If everyone retires later in life, they put more funds into the system and theoretically die sooner, restoring financial health to the system. Turns out that everyone I had spoken to had retired before their full retirement age.

The reality affected me in an alarmingly positive way. I sent in the paperwork with a projected “sell by” date of October 31^st. The nice people at the SSA called to inform me of a few things. 1.) Social Security pays on the 4^th Wednesday of each month. 2.) There is a 30 day delay. So, if I retired as of November 1^st I would receive no money until after Christmas.

As I was thinking to myself “hmmmm…” this nice person continued. BUT, since I had reached my full retirement age on my birthday in March, she could back-date my application to then. I stuttered something about not wanting to ruin my benefits, since I had been working all year, and that’s when she dropped the bombshell that at my age I could make as much money as I wanted.

Still slow to hear the penny drop, I asked what this would mean, and she told me it would mean she would put about 5 months of benefits in my checking account in ten days and I would receive a check each month going forward.

Imagine calling a government office and receiving such helpful and jolly news!

The next problem for you to consider when you do this is that Social Security “benefits” are taxable. The nice lady never asked how much I wanted to have taken out, so I am now several thousand dollars upside down on my 2013 donation to the IRS. I can fix that with a largish check in pre-payment, but do keep this in mind.

It’s only been a couple of weeks, and another essay will probably be along in a few months, but so far it has been an interesting journey, and almost entirely positive.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Adapting One Motorcycle to Many Uses

Posted on November 15, 2013 by david

Can One Bike Do It All?

There’s an old joking adage recited by experienced motorcyclists.

“How many bikes do you need?”

“One more than you own.”

Alas, for most of us, this is not a reality most of the time.

There have been three occasions when I owned two bikes. Long ago I had a 1977 Yamaha triple and a replica of a John Player Replica (that is not a misprint), but the Norton was more of a cool objet’d art that a functional motorcycle. Later I had a wonderful Kawasaki ZRX and then a modified ZX 12R, both of which were kept company in the garage by a super-rare Muzzy Raptor. Now there was an attractive man cave garage! For the past three years I worked for Ride West BMW, and I was provided with a new BMW model of my choice each year for my duties. This bike shared garage space with my Triumph Speed Triple. Today I’m back to “just” my 2006 Triumph Speed Triple, now re-fettled into prime condition after being mostly a garage queen for three years. It has been cleaned to a fare thee well and is ready for a ride at a moment’s notice. Like today, For lunch. I do have a lottery ticket at all times in the keys and change box, and a bank would probably nod kindly if I wanted a loan for a second bike, but these days I prefer to keep multiple bikes as a “what if” contemplative topic. If I’m serious, I don’t really need two bikes, and with some thoughtful planning you probably don’t either.

Let’s run through some considerations that might allow your one bike to do everything you want to do with a motorcycle.

Magazines vs. reality: Few things are better than curling up with a nice fresh motorcycle magazine for a thorough investigation. For me, smooth physical paper is not matched by the wonders of the computer. There’s irony here, as you are reading this on a computer. While enjoying the latest issue, however, it’s important to keep in mind the intent. Magazines are not published to provide you with the best solutions for you. They are published to sell, and they sell by touting all manner of bikes, apparel, destinations, and farkles, all edited for content to delight and intrigue. The more you’re intrigued, the more you buy, and the magazines and manufacturers are happy all around.

The essential concept is to make sure you purchase the right bike for you. This might not be the “best” bike in the latest 10 bike shoot out, or the fastest or best looking or most expensive. It just needs to be the bike that fits your taste, budgets, and needs. A little knowledge is a good thing, but slavishly following the opinions and tastes of others is a fool’s errand. Once you have the right bike for you, everything else is relatively easy.

How do you want to ride? This changes over time. When younger, I sacrificed a lot to own the fastest sport bike I could, and would have purchased more extreme motorcycles if I could have afforded them. I was happy to be uncomfortable much of the time, because I wanted to be fast or (more factual) to look fast, or to be considered fast. I never did a track day, and never raced. My choices were driven by ego.

A few years ago I had the chance to ride a Ducati 916 for two days. Extremely capable, very fast, and one of the most beautiful sport bikes ever. And total agony to ride – all the time. The Muzzy Raptor I owned soaked up bumps very well, if traveling at over 80mph. Below that it was a solid rock that delivered a crushing blow to your seat and back any time it encountered any surface irregularity larger than a dime. Do you do track days? Do you like to ride across the country? Do you commute to work? Ride off-road or on adventure trails? What percentage of each? In general, a smaller bike can be outfitted for cross country work much more easily than a Gold Wing can be adapted to a rush hour commute. I rode a Honda 450 Street Scrambler from Seattle to Florida and had a great time. I also rode to Minneapolis and back, California and back, and you get the idea. Most of the time I rode it to work, or for weekend adventures, and it was excellent at everything. For me.

Do you want to look the look with a cruiser? Would you rather be a “Starbuck’s Adventure Rider” with the full Ewan McGregor adventure bike kit, even though you are unlikely to adventure off road or out of state, ever?

There are no bad choices, as long as you are the one deciding and not beholden to a marketer, magazine scribe, or the voice of the “cool crowd.”

I was frequently pained when a customer told me they wanted to ride across the country but did not have a big enough bike. This is nonsense, although I was never so crass as to say such a thing. I rode a Yamaha 250cc two stroke from Minneapolis to Seattle and back. I think it had 36 horsepower, on its best day. It would also cruise at 80mph. Is that fast enough? The size of the bike may determine how you cross the country, but it should not affect whether or not you choose to do so. Even then, on a long trip the only thing size really brings you is (usually) more comfort. How comfy do you need to be? You choose.

Example. I have a good friend who recently parked his enormous BMW and purchased a… BMW 650 Scooter. He absolutely loves the new ride, and revels in the performance. It’s so much more comfortable that he’s pretty sure he has added ten years to his riding “career.” He’s been able to listen to his own voice, and not the cries of the masses. As we age, we may choose to trade “up” for ease of clambering aboard and ability to whip around at slow speeds, rather than deal with getting aboard and controlling 600 pounds or more of mass. Every time.

Let’s skip ahead and assume you have a bike that you like. For you. Now what? How can you adapt it to multiple uses?

Sound: Magazines rarely mention this in new bike tests, and yet motorcycle-generated “music” is so important. Do you like both the amount and tone of the exhaust? They are not the same at all. I always enjoyed the sound of a stock Japanese cruiser, and yet adding aftermarket pipes usually ruined it, creating a lot of noise but no music. Most of the BMWs I rode had a pretty utilitarian sound that was fine, and not really improved when I heard other BMWs that had been “piped.” One exception was a customer who had reamed out the exhaust on his BMW scooter, and it sounded like a 427 Cobra! The sound coming out of the machine was hilarious, and added a sprinkle of good humor to any ride.

Harleys are famous for making a lot of noise and not all that much power. Aftermarket pipes for Harleys made by a company called “D and D” are often referred to as “Dumb and Dumbers.”

They are awful. Harley had a slick marketing campaign going for decades with stock pipes that strangled the engine. A healthy percentage of customers replaced them with “Screaming Eagle” pipes made by Harley – before taking delivery. Selling two sets of pipes for one motorcycle is healthy for the bottom line, and the Screaming Eagle pipes made the bike sound like it should have in the first place.

So many people have made bad choices in this regard that the issue may become moot, as current and coming legislation will probably outlaw ANY swap of the stock pipes.

For me, the Speed Triple was close to ideal as purchased brand new. I eventually traded the exhausts for a set of Triumph “off –road” pipes, which look identical and I think are the same pipes with about 30% of the baffles removed. Not too soft, not too loud, but just right, and Goldilocks would agree. At about 6,000 rpm they make a sound so pure the hairs literally stand up on the back of my neck. At any speed in any gear it is creating fine music.

In my humble opinion (?), if you get the sound right you’ll have no need for a stereo or any other music delivery system on your bike.

Tires: How many magazines do tire tests? Here’s a hint – all of them. The tests sell copies, but technological changes in tires come along fairly often. When you need tires, what to do? If you’re not doing track days, riding over the Himalayas, or have other specific needs, there’s a simple solution. Go to the dealer where you do business and ask the opinion of the folks at the parts or service counter. They have little vested interest, other than selling you the tires, and are smack dab up to date on what is working well on your particular brand and model. I’ve been doing this now for so many years and on so many bikes that I’d have to go look at my bike to be able to tell you what the Triumph is wearing this season.

I couldn’t stand the suspense – they’re Michelin Pilots.

Luggage: If you’ve never tried it, a multi-day trip is a wonderful experience. I learned more about people and about myself by riding motorcycles across the country than I did in college. Literally. And I hasten to add that I had an excellent college education.

Many people purchase a humongous tourer to have “room.” These bikes are technological wonders, but it in addition to paying for them, you have to toss around all that heft, width, and length on every ride. Do you need huge panniers, a top box, and a fairing every day? Accepting that motorcycles are rarely about “need” and usually more about “want,” this could be a moot point.

On the other hand, every article I’ve ever read for the past 50 years (!) matches my one experience – you always take more than you need. Over time you can cut back on the “musts” and eventually discover how little is required.

My Triumph has five different options. A Triumph tank bag is an inordinately handy thing, able to swallow sunglasses, a hat, pipe and tobacco, spare gloves, maps, water, a spare visor, and more. I love tank bags, but some people hate them. I’ve added a Ventura rack system. For long trips a tall loop thing goes on which accepts a large back pack that slips down over the loop. For maximum capacity, say for a short camping trip or week or more long ride, a second bag can be zippered to the first one, giving a double back pack jutting up from the back seat. Not too sleek, although the bike gets better fuel mileage in this configuration. Most of the time the loop is replaced by a small luggage rack, and on that goes a nifty Nelson-Rigg tail bag. That holds a first aid kit, an air compressor, and a tire repair kit.

I did all of my trips, for over twenty years, with no first aid kit and no tire repair kit or air compressor. Then I started leading rides, and felt a first aid kit would be a good thing. One year I had three flat tires in the same summer, having experienced none in the previous thirty years. On all three occasions I was in a group where someone had what was needed. I took that as a memo from the Great Spirit, and now I have them on any ride of any length over 20 miles.

You make your own choices, but in general it is lovely to have luggage, whether hard or soft saddlebags (panniers) or other, that you can mount or leave at home as needed.

Windshield: I am a heretic here. I hate windshields. I know experienced and talented riders who will not ride without them, but I demur. Without a windshield you always know which direction the wind is coming from. The front. With a windshield, there’s often buffeting and increased noise – sometimes a lot of both. True, you get increased protection from wind and water, and you’re much warmer on a bike with a big windshield and a barn door fairing. For me, heated grips and my non-electric riding gear will keep me comfy for all of the riding I am likely to do.

Riding two up: If you ever intend to carry a passenger this may alter your original purchase choice quite a bit. Many bikes of a sporting ilk are clearly designed to have a passenger – never – or someone about 5’2” that weighs 75 pounds. I’ve carried passengers on other bikes, but not the Triumph, and I doubt I shall. It has a seat cowl covering the passenger seat, merely because I like the look of it. I’ve thought of losing the passenger pegs, but the bike would look odd without them as they’re part of the exhaust system mounts.

Seat comfort: You can certainly purchase a better seat, and there are many companies competing for your dollars. I’ve never felt the need for it. First of all, a lot of seat discomfort is caused by the rider being in poor physical condition, or from wearing poorly designed gear. Secondly, an aftermarket seat can keep you comfortable for several hours, but I never like to ride that long at one stretch. I like to stop every 125 miles or so for fuel, or to have some water, or merely sit on a park bench and smoke my pipe and enjoy the day. Or to pee.

Farkles: Motorcycles are often at the leading edge of technology, and that is part of the allure. How far do you want to go with adding stuff? You can get heated pants, jacket, gloves, and socks. You can have phone and music connections into your helmet. You can opt for cruise control, ABS brakes, traction control, and some 2014 BMWs will offer “hill holder” electronics. Modern dash displays offer entire menus to scan through to select your preferred settings for so many things. If you can get on a BMW K 1600 GT and memorize all the settings in less than ten minutes you’re amazing.

The older I get the less I want. I’d opt for ABS brakes on a new bike, although they were not available when I purchased the Speed Triple. I will never again purchase a bike without heated hand grips, and a center stand must be fitted, either as original or an aftermarket item like the excellent SW Motech unit on my bike. I would accept other stuff if the bike came that way stock, but not pay extra for any of them. Your choices will be different.

To hammer on the same note, the theme is choice, and making choices that fit your bike to as many uses as you are likely to put it to, My Triumph can commute, go immoderately rapidly on winding back roads (it’s best use), or be used for touring the state or the country. That is everything I want a bike to do.

How about you?

Of course, let’s see – where did I put that lottery ticket….

Posted in Equipment, Marketing, Motorcycles, Travel | 4 Comments

Memories of My Career in Motorsports – Part IX

Posted on October 31, 2013 by admin

Memories of My Career in Motorsports - Part IX

The Fast and the Famous Along the Way

One of the pleasant side bars to my motorsports career has been the need or opportunity to work well known people. This was particularly welcome, as someone who reads every motorcycle or car magazine I can get my hands on. Many of these folks I’d been reading about for decades. With apologies for notables I have lapsed and left out, here’s an annotated list in no particular order of some of these folks and my adventures with them.

Bill Werner: Long time head of the Harley Davidson racing team and a legendary tuner. I was at work one day in August 2000, and pretty excited. I’d just agreed to purchase a new Ford Focus and the salesman was coming down to pick me up to sign the paperwork. My office at that time was in a little cubbyhole at the top of the building, and just as he drove into the lot my phone rang.

“Dave – this is Bill Werner from Harley-Davidson.”

Wow – now I’m trying to tap on the window so the salesperson three floors down outside can see me, as I do not want to hang up on Bill Werner!

He was calling to set up a meet and greet session with Chris Carr, the legendary racer for Harley. There was to be a mile flat track race at Emerald Downs raceway in the fall, and Chris would be signing autographs at the dealership the day before. My job was to take care of all the details and make sure Mr. Carr was treated royally, which he was.

Chris Carr: The day of the race I’d arranged for a charter bus for any staff who wanted to go, and plied various favors with suppliers so that I had free tickets for any staff who wanted to go, and their dates. That was a neat trick, I must say. I also obtained a banquet permit for the bus so staff could drink beer on the way, which may have been a bad idea. Fortunately, while the techs were chugging beers at the back of the bus they discovered that the door latch to the bathroom on the bus was broken, so on the way to the race they completely dismantled the door, lock, and latch and rebuilt them to full function. The bus driver was most pleased.

At the track I strolled in to see that Chris and other racers were conducting an autograph session. I wormed around the line because I thought it would be polite to thank him for the previous day. I stood behind him as he signed hats and posters for the last few people before it was time to go race.

The last person in line was a young woman of extreme beauty, quite tall and wearing a tight white t-shirt stretched taut over her quite ample upper body charms. Most of these racers were young men who did not have a lot of experience with women, and they nervously signed her sleeves, her shoulder, her upper back…. And last was Chris. He looked around, grinned, clamped his left hand on her right breast (as if it were not firm enough), and signed. He turned around, gave me a high five, and vaulted over the track rail to go to work racing motorcycles at 120mph sideways in the dirt. Now THAT is a pro!

Fortunately, I ran into him at the AIMExpo in Orlando last week and had the chance to remind him of the story, which he greatly enjoyed. I rather imagine he has more than a few others in the same vein… oh for the radio show again!

Jennifer Snyder: Harley sponsored flat track racer who came to the 2^nd (and last) iteration of the Emerald Downs race. She appeared on my radio show with Bill Werner a couple of nights before the race, and I found her to be a quiet and shy young woman who was not comfortable talking about pretty much anything but racing.

During the race I got irritated with the loud and obnoxious announcers who were hyping all sorts of ancillary crap and not really paying attention to the actual racing, plus some of what they were saying was factually incorrect. I left the massed crowd along the front straight and walked all the way down to the exit of corner four, where I could focus on the racers and also not hear the nonsense.

In one race Jennifer came around and ran wide, and then wider, and then lost control and hit the fence where a supporting post stopped her progress violently. More frightening thing I have ever seen. The race was stopped and she was helicopter-ed off to Harborview. I visited her in the hospital with some flowers a few days later and then went down there at 0 dark thirty one morning to drive her father to Boeing field while she did the same journey in an ambulance. Harley had flown their corporate jet out to fly her home to Texas. The accident cost her a little finger on one hand and a few broken bones, but it was amazing she was not killed. I never got a thank you from Jennifer or her family, which is too bad, and I don’t think she ever raced again.

Chip Hanauer: legendary unlimited hydroplane racer detailed in a previous entry to this series.

Dave Despain: long time announcer and the host of “Wind Tunnel” on Speed TV for years. I met him at a motorcycle display put on at a museum. This was just two weeks before the debut of my radio show, so I told him what we were about and invited him to be a guest. He would not be in town, but impressed me mightily by calling in from somewhere in California during the first show. About 6 months later “Wind Tunnel,” debuted, and was essentially identical to my show if you added TV, lots of talent, and a huge budget. Hmmmm….

Dominic Dobson: Pro road racer from this area. Dominic raced at the Indy 500 for 11 years as a driver for PacWest, drove for the Porsche factory at LeMans, and was a national road racing champion. As a guest on my radio show he was soft spoken and very open, and had terrific stories. One involved high school shop class, where he spent his time designing and welding up an expansion chamber for his racing kart while his friends were mostly working on bongs of various designs. He also described his first experience at LeMans in a factory Porsche – in the rain. He’d been told he could make it through the “kink” in the Mulsanne straight flat out, and as he did so, barely able to see through the rain and the fog at well over 200mph, he thought to himself, “What am I doing?” With candor, he related that he quit racing after he got married and had a family because he could not force himself to drive a car on the ragged edge all the time, which was required in his profession.

A year later, I assisted him with the filming of a TV show based in Australia that was covering a heads-up display device for helmets Dominic was involved in. I had helped with the design a bit by testing a prototype and discovering a glitch in the programming that only appeared over 7,000 rpm. The bike used in development was not revved that high. I gathered a few customer friends and we went off on a rainy and cloudy day with Dominic on a Suzuki SV 650 and the Aussie TV crew in a couple of rental cars.

Up on Jordan road, Dominic and I parked the group and rode ahead to scout out the camera locations I’d previously selected. As we came to a corner, I remembered that Dominic had told me he’d not ridden motorcycles very much. It occurred to me that I could be late on the brakes and pass him on the inside going into the corner. My only chance ever to pass a Dominic Dobson! Thankfully, my wiser head prevailed.

Later, there was a long pause for whatever reason (there are always long pauses on video shoots), and I mentioned to Dominic that I had a dark visor on my helmet, even though it was a dark and rainy day, because I was vain and thought it looked cooler. He told me he’d always used a dark visor for his entire career for the same reason. Good enough for a Dominic Dobson is good enough for me!

The last shoot of the day involved me on my Triumph Sprint ST with a 6’2” cameraman behind me, sitting backwards and holding a large and heavy video camera. His only contacts with the bike were the foot pegs, the seat, and his spine pressed against mine, as both hands were occupied with the camera. The concept was that I was to accelerate up to about 50mph while he waved the 6 bikes behind us as close as possible to get a good shot. When a corner approached I had to brake gently enough that the bikes behind did not ram us, arc around the turn with 250 pounds of unsecured human cargo on the back, and then accelerate without casting him off the back.

This is the sort of thing where you wake up the next morning in a cold sweat as the magnitude of what could have gone wrong sinks in.

And of course, none of the footage shot that day was ever used.

Dominic did burst one small bubble for me. I’d driven a Hummer during the parade laps at a vintage sports car race at Pacific Raceway. Sure nobody had ever done that, I figured I held the lap record for a Hummer. Dominic shared that he had once driven a friend’s Hummer for a few laps to show him what it could do, so my time was probably off by a minute or more. Boo.

Dominic is now one of the important people at the LeMay museum in Tacoma.

Greg White: TV host and racer. Greg came to one of the “Seattle 500” charity rides at Pacific Raceways put on by 2Fast for a segment for his TV show. Representing the Cycle Barn Sport Bike Club, which had dues and a budget, I presented 2Fast with a check for $1000 as a donation. That got me an interview with Greg for national TV where I managed to mention Cycle Barn several times. Afterward he complimented me on my TV skills (it was not my first time doing this) and it all went over very well at Cycle Barn. The event had been sponsored by a competing dealer, who was never mentioned!

David Alan Grier: Award winning Broadway actor, film actor, TV host, etc. David was a friend of Greg White’s and an avid motorcyclist. He strolled by while Greg and I were chatting, resplendent in head to toe custom Honda red white and blue leathers, boots, and matching helmet. I said “The trouble with gear like that is that you have to be fast everywhere, and all the time. Greg countered with “Well, David is slow everywhere and all the time,” which got a good laugh from all three of us.

Matt Mladin: Many time AMA Superbike champ. Famous for his stern approach to his job, I was surprised that Matt appeared one year as one of the pro guests at the Seattle 500. He seemed to stay in his trailer most of the time, coming out only for the lunch time show, where pros did laps to show what could be done. He went out on a brand new and bone stock Suzuki 1000 GSXR. A dealership owner who was sponsoring the race was also allowed to do laps on his Ducati Desmosedici, a $72,000 motorcycle which had been race prepped. Each lap Mladin would come around and sit up and coast on the main straight for ten seconds or more to allow the much faster Desmosidici to catch up, and then gap him again by ten seconds or more in the remainder of the lap!

Josh Hayes: Current multi-time AMA superbike champ who was also a pro guest at a Seattle 500. Very open and friendly. On that day I was also introduced to a young woman by the name of Arpana, newly arrived in our area after getting her Masters degree in computer science. I signed her up for my riding group and she plunged into riding with her whole heart and considerable intelligence. She purchased a Suzuki 500 as her only vehicle. Josh met her, and when he discovered that she was volunteering and had never seen a race track, he gave her three laps of the track on the back of the Yamaha R1 he was riding! Later that evening she purchased his boots at an auction. It was a memory to last a lifetime. Sadly, that became literally true a year later when she was murdered in her own condo after a Halloween party. Many of us attended her funeral, and that was, by a long shot, the saddest day of my motorsports career. She was a remarkable young woman.

Jake Zemke: Honda (and other) pro road racer. Another pro guest at a Seattle 100, and I was so impressed with him. He strolled around all morning in shorts and flip flops. He was totally relaxed and happy to chat with anyone. Then he suited up and went out at the lunch break and reeled off a string of laps at a pace mere mortals could only dream of.

Grizzly Adams: Star of “Grizzly Adams!” Met him at a charity ride in 2000. He really blended in and seemed to enjoy being himself a great deal. I would think the hugs and pictures and autographs would get old very quickly, but he was very good at it. As Cycle Barn was one of the sponsors, I was to ride next to him on the actual ride portion. As we pulled away I remembered that the Harley I was riding had a choke (remember them?) and as I adjusted it I almost swerved over and hit the man. Wouldn’t that have been an awkward moment?

Helge Pedersen: Most famous adventure bike rider in the world among people who actually do world-crossing journeys, as opposed to the millions who watch “Long Way ‘Round” and variants. Lives in Seattle (when he’s home) as the principal of Globe Riders, and has done several superb seminars at Ride West. Wonderfully dry sense of humor and a media master. If you get to listen to him some time, look carefully at how he moves. He is an incredible athlete.

Lyle Lovett: Of “Lyle Lovett and His Large Band” fame, but also a life-long motorcycle enthusiast. Susan and I were invited by good friend Scott Younggren to attend one of Lyle’s concerts at the Chateau St. Michelle winery. We’d never been to one, which is ironic since the venue is only a mile from our house. In addition to free tickets, we were also to attend a meet and greet afterward with Lyle. We showed up with Scott and his date and were shocked to see that we had seats 10 yards from the stage! It’d been raining all day, and as we were shown to our chairs we could look out at the vast expanse of lawn and the 95% of the people sitting on blankets on the wet grass. I put my arm around Susan and said “Look, honey – poor people!” and sat down with a sharp pain in my ribs from her elbow.

The co-star of the concert was K.D. Lang, Susan’s favorite, and the evening was a rare chance to see a lot of people with unimaginable musical talent doing their thing up close and personal.

After the concert we were ushered to a lower room of the winery with huge wall shelving units of gradually aging casks of wine. There was a long line of people waiting for their chance to speak with Lyle, and he talked to all of them first so he could have more time with Scott, as they’ve been close friends for decades. As the line got shorter, Susan suddenly punched me in the arm – hard! “What was that for?”

“It’s Lyle Lovett!” Somehow his small stature and quiet persona had not quite penetrated her consciousness. We had a great 20 or 30 minutes with Lyle and his lovely wife.

Mark DeGross: Unsung motorcycle hero. Through his 2Fast company, Mark puts on the best organized and run track days in this area. He has also raised thousands of dollars for charity with the Seattle 500 events. A WMMRA #1 plate holder for 2012, his racing credentials speak for themselves. I’ve worked several events with Mark, and had a grand time at every one of them.

Mike Sullivan: Possibly the greatest road racer from the Northwest ever. #1 plate holder for WMRRA and ORRA (Oregon) too many times to be recalled. He was a guest on my radio show, and like Dominic and Mark and VERY few other racers I’ve met, open and polite and seems almost shy. On a track, probably a different story. Mike has gone out of his way to come by and say hello at any event where we’re both appearing, which means a great deal to me. Mike is a class act.

Phil Smart: Seattle Mercedes Benz dealer. Opened his store in 1949, if I recall, when representing a German car manufacturer was hardly politically correct. In later years, as he had a lot of success, he had dinner in Germany quite often Mercedes Benz top management. A few of them had been in the Luftwaffe, and they discovered over dinner that at times during the war in France he had been on the ground shooting up at them while they were in the air shooting down at him!

Phil played “Santa” at Children’s Hospital every year for over two decades. I met him on one of my radio shows touting the annual Children’s Vintage Sports car races at Pacific Raceways – always sponsored by Phil Smart.

At one of those I was asked to drive a new Phil Smart Mercedes SL 500 AMG or something or other convertible to lead the pace laps. The guy next to me was a race instructor, so after a couple of laps to spread people out he told me to go faster. Um – OK. Then he ordered me to hit the apex of each corner so that I could feel the inside rounded curb with the front tire. OK. After a few laps of thrashing the car we pitted. Later I saw Phil in the pits and thanked him for the use of the car – which now probably needed new tires!

Rick Stark: Local and successful Corvette racer who rose to an entrant in the SCCA Trans Am series in the mid-80’s with a purpose built race car. I met him through a motorsports club I was running at a junior high. He gave the kids a terrific and informative tour of his repair shop and especially his race car. I hooked up with him later and did three laps of Pacific Raceways belted into the non-existent passenger seat space of the race car. To get in I climbed up on the roll cage and then levered myself into place. The crew then bolted on the roof and – I could not get out. It made for a nice article for “Corvette Fever” magazine. I did some promo work for Rick, or tried to, but he was a hard man to work for, given to bouts of rage that had pretty much every Corvette tech in the area work for him – for awhile.

While I was enthralled with my entrée into big time motorsports I would go down to the shop one evening a week to help. That usually involved my spending hours cleaning brake dust from the huge BBS wheels, but on one occasion I spend all evening on a grinder shaping a piece of metal about 2 inches long by a half-inch wide. It became part of a custom set of headers being created by head wrench Marty Phillips. When I was done, I asked that the car not be crashed on the left side, where “my” part was!

Marty eventually had enough of Rick and left to start his own business. He’s been my go to mechanic for over twenty years, and I highly recommend Phillips Motors (in TotemLake) to you. Marty and his wife Monica are wonderful people.

Troy Corser: Never met the Aussie WSBK champion, but like me, he’s a supporter of Riders for Health. I wanted to have a quote from him to use in promoting a Riders for Health charity event. To save time, I wrote the quote for him (!) and sent it off. He approved it, so I could quote Troy Corser, sort of!

And that, my friends, is it. For now… Until I think of more stories…

Posted in Cars, Marketing, Motorcycles | Leave a comment

Memories of My Career in Motorsports – Part VIII

Posted on October 30, 2013 by admin

Memories of My Career in Motorsports - Part VIII

Leading Rides, Racing Karts, and Announcing Events

An important part of my new job at Cycle Barn was to lead customers on rides. Obviously, (I thought), this would be the best part of the job and might create jealousy among others who worked for the dealership. Turns out my assumptions were totally and completely wrong – again! I learned that most folks who work in the motorsports business do like customers and enjoy dealing with them, but do not want to actually ride with customers – ever. Further, most motorcyclists, in the business or not, rarely stray very far away from the particular niche of the sport they enjoy. Other than the rare chance to ride OEM bikes as a demo day, most people do not want to ride a different style of bike, sometimes not even a different brand, and in some cases not even a different model!

Here I was, jumping in with both feet with the opportunity to ride a different bike virtually every day. On one occasion I was taking a used Suzuki 800cc cruiser home. Two different sales people asked me why in the world I would take such a bike, which they described with scatalogically laced derision. My response that I had never ridden an example of the model was greeted with scorn, and yet I always learned something. In this case, I figured out the target market. The person who purchased this bike would most likely be someone who liked to ride but had many other interests. The bike would be used very occasionally for short rides on sunny days, with perhaps one “long ride” a year – perhaps the Oyster Run in late September or an all-day lap of Mt.Rainier. In return, the bike would need maintenance virtually never and had shiny paint and a lot of chrome. In fact, both my wife and daughter thought it was gorgeous.

I also learned a lot by going on HOG Chapter rides led by others. Most importantly, I learned that riding slow (relative to my previous personal preferred manic pace) could be very enjoyable. I came around a corner on such a ride on a road I knew well to be astonished by a glorious view of Mt.Baker – which I had never previously noticed in twenty years of carving that corner because I had been going too fast to pay attention to the scenery.

Not that I liked everything. For a time Cycle Barn was a dealer for “ThunderMountain” choppers, at the height of that craze. These bikes had the mandatory steam roller rear tires, and to make room the Harley engine was offset two inches to the left. To “balance” this, the right hand frame tube was filled with lead. This was not entirely successful, as the bike wanted to turn left all the time. Not a problem if you wanted to turn left, but a sweeping right turn of a freeway entrance ramp led to a wrestling match that I almost lost. On my way home one evening I decided that the way to make the bike turn was to wait to corner entry and then slam on the brakes, putting the weight forward and allowing me to turn with the front wheel. Alas, I forgot about the lack of cornering clearance, so loud scraping greeted my efforts. Not what you want on a $35,000 bike, but it was a demo.

I was describing my findings the next day to Boltz and his major finance guy, and the CFO turned to him and said “He’s riding a 35k chopper and talking about how to hit the apex of a corner!” Well, yes – wouldn’t anyone?

Over time, operational systems for leading customer rides grew and settled into place. The rides were initially pretty much sport bike rider groups, but quickly evolved into a wonderful 3 ring circus of everything possible.

Rules developed over decades for HOG chapter rides were just fine and dandy – for HOG Chapter rides, where virtually all of the bikes are Harleys, cruisers, and very heavy. Relatively slow bikes that neither turn nor stop very well, many are ridden with a passenger. Many of the riders have never had any training beyond a basic rider course taken possibly decades earlier. For those reasons, it is safest and the most fun for Harley and other cruiser groups to travel in herds over a route that is not that challenging.

For my widely disparate groups, a different set of procedures was required, which gradually came to look like organization, but not control. There were tricks of the trade I am sure I did not invent, but used as routine. Most people do not want to follow any printed directions, for example, preferring the “I’ll just follow you” approach. This has obvious logical flaws if the group is larger than about 3 bikes, but you can improve the odds. You play with traffic lights by coasting toward a green in the hopes of it turning yellow so you can stop and let others catch up. Out in the country at a stop sign you look both ways, adjust a mirror, and check a glove strap – anything to use up a few seconds. Nobody will notice this, but it allows people further back to catch up to the stop sign just as others were leaving.

There are many other concepts I used for these rides, but I’ve written about them before and they are somewhere on this web site!

In such a fashion I developed a menu of about 4 dozen rides of a few hours to 5 days duration, covering the areas east and northeast of Seattle, but also the Olympic Peninsula, all of Washington and Oregon, some of Idaho, and at far as Salt Lake City. I look forward in retirement to revisiting many of them without the need to keep looking in my rear view mirrors and thinking about the needs of everyone in the group. Despite what many think, leading group rides is real work, although certainly some of the most enjoyable work you can do.

The rides were put on twice a month at that time, and in addition I often did an “echo” ride on Mondays for people who had that day off work. I eventually had to drop those as other projects ate up a lot of my time. For one, Cycle Barn was opening a go-kart center. This provided many adventures, some of them hilarious.

Ironically, my entry into motorsports at 17 was supposed to feature karts and racing. My parents would not hear of a motorcycle, but I had a good friend who was racing karts. After going along with him to a couple of races as the most ignorant pit crew ever (I did keep anyone from stealing Don’s stuff while he was racing), we decided to form a two driver team and go racing the next summer. All excited, I drew up plans for a trailer to haul our race karts, including the one I did not own. For Christmas my parents signaled their approval by having Santa give me a Bell 500 helmet, which at that time was the best you could get.

How cool was that? If possible, I would have worn it whenever I drove a car! Sleeping in it seemed too immature – just barely so.

But… Don decided to retire from karts and move on to competitive water skiing, so that was that. When my parents’ attitude toward my having a motorcycle finally changed, I already had a great helmet! Sadly, my mother was dying of cancer at the age of 48, giving them sort of a “What the hell” attitude. And on to motorcycles I went.

I’d been to an indoor kart facility a few years earlier with the Miata club. My first track session was horrible. I was uncomfortable from the get go, and suffered arm pump within two laps and could barely finish the stint. Back in the pits a friend got out of his kart and announced “Well, it’s always nice to find another branch of motorsports I suck at!” I could relate.

While watching the next group I noticed two things. First of all, the karts were not all the same size. In ignorance I’d climbed into the first one I came to, which was set up for a driver of about 5’6”. Thus the arm pump, as I simply did not have enough room. Secondly, the “equal” karts were not quite equal. If you listened carefully as they passed on the one straight with some length, you could tell that some were turning slightly higher rpm. I noted that #13 seemed to be the best one, and was also scaled for a fuller-size person. Next time out I took #13 and dominated! Know your tools…

Cycle Barn was developing the Kart Barn store in Lynnwood and a rental kart facility at Evergreen Speedway, and put on a Sunday free day to introduce staff to the concept. I was proud to be the first person to spin one of the rental karts, as I tried to see how hard you could get on the throttle coming out of the tight corner. Later I got schooled kart store manager Bill Hettick, a former successful racer. We went out in identical rental karts, and Bill, 3 inches taller and about 60 pounds heavier (at that time), should have been at an enormous disadvantage in such a light and low car. Instead, he proceeded to walk away from me at about 40 yards per lap. On a short track. I knew the correct lines and how to brake, but his lines were just that little bit more precise and he got on the throttle that partial second sooner and the brakes a foot or less later. An impressive lesson.

Later that day the owner’s daughter took out a race kart as I left the pits in a rental. The racers were much faster, and she shifted and rocketed away. Coming up to a corner she stayed to the outside, and stayed, and stayed. I decided Kim was not going to turn in for whatever reason and much later on the brakes than she, I dove for the apex just as she did turn in at last. As a result, I t-boned her kart!

Cycle Barn, through a subsidiary business, was also the importer of the Rotax Max spec racer karts. I was given the opportunity to edit a racer’s user manual, and I learned a lot about setting up a kart. Even in a spec class you could alter the wheelbase a bit, the width, and other fiddly bits. By changing the height of the seat mounts you could alter the handling appreciably. Only the engines were sealed to cut costs and ensure a reasonably level playing field. I learned a lot, which was about to become handy.

Owner Boltz called me into his office one day and said “The finals of the Rotax Max Challenge series are next week in Denton, Texas.”

“Yes…”

“They suddenly find themselves without an announcer for the weekend.”

“Yes…”

“You could do it.”

“Yes.”

“Oh good, you’ll go. I’ll make all the arrangements.”

“I’ve only one requirement.”

“What’s that?”

“At the end of each day I’ll need a hot shower followed by a glass of Scotch on the rocks.”

A week later I found myself in the Dallas airport, the owner having flown there earlier. He met me with his LincolnTown car rental, and chauffeured me to the motel room we would share. He had friends to visit in Dallas, so each morning we’d have breakfast and he would drive me to the track. At the end of the day he’d be waiting as I turned in the microphone and drive take me back to the motel. After my shower there’d be a glass of Scotch on the rocks waiting, and then he’d take me to dinner. It was great!

The first day I walked into the pit area and met the people running the race. I was handed a microphone and started talking. Ample information was displayed on various time charts and scoreboards, with lists of the rider’s names and home towns and so forth, and I never lacked for material. I talked all day long and had a great time for the entire weekend.

Once back at work I wrote an article for a national kart magazine and sent it in. Later Bill Hettick surprised me with a copy of the magazine with my article. They’d never told me it would be published. They also did not pay me, but since I wrote it at work I was not bothered.

Today I occasionally recognize one of the better teen racers from the weekend, as a couple of them are now Indy Car and other pro series veterans.

The fellow who organized the national series was thrilled with my performance, and e-mailed me that he wanted me to do all the regional race weekends and the nationals the following year. Whoa!

I replied that I was receiving many invitations to announce (which was true) and had found it necessary to establish a fee schedule. All expenses, plus $500 for any day that began or ended at my home, and $1000 a day on the road. By leaving on Thursday and returning Monday that would be, um, $4,000.00. I figured this would end the discussion, and by golly it did. Later I ran my fee schedule by Boltz and he said “That sounds reasonable.”

It does? Then why did I spend a weekend in Denton, Texas for only my usual salary? (I chose not to utter that out loud)

Later the Kart Barn put on an annual race for two years in Centralia, and I was pleased to be the announcer to those as well – at my usual rate of pay. The first one was particularly enjoyable, as part of the deal was that local community groups had food stands around the area where I was announcing. They kept up a constant supply of various food items, pop, and beer, and I almost felt sorry for the race crew that was schlepping hay bales around with great abandon all day long in front of me as racers erred on their corner entries. In 90 degree temps. But I hung in…

My last kart adventure came when I had the radio show. The manager of an indoor facility that used electric karts was to be the guest on my show, and he invited me down the day before to tour the facility. Then he asked me if I wanted to try a kart for a few laps, and by gosh, my helmet and gloves were in the trunk of my car. How handy!

As we strolled to the karts I thought this would be humiliating. The manager was decades younger than I, weighed about a half a ton less, and used the karts every day on a track he designed. Oh well.

The karts had two settings. The “customer pace” used less electric power and allowed more laps before needed to be charged. The “pro level” was reserved for staff and extremely experienced customers. We did two or three laps on the standard setting and then pulled in to switch to the pro level. He graciously allowed me to go first, or gave himself the chance to pass me and feel superior. We zipped around for three or four laps until the karts began to run out of juice, and to my surprise I remained in front. I had not made any mistakes, other than a little too much throttle out of one corner than had the kart graze the tire wall.

On the show the next night I dared to ask where he would have passed me if he was not being polite. I was elated to hear that if the kart was driven on the correct line with reasonable speed, there was not anywhere a pass could be made. He had been waiting for me to be slow on the go or early on the brakes, or to make a mistake, and I never did. His only chance came when I touched the tires, but it did not upset the kart enough to allow him to pass. Major ego boost!

Next (and final, I think!) chapter - Dealing with the Famous and Infamous

Posted in Cars, Marketing, Motorcycles | Leave a comment

David Preston

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A New Idea for Track Days

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The Most Useless Gifts of the Holiday Season

The Best Farkle Ever

The First Few Weeks of Retirement

Adapting One Motorcycle to Many Uses

Memories of My Career in Motorsports – Part IX

Memories of My Career in Motorsports – Part VIII

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