Bob Barnard Track Engineering

We drive from PI up to Sydney and EC where we have the IRTA test, and around 17,000 spectators turn out on a Wednesday to watch. We run it as much as anything to show we could have staged the GP here, even though a couple of things are yet to be finished like the control tower, but we could have done something for that if it was the only problem. Naturally the lovely supportive Sydney press are looking for anything negative they can find, and as I said, this was never going to be PI, and that is what the riders said. Nice track, but not PI. The headlines read “Unsafe track” even though nowhere in the story did it actually say that, and the journalist just blew it off that he did not control the headline writers, thanks a lot.

We are not yet done with PI though as we meet with the new Premier, but nothing can really be done, we are contracted to Sydney and the loan. We do have the World Superbike round by now at PI, and a round of the World Endurance Championship following the success of the Six Hour last year, and agree to package the two as a “Superprix” to be sponsored by the TAC again.  These races go OK, but I doubt we were ever going to recapture the success of the GP at PI.

Back in Sydney we are working to complete EC and make the minor changes asked for following the test day. We still have to have EC inspected by John Thomson prior to the FIM meeting in Budapest where it can be homologated for next year’s race, let’s not go through that again. John comes up on the Saturday 13^th October and is satisfied that we have enough done, just some tire wall and gravel left to do. So we go to Budapest and all is well, track accepted and date confirmed for April 7^th at EC. FIM introduce the idea of selling rights to the GP’s to DORNA, a Spanish entertainment company, including a series sponsor. No one can understand the problem that will cause for promoters who are trying to sell the race sponsorship. “World Superbike has a series sponsor” they say, but yes I answer, WSBK does not charge me a fee for bringing the race, which they did not in those days. Yamaha was addressing the problem of not enough 500’s on the grid, sound familiar, and are proposing to sell engines, and ROC and Harris will sell frames to make a good privateer machine.

During one boring function at the FIM meeting Trimby, Butler, two Japanese team bosses and I decide to go to the only Japanese restaurant in Budapest. The cabs are small here, so Trimby and Butler, who know where this is get in one cab, and the Japanese and I get in the other. “Follow us” they say and inevitably we get caught at a stop light and lose them. We are now in the middle of Budapest with a driver that speaks Hungarian, an Englishman and two Japanese. We proceed to drive around, passing one outdoor café three times, like some French farce, while the driver is asking all his cab mates where the Japanese restaurant is. We do eventually find it.

I am spending time at PI at the WSBK round on my return, while at EC there is a long distance touring car race, The Nisan 500, is being run, with no major dramas except Turn Nine asphalt is torn by what looks like a fuel spill. We start the serious planning for the GP including coordinating rail and bus service using Blacktown Station and special trains from around Sydney. Sydney is a huge city spread out around the main harbor and other major water obstacles like Botany Bay. People tend to live and work in one area, and my mate Bill Gibson who lives on the north shore and commutes to the airport has never been to EC in his life! It is like most big cities and I forgot about how it was in London when I lived there, you were almost tribal in where you lived and went. South of the Thames to me was “overseas” and north of Watford people lived in caves, and I certainly did not go anywhere west of the center except once a year to see my brother. So what looks like a nice big population to draw from is actually difficult to attract and we need the rail system.

Dovigo are being their usual cooperative selves and trying to organize a World Sports Car round for March, which does not make the FIM happy with our race being April 7^th. Dovigo are writing direct to the FIM which makes John Thomson unhappy. Apparently Bernie agrees to a March 17^th date, but it never happens, so is it all bluff? We meet with PBL about next year’s race, and the possibility of PBL buying out Barfield is raised, which suit us, and we thought would suit the ACCA to have their race owned by the largest TV Channel and Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer.

It is the end of November, and the Motorcycle Council contacts us through Greg Hurst to discuss security arrangements for the GP. These are the everyday motorcyclists as opposed to the ACU members who are racers. As I said, the clubs were very concerned about the attitude of the NSW Police, and at avoiding problems at the event. They want to put their members on site to assist our security, in a way formalizing some of what went on at PI, self policing.  I like the idea, but insist it must be done properly, an organization structure to dovetail with our security, and the same people every day, not just turn up when you feel like it, and identifiable as part of security. We agree and a fee is to be paid to the Council for this service which lets us reduce the number of security guards we need. It actually worked extremely well and we were to have no trouble at all at the event.

The NSW Gov’t is not being so friendly these days. John Harvey is not around and they are being difficult about ticket sales guarantees. They want to see my tax return! Thanks for the vote of confidence in my integrity. Corporate sales are almost non-existent, so much for Sydney’s corporate headquarters, times are tough. We still do not have a naming rights sponsor, and things are not looking so good. We still have problems with Dovigo purporting to have the right to sell things for the GP, which is making people wary. We have decided to move the largest over track sign from PI to EC, BPM owns them after all. The over track signs at EC are proving difficult to find a cheap solution for as the wind loading is high and the spans are wide. Some people are saying the run offs are not as large as PI, but they are, if not bigger, as we built the place. It is just the concrete walls intimidate drivers, but they are mandated by the FIA. There are also reports that the “constant radius corners” make it less challenging, but I know that there are no constant radius corners, I designed it remember? Back to the signs, I am trying to install something like I saw in Hungary with a cable supported canvas sign, but it seems our engineers cannot work this out. Speaking of engineers, I return to EC from the 6 Hour at PI to find Peter Russell has taken off again, like he did at Cararra. Worse, this time he lets his teenage daughter drive a company car back to Adelaide. It is the last straw for Rod, Mick and I, and Peter goes the same way as Noel. Now there are three. I know we are actually doing Peter a favor, as I can see this is not likely to end well. Peter cannot see this and takes us to the Industrial Court for wrongful dismissal. He is a partner, what is it to do with the Industrial Court?

The Court seems to agree with him though, and in a private hearing with the Judge he tells us we have a deadline to resolve it, as he finds “pressure” usually does. We laughed as we walked out. Pressure, he does not know the meaning of the word after what we have been through. I suspect we will not be in business by the time the deadline comes around, and I am correct.

December 17^th and Rod meets with the NSW Gov’t people and they agree to release ticket money, but with eight conditions, aren’t there always, and Rod says he does not like the connotations in those conditions. We actually give the Gov’t notice that if this is not sorted we will just fold Barfield up. The Director General of the Premiers Dept calls and says it will be fixed, money released, and we will work towards a lease agreement by the end of January 1991. Great, that makes me feel better.

Things are not going well with PBL. I suspect we have left them last to be paid with the thought that Channel 9 are doing better than anyone out of this. I went to the test match in Sydney with Lynton Taylor and discussed the outstanding payments and the possibility of Channel 9 buying into the event. Hunwick and company also mention the possibility of buying Barfield, seems everyone wants the GP. January 11^th and Rod and I meet with Lynton and we sort out a deal which Lynton will talk to Packer about. The next day we tell the Gov’t about the possible buyout, which they are naturally pleased about, and we meet with Hunwick and Malouf later that day on a possible buy by them. We meet again the next day and start sharing balance sheet information, and then we hear back from Lynton on the 18^th that they are not going to accept the offer we made on the buyout. Hunwick and Malouf meet us the next day and now it is BPM they are asking about buying out. We see no problem with that and actually draw up a heads of agreement.

Meanwhile PBL are delaying the TV ad for this year, it will be early February before it goes to air, two months before the race. 29^th we meet Hunwick and Malouf again, but this time it is about signage and McNally again. They state McNally has sold Rothmans and Marlboro the signage for the race. Ken Potter denies that Marlboro has done that, but next day Hunwick shows me the fax from Marlboro to McNally. 5^th February and Alan Hill from Rothmans confirms they have done a deal with McNally and tells me Marlboro has too. I tell Hunwick that this changes our deal and he had better hurry up and buy us. Hold on, news come through from Rothmans in London that they have not done a deal with McNally, yet. Ken Potter is telling Europe he wants to buy signage in Australia from us, and Alan Hill confirms his corporate facilities. All the normal meetings are going on of course to actually stage a race while all this background noise is happening. 13^th and Hunwick tells me they have sold 9 suites on the pit roof, 3 signs and a corner name for $150,000! 18^th February and we are still having trouble over the release of ticket money, goodness knows how we are surviving. Alan Hill tells me he does not know what to do about signage and corporate, things are coming to a head. Wednesday 20^th and I meet with a marketing guy who looks after Tooheys, who are by now not part of the Bond Group. He is interested, but Dovigo have told him we only had the race for 1991.

Thursday 21^st February. I have had enough of these games. If we are going down we are going down on our own turf, i.e. PI. I check with John Thomson about his attitude to running at PI this year, and of course he has no problem. It would be hard, but we could do it, better than the death of a thousand cuts going on here in Sydney. There is a meeting set up with PBL, Dovigo and us in the Dept. of Sport for 10am. I walk in and lay a draft press release on the table and tell them it will be sent out at 4pm if we do not hear that we have the clean track we need and a signed deal, and leave. The release says that due to the inability to finalize a track rental agreement this year’s Grand Prix will be held at Phillip Island. And you know, maybe that is what we should have done anyway. Can you imagine the goodwill to support us?

 PBL are sitting there with their mouths open, I had not forewarned them. It worked and I should have done it months before. By the next day we had a signed agreement. I flew to Melbourne to talk to the Tennis Center about how they could improve the way they do things and get a call from Tooheys, see them tomorrow in Sydney. It is Saturday morning, Tony Skelton has come with me and we do a deal for Tooheys to be naming rights sponsor for $400,000, as easy as that.

I leave almost immediately for the FIM meeting in Geneva where the FIM manage for the first time to aggravate all the parties to GP’s, promoters, teams, manufacturers and sponsors. The specter of a non-FIM Championship is raised again. Kenny Roberts tried it in the early eighties, and there have been mutterings for years about the need for professional management and stable contracts, but it was always only one of the parties the FIM annoyed at any one time. This time it looks like it will happen. On my return Rothmans confirm the 250cc sponsorship deal as we had at PI, amazing what a track hire agreement will do. The next day, March 7^th, we hold the media launch and announce Tooheys, who do a great job despite having basically one month to arrange things. They even have a special beer can made for the event.

I go to Canberra to meet with Peter Staples, the Minister for Health about restrictions at a Federal level on tobacco sponsorship. At least he listened as to why it is impossible for international events unless an agreement is reached between those countries staging the events.

I fly to Melbourne airport to meet with Kenny Roberts and Garry Taylor from Suzuki. One is going to test at PI and the other is coming back from testing, and they want to talk about how to set up a new Championship outside the FIM. They ask me to provide an outline how it can be done, and I work on something like the CART model where the teams own the series. They are scared of Bernie though and what he would do. They have seen what he does to series that look like a threat, the World Touring Cars and World Sports Cars to name two. We were to meet later in London where they went o meet with Bernie, against my better judgment, and he obviously did enough to stall them.

Back in Sydney we give up on over track signs, but find a solution in a scaffold climbing system that we can set up so it looks like it is over the track by positioning at the rear of corners to suit the camera positions. They actually work better as we can lower the sign so it looks like it is sitting on the track behind the rider. Brian Morelli cannot shoot under those. Bill Gibson and I go up to the Japanese GP again to arrange the smooth handling of the freight and any other last minute arrangements, such as when Ueda wins the 125cc class as a wild card, a local, and his team suddenly decide to send him to Australia. No official entry, no passport, no carnet for the bike, no planes booked or accommodation, no problem.

The race is staged, we have our problems with Dovigo’s track manager who seems to forget that for this week we are in control. The transport works well, we have the biggest crowd Sydney has seen, and will be until the Olympics. The racing is good, except for one poor 250cc rider who falls off at Turn One but his bike gyroscopes and keeps going, finally hitting the wall way down by Turn Two. He complains that there were no straw bales there. I tell him the only way to guarantee that there were bakes where the bike hit was to tie them to the front of the motorcycle. He is not amused, but neither am I. The Malaysians turn up at the race, the ones we helped bid for a GP, and who this year have one. They can afford to fly down to the race, but no, unfortunately they do not have the money they owe me.

The organization runs as smooth as you could ever expect, but we cannot arrange an Australian to win. Doohan’s clutch lets him down at the start and he is back to 9^th. Rainey gets away, and so does Kocinski, with Schwantz and Gardner trying to get on terms. Doohan is working his way through the field and is soon second and catching Rainey. It is like a football match again, with the grandstands going wild as Doohan passes, but it is not to be, the laps run out and Rainey wins.

The crowd was good but not good enough. The sponsorship helped, but not enough, and the corporate were again, not enough. We knew we were done. Rod, Mick and I meet with our lawyers at Sydney Airport. I am for declaring bankruptcy now and walking away, but no we have to stick together they say. Let’s see how that works out? We meet that afternoon with the Gov’t reps and they are not supporting us any longer, go and see Packer. I make the case at some point to Greiner that he should just take over Barfield. He is going to lose the money anyway as he has the guarantee with the bank, but if he controls Barfield he controls both of the tracks in Australia that can stage a GP, and guess which one he will choose. Let Barfield go to the wall and Placetac will get PI back, and guess where their first stop will be? Logic it seems never works with politicians, but I will be proved correct.

Meanwhile we are still alive, and part of ROPA, and I am invited to a meeting to discuss, among other things, a possible break away series. I stop off in London on the way and meet with Bernie. I tell him he is the only person who can take this over, which I am sure he already knows, but the teams do not trust him, so hire me and I will run it for him. Well you cannot blame me for trying. Bernie, with a straight face, says he cannot possibly be seen to assist a breakaway series from the FIM, he is a Vice President of the FIA, a sister organization. But like King Herod to the wise men, come back and tell me what ROPA are going to do. Flammini is President of ROPA by now and promotes the WSBK series, so he is clearly not going to rock the boat with the FIM. I make the case that we as promoters should work with the Teams, they are the show, and between us we can pull this off. We would have the stability we needed, a multiyear contract with a guarantee of the teams showing up. Everything we have needed in fact. Most of the other promoters are very interested, but Flammini is too cunning to let it go to a vote or anything like that, so we get nowhere. I see Bernie on the way back, but he knows time is on his side, as it proves to be and he can come in at the last minute to “rescue” the series.

May 24^th and we finally get an agreement from Lynton Taylor to buy our shares in Barfield. Now all we need is ACCA agreement to the assignment. See, I told you to pay attention to those assignment clauses. Early June and David White cannot see a problem with the sale to Packer. Why would he, other than he is Victorian? We arrange to go to Melbourne to see the ACCA and of course their solicitor, Mr. Apel. June 11^th we officially requested the ACCA approve the transfer of shares, which they acknowledge, and we meet at Apel’s office on the 13^th. They do not say yes and they do not say no. They need Packers Group to confirm the arrangements in writing. A wise old engineer told me once, “Delay is the deadliest form of denial.” And so it was.

We actually thought this was going to happen. Packer offered me an employment contract to run the race, and I told them I thought slavery had been abolished. We set up a management committee with Channel 9 and PBL and had meetings, what fools. July 1^st and the rent is due on PI and the Gov’t who are by now controlling our money, will not let us pay it. Do they understand what that will mean? I go back to Adelaide and we sit and wait, and wait, until Lynton Taylor has had enough. I guess he figures he does not want to deal with these people anymore, and pulls the plug on the deal on July 12^th I am already booked to go to the next ROPA meeting in Flammini’s office in Rome, and to go to the Motorcycle GP at Paul Ricard with Bill Gibson and David Eckart. I have the QANTAS airfare so why not. Maybe I can find someone to give me a job while I’m there.

The ROPA meeting is a non-event, an air traffic controllers strike means most promoters cannot get there. Maurizio says we will go to lunch in Fiumicino, the port down the autostrada. We climb in his 5 series BMW, me in the front and Carla his lovely secretary in the back. Unusually for those days he has a car phone, in fact he has two. We are driving down the autostrada at a large rate of knots, he is talking on one phone, steering with his knee and writing notes on a pad. I am a little stressed when Carla leans over and whispers in my ear, “we’re in real trouble when the other phone rings.” The real trouble is while I am here Lynton Taylor has applied for Barfield to be wound up, which of course it will be.   

I survive and go on to Bandol where we are staying. It is the time when Christopher Skase is trying to be extradited from Spain for fraud charges, and the boys are all joking that here I am in the South of France having just gone bankrupt and the TV crews will be here any minute. We go to eat down a small alley in a real French Café, no English menus here, and no Maitre de to help, so we all just order one of the first courses without knowing what they were. The table next to us gets delivered a wicker basket of raw vegetables and we crack up laughing, what idiot would order that! Well Bill did actually as that was then also delivered to us. It was a bit of light relief before going home to an uncertain future. No one offered me a job, so Sydney here I come.

The Sierra was the first to go, to be followed soon after by the Brock, despite there being only one payment left which my wife offered to pay, but no thanks we want the car. Di had her teaching job so it seemed sensible to stay in Sydney, and I approached Graham Wragg about a temporary job until something else came along. He said he did not need a project manager or an engineer, but he did need a foreman. I am not proud, that will do. So I get the Company Ute to drive and a subdivision to build. They tell me they bid the price too cheap and there is not enough time, but good luck. It is a new challenge. It is one thing to roll up to a job, tell the foreman what you want done and then leave, it is much harder to be there first in the morning, brief the workers who’s doing what today and make sure they have all the material and survey they need to do it. I take great pride in the fact I completed that job on time and under budget, we made money. That earned me a Holden Commodore and a promotion to Project Manager.  

That was not the end of BPM and the creditors though. I do not know to this day if BPM was wound up, as far as I know we just stopped. We had to let the staff go of course, but most went on to bigger and better things with what they had learned. I do not recall any recriminations from them, they all knew how hard we had tried to make this work. We as Directors had signed personal guarantees, and in Australia a Company affords little protection to the Directors. So we had to face the prospect of personal bankruptcy which my partners proceeded to work at avoiding, so much for sticking together. In the end I was the only one to go into bankruptcy, Rod and Mike negotiated a settlement, and Noel and Peter were long gone. It was as if it was my name on the door and I was the one to be made to pay. It would get quite nasty, but that comes later. I am just trying to survive at the moment.

I am applying for positions, I do not actually like building subdivisions, and driving around Sydney all day gets old very quickly. Being a PM means I have a number of sites to manage, and they are spread out all over the outskirts, down as far as Picton and over to Menai and Kurnell. I do not know if I am seen as a liability by potential employers with my history or they just think building racetracks is not real engineering, so my experience is not current, pretty stupid. Maybe I am just too old by now, getting a job over 40 in Australia is tough. So time passes, Bernie takes over Motorcycle Grand Prix racing with Two Wheel Sports, he is just happy to be able to help. Mick and I get a consulting job with the Melbourne Tennis Center to come and look at how the Australian Open is run and suggest improvements. A nice diversion.

And then Kenny calls me in mid November. Come over for a week and let’s see if we can work out how to promote motorcycle racing in the US better. We go up to the ranch in Hickman and various people come and talk to us from the sport and the media, and we later go down to his house in Carmel where he declares he thinks he wants me to come and work for him, even though we have decided there is nothing to be done in America and he should look at Spain, where he already has a house. His Manager, Garry Howard has been warning Kenny that sooner or later someone is going to sue him after an accident at the training camp at the ranch, and he needs to go somewhere less litigious.

I return to Australia, but it has been a fun diversion again, and at least someone remembers me from the sport. And so ends 1991. But what has happened to the Motorcycle GP I hear you ask. Well as Bernie now controls it he can sell it to the highest bidder, and thanks to Greiner’s stupidity there are of course two tracks that can bid for it, which makes Bernie the only winner out of this mess, how does he do it? NSW has to win this or their politicians are going to look right idiots, and they do, and have the ACU of NSW run it for them. They cannot make money either so in the end the Gov’t is paying for it until the now conservative Gov’t in Victoria under Geoff Kennett buys the race back and the Victorian Gov’t now pays for it to be run at the Island. Where was Geoff Kennett when I needed him?

Dovigo? They basically gave the track back to the Gov’t as they could not make money, and it is now leased to the ARDC, the Australian Racing Drivers Club.

I continue to build subdivisions in Sydney while my wife Di is consulting lawyers about retaining her half of the house the bank is now wanting to take, remember, the one they only wanted signed up as a good faith gesture. There are precedents for this on the basis she signed under duress and with no private legal representation, which is all true. Di is eventually going to win this argument and keeps half of what the house brings at sale less the mortgage, which is about $50,000, better than nothing.

March 26^th and the ABC does its 7:30 Report interview about the arrangements for the GP in Sydney and tell me about the Dovigo contract predating ours. I am still being asked to go and speak about the GP and Eastern Creek, so I am not quite forgotten, and when the GP comes around again I have a pass and catch up with a lot of friends, including King Kenny. A couple of weeks later Kenny calls, “what are you doing?” “Standing in a field in Sydney.” “Do you want to come to Spain?” “I will if you send a ticket.” So I am off to Spain to meet Kenny in Jerez during the Spanish GP at the beginning of May. I left with two suitcases of clothes, not knowing if I was going for the race or the rest of my life.

I roll up at the track in Jerez and catch up with my friends at IRTA to get a pass, and meet Kenny in the paddock. He takes me off to a meeting in the DORNA bus about staging the USGP in 1993, and introduces me, “you all know Bob, I just hired him.” Err, can we talk about this? I am telling Kenny he does not want to promote the GP, look what just happened to me, but he is determined and although it takes all year, that is what we will do. Laguna Seca, SCRAMP, has run the GP from ’88 thru ‘91and were voted the worst race of the year or close to each time. They dropped out this year as Bernie upped the fee, and Kenny wants to rent the track and have me promote it as he is tired of being beaten up by the other teams for how bad the USGP is. It is payback for the stick Kenny gave them over the European tracks when he first went over there. Kenny never said it in this fashion, but I knew my brief was to develop motorcycle racing to a level and status that it enjoyed in Europe and Australia. Kenny and the other champions were unknown in their home towns, whereas Kenny got in a cab in Sydney and the driver knew who he was!

In the meantime we spend the weekend at the Spanish GP, with the show downtown Saturday night of guys doing wheelies on main street being as exciting as the race, twenty thousand watching and not a cop in sight. Sunday we expect the usual 250,000 crowd and with only one road in we enter around 5 am and leave around midnight, but who cares with that many spectators. I am told to get myself to Sitges, a small seaside village south of Barcelona, where Kenny shared a house with Wayne Rainey. The team was based in Holland, but we only saw them at the track. I book in a hotel recommended by Paul Butler, but the Barcelona Dragons, an NFL Europe team are based there and sleep is difficult. Chuck Aksland, Kenny’s team manager, and I share an apartment in Villanova just south of Sitges and not quite so nice. We start to take Spanish lessons, but miss so many going to races that we gave up, and just learned as we went along. Not that I went to all the races, my role here was to work with Jaime Algersauri, the owner of Solo Moto and race promoter in Spain to reestablish the National Motorcycle Championship and set up a training camp on a commercial basis.

On the Tuesday after I arrived Kenny, Garry Howard his Manager, and I turn up at Solo Moto for a meeting, which at the time Garry and I had no idea what it was about, and after ten minutes Kenny announces that he has a tee time and will leave us to it. I am to find out this is common with Kenny, not one for meetings. So Garry and I are totally winging it, and spend the day listening through an interpreter to impassioned speeches about how great this is going to be. We get nowhere and I learn that “mañana” does not mean tomorrow, it just means not today. In the end there is a basic problem that neither of these guys wants to give up control so 50/50 does not work, and neither does 49/51 whichever way you slice and dice it. Kenny is rightly concerned that something with his name on it is done to the right standard.

So, when not at the GP’s I am looking for sites to build a training camp, which Dennis Noyes helps me with enormously, but does not get done while I am in Spain, but Dennis and I make the first approach to the Barcelona Circuit where the camp will eventually be established. Marlboro are keen to have a private place to stage races, especially flat track, so they can invite spectators and still advertise cigarettes, they can see that public events are going to be barred to them. Kenny supports the new Championship which we work with the manufacturers on to come up with 125cc and 250cc two stroke classes that would showcase the ability of young riders from all over the world. A sort of “finishing school” using Spain’s five GP tracks and equal equipment, no works bikes, steel brakes and no trick tires. We did not write a lot of rules, Bernie always says no rules are best, then no one can argue about the rule. We knew who had works bikes, and if they turned up they would be told to take them away. Same with tires, the Dunlop and Michelin guys worked with us to prevent the GP tires being used. Kenny wanted to run several teams to develop riders, and part of my job was to try and raise sponsorship in Spain, not easy when you do not speak the language well enough. The Championship does start in ’93 with Jaime promoting it, and it is a big success.

In Sitges the team frequents a local’s bar, El Tros, run by a family, Mum and Dad, two sisters and two brothers, Mark and Xavi. It opens at 6 am and closes at 3 am, and it is a local’s bar, not a tourist bar. They like me as I will eat the local dishes, and very good they are too, I still cook some of them. They take me under their wing, especially the youngest, Mark, who leads me astray. I find that when in Spain you have to live like they do. Work starts around 10 am, lunch is 1 pm or so, and is a serious meal, breakfast being a cup of coffee, and then a little sleep and back to work at 4pm. Finish around 8-9 pm, go home and go out for a “promenade” with the family and meet and great your friends. Home around 10 pm and eat dinner around 11 pm, then to the bar for a couple of hours. If you are in the mood then a disco until about 7 am. What you must understand is that unless you cook it, dinner is not served until 10:30 or so, and the disco is not open until 2 am.

Let me tell you some food stories. I walked into the bar one evening to be told that Mark had prepared a special dinner for us both. He had gone to the fish market early and bought the seafood, and gone to the hills to pick juniper to boil it in. He had prepared a special sauce to dip it in, and thank goodness he had. There were two places set side by side for us two, so how could I refuse? The shellfish looked like spiny snails, and looked even worse when you pulled them out of the shell, but again how could I refuse? If you closed your eyes and dipped it into the sauce it actually tasted fine, and that’s how I got through it.

Talking of special sauce, Kenny used to like a restaurant up in the hills behind Sitges called the “Carnivore.” Guess what it served, meat, and a lot of it. The steaks were 1 kilo, 2.2 lbs, and the “secret sauce” was excellent. They also served a 2 kilo steak, it looked like a Sunday roast, and Kenny used to relish surprising people by changing their order to this and see their faces when it turned up. We had an English couple who looked after the house and at Christmas Kenny took them up there for a treat and ordered the large steak for the man who thought he’d died and gone to heaven, ate the lot!

The there were the food fights. When the team won we would all go out to celebrate, and at Barcelona I had the job to go out and book the restaurant just outside the circuit. When we arrived we basically took over half of it as we were the biggest team at the time, probably about 45 guys. Kenny and Wayne sat in the middle on one side and about halfway through the meal Wayne starts throwing food down the end, starts the fight and then leaves! I am thankfully sitting in the middle opposite them so it is all going past me end to end. I am waiting for the owner to go ballistic, but he just brings in screens to close off our area from the “normal” patrons, I guess he has seen this before. Of course we pay to clean up the mess as we leave. 

So some nights Mark and I go into Barcelona where he is known at all the discos and clubs, or he finds a house of ill repute. The Spanish girls do not come across much. He takes me to Barcelona soccer with the “mad boys” as they call them, up in the nose bleed section, but the real fans. Later I go with Sete Gibernau’s father. Sete is a lovely young man who is desperately trying to get a ride on Kenny’s Spanish Championship team, and is helping me with interpreting. Sete is the grandson of Paco Bulto of Bultaco fame, and I actually meet him when Sete takes me down to look at his property as possible site for the camp. Paco loves this idea, he can set his chair in the center and watch all day, but it is too far south of Sitges. Sete’s father is minor aristocracy and a BS merchant, so when he tells me his father is a Vice President of Barcelona FC, and built the Neu Camp, the stadium, I take it with a grain of salt. He tells me the family has seats but no one goes, and I must come sometime. So, when he says do you want to come tonight, I say OK, and we meet at his house. Now Barcelona is the densest city in Europe, driving around, especially to a 150,000 capacity football match is not easy. We go to pick up his father who toddles out on his sticks, and we set off to the ground. We keep getting waived through police checkpoints, so I am starting to think Dad might be important. We arrive at the street the ground is in and get waived past. We arrive at the main gate and get waived in. We park about ten feet from the main door and Dad toddles off through the Directors Entrance, he is a VP of the Club, and we get shown to the best seats in the house at the rear of the Directors Box. For once Sete’s Father was not BS’ing and I felt very small.

But back to the team, who are struggling. Honda has invented the “big bang” motor, which sounds dreadful but somehow has great traction and just drives away from Wayne and John out of corners. It takes half the season to work out what they have done, and then we cannot copy it, the Yamaha crank case will not stand the strain. Kenny and I have had discussions before about the state of GP racing and the role of the manufacturers. Yamaha see racing as an R&D exercise with a limited budget. They are supplying an F1 engine to Jordan which keeps exploding, and we question the wisdom of spending all that money and are told it comes from the marketing budget, which has much more money. We point out that an engine blowing up is not good marketing, but winning World Championships is. That is the problem, we are winning, so why should Yamaha spend money improving the bike? Wayne is riding the wheels off it, literally sometimes like in Germany, to try and stay with Doohan, and if it were not for the development done by people like Bud Aksland we would be nowhere. In the end this will bite Wayne once too often, but till then we talk of an F1 type structure where teams build their own bikes, with or without manufacturers. Wayne is to win the Championship again in ’92, but only because Doohan has his crash at Assen and nearly loses his foot.

These discussions prompt Kenny to pursue his own machine with Proton sponsorship, but it is hard to beat the Japanese factories mores the pity. I see the demise of motorcycle racing when manufacturers want to race what they sell on the street, such as 600cc four strokes, and not what the public want to watch. If F1 did this we would be watching Toyota Camrys racing Chevy Malibus.

When I do go to races I get roped in to do the Marlboro TV interviews which I quite enjoy, and so do the riders. Because I am living with them basically I know some background that I can use to ask sensible questions, and when I visit the World Superbike in Jarama I get the job there of interviewing the winners. Good fun.

All this time Kenny still has his heart set on running the USGP, so we have meetings through the year with Dorna, who are involved even though Bernie’s Two Wheel Motorsport has the commercial rights. Dorna would eventually buy those rights from Bernie, who made money yet again. It gets down to September and we have a sort of deal with Bernie/Dorna, so we go to the CART race at Laguna and start a negotiation on renting the track. We have a basic agreement and Kenny leaves me to finalize it, including the problem of the track’s major sponsor, Toyota. Now Laguna is allowed five “noisy” events a year, but only had four at that time. So Toyota had a deal for signage and official sponsor rights to those events. Our arrangement with Dorna required that we provide them with a large number of billboard sites, but we could keep a naming sponsor, who would also want a number of billboards. Now, there are only so many you can fit in so I needed some back from Toyota, including the winners rostrum etc. Now I think this is a no brainer. Toyota has paid for four events, and we are giving them world wide exposure for a fifth which they have for free, provided I get some relief on their terms of contract with SCRAMP. So I call Les Unger, Toyota’s motorsport man in LA, and give him the spiel. He promptly says “I guess we do not have a race then” and hangs up!  Suits me, I am happy in Spain, not really wanting to come to the US, I have seen what happens to people here on all those cop shows and movies.

Garry Howard calls me and berates me that I do not know how to talk to US businessmen. Well I guess I don’t. I think the deal is over, but no, come back to the US, put on your best suit and come with Kenny and Garry to meet Les in LA, and keep my mouth shut and learn. Kenny is in a suit for once, and he and Garry talk to Les for over an hour, about everything except the GP. As we leave Les says, “I’ll send you a fax.” Outside I ask what he is sending a fax about, as we did not discuss anything? The fax arrives, it is worse than where we started. So back to Spain, that’s over again. But no, two weeks later, go back to Les on my own, sort out a deal. So much for showing me how to do business. Les and I go through his wish list, like 50 passes to the media center. I explain that as an international event Dorna controls those, but if he gives me the names and employers of those 50 journalists I am sure I can get them in. Oh they are not journalists, they are my staff, says Les. Why does your staff want media passes I ask? Because last time it was the only place to get a cup of coffee and watch the race on TV, says Les. So if I set up a tent with coffee and CCTV that would do? Certainly says Les. And so we work through his wish list and do a deal. So confirm to Dorna we have a track, and we have penciled in a date so we can finalize a deal. Now we should let the American Motorcycle Association know before it gets public. We think they will be pleased to have the GP back. By good fortune it turns out they are having their National Convention in LA at the same time, and we make a time to meet Ed Youngblood later that evening, but I am to go on my own to tell them the good news.

Ed meets me with their new marketing guy who is not at all happy to hear my news, especially the date, which is to be two weeks after their national race at Sears Point, which they have just negotiated to put on the calendar. He keeps saying they will not approve it, and I am very politely trying to tell him he can do nothing about it, until finally Ed chimes in to tell him the good news that we do not need AMA’s blessing. That is true, and what’s more I do not actually want it as I have heard horror stories about how they run their races, so I am planning to bring Ross Martin over from Australia to run the race. So we have a GP to organize, but first it is back to Spain for the “Superprestigio,” an end of season non-championship race staged by Jaime Algersauri at Jarama which all the top 125 & 250cc riders attend. Kenny Jnr. has been racing in the US in 250cc, and is to have his first taste of racing overseas. Colin Edwards is also there, as is Sete on a very poor machine. Sandy Rainey, Wayne’s Dad is running the bike, and some of the team are here with the team bus. 

Kenny gives Jnr. the speech, “we are not here to win, we are here to ride better.” I was pretty amazed at this as Kenny is the most competitive man, but I was to understand later what he meant. If you just go out to win you are going to be disappointed more times than not. Tiger Woods loses more than he wins, in baseball if you hit the ball 25% of the time you are doing well, which means you miss 75% of the time. Warren Willing told me that riders who do not win do one of two things. They get depressed and stop trying, or they “override” the bike and crash. What Kenny was saying was that if you go out and ride better each time as your goal, then you will win. An excellent philosophy for us all.

Kenny Jnr. qualified about 16^th from memory, and the race was actually three races during the day, but each time you started where you qualified, not where you finished the previous race. Well Jnr. improved each race and finally ended up eighth and we all celebrated that achievement, which prompted Sandy Rainey to observe how unusual it was for us to celebrate eighth. In the lobby of this nice hotel was obviously a high priced hooker, and we sent Sandy down to ask the price and if she would do a discount for a group, but we could not afford it. 

And so back to the US to start on the USGP.I go up to the ranch in Hickman near Modesto where Kenny has his home and his training camp. We are supposed to be discussing the GP, hopefully giving me some “riding instructions.” Now Kenny and the boys race on a small TT course, no not the Isle of Man, and American TT, a small dirt oval with a loop and jump in the infield. They race 100cc Honda farm bikes which started out stock, but of course they cannot help themselves and “improve” them. Kenny is going one better and building his own from scratch in his workshop, so I am not actually getting anywhere on the GP. Friday comes and Warren Willing invites me to go out to dinner where he gives me some advice. Just start.

So I leave and go back to Monterey to set up an office in the paddock at Laguna which will be home for the next year, and hire a secretary to run it. One key piece I need to resolve is my visa. I am on a business visa, but need a work visa, so Garry Howard arranges me to meet an immigration attorney and we start the process, which in the end is only completed when I leave! In the meantime I cannot actually get paid, so I have a credit card and expense everything. Not the best feeling in the world, but I am not in a position to choose. In the end I pay for my own visa, $5,000, which I find a bit rich since Kenny wanted me to come in the first place, and Garry Howard will not even let me take it out pre-tax when we finally get the OK to pay me.

I arrange for Bill Crouch to come on board to assist me, I need at least one other person who knows what we are trying to do here. We split the task in two, I will look after the marketing and promotion and Bill will manage the operations. We start being approached by people and companies that want to be involved, and Robert Jackson, and Englishmen now based in LA and with ties to the manufacturers comes up to Hickman to meet us. Kenny is not sure of Robert so we meet him for breakfast down at the local diner, and when we think he could be useful we take him back to the ranch. Robert and I are sitting in the kitchen discussing his possible role when a procession of American riders walk through one after another. Wayne Rainey, John Kocinski, Eddie Lawson, Randy Mamola, all at the camp to train, and each says Hi Bob on the way through. Robert is beside himself but contains himself for a while until someone else famous walks through and he bursts out “how many more world champions are there here!”  It was probably an enthusiast’s heaven up at Kenny’s in its hay day.

Robert goes on to manage the trade show for us and does a great job, very successful and I have some great letters from vendors. “I did not see much of the race, people kept forcing money on me!” I rearranged the layout of the Laguna Seca infield, using the nice lawn area that had been left empty previously with all the vendors being crammed in around the paddock. I wanted that space for team parking, and anyway wanted to develop a concept where if people wanted to do something else rather than watch what was on the track they could go to this area and get food and entertainment, merchandise, and look at motorcycles. I had to drag everyone kicking and screaming to do it, especially the motorcycle manufacturers who were previously spread out all over the track, so if you wanted to look at machines you had to walk 5 miles. Strange that now all the events follow this pattern.

Talking of manufacturers, Robert also took me around to the big four who are all based in LA. None of them wanted to put any money in, and to put it in perspective, Honda NA spent about $35,000 with us when Honda Australia spent $80,000 a year, go figure. Suzuki did not see why they should get involved at all, Schwantz rode for the Japanese Suzuki team after all! Same with Kawasaki, they said they did not race GP. I said then they could not lose could they, which they liked the idea of, so came in with a display. In the end they all came including BMW, and even Suzuki, who actually got it in the end and spent the most. BMW took a cab ride into darkest New Jersey to talk to, and then I was stuck as there were no local cabs and the offices were emptying on a very cold and snowy evening. I finally found someone to take pity on me, but it was a very expensive cab ride each way. Contrast the attitude now with the USGP’s at Laguna and Indy. Where were they when Kenny needed help? Yamaha was Kenny’s machine, but even they did little to help. I guess Kenny ran the Japanese team?

Robert also introduced us to a couple of young guys, Don and Dale, DD, who ran a creative agency to do the advertising and promotion. We needed a logo and to start producing a corporate image. Bernie issues a style manual for his events, so even our letterhead was proscribed for us, but we still needed to produce posters and ads. We met them in LA and I liked them, but in the meantime Ken Vreeke had made contact to see what he could do to help out, for a fee of course. Ken also had an agency and did a lot of work for Honda, the big boys on the block. I liked both groups, so to decide on who to use I set them the task of producing creative while I went home for Christmas to Australia. They both did great work and had it all spread out in the Laguna Media Center when I returned. They each had excellent pieces, so I finally took them both on to do pieces that I thought they were best at. Ken’s logo initially looked too simplistic, but I quickly realized that was its strength, and lent itself to all the situations we would need, from business cards to billboards and to merchandise.  I liked DDs’ poster so went with them for that side, and Ken was also strong on the editorial side having worked for magazines and knowing all the players.

So I had the nucleus of a team on the marketing and promotion, and would bring in Isabella Maderang to take on promotions for the event. Unfortunately I was landed with Paul, a recent marketing graduate and friend of Tad’s to “help” me with the sponsorship and other marketing. Tad was ex Phillip Morris and was working with the team on sponsorship. I do not know what they teach at marketing school, but it did not provide Paul with even the basic knowledge to write a proposal. Sponsorship was to prove impossible to find. ’93 was not a good time in the economy and we were trying to sell to American Companies an international event with little interest in the US. Even those like Budweiser who had sponsored a bike for Randy in Europe, via the Spanish importer, were not interested. The budgets were overseas too. Phillip Morris, Marlboro, who sponsored Kenny’s team out of Europe, were not able to help. The tobacco companies had an agreement with the US Gov’t that they would limit their advertising to one sports series, and Marlboro had CART and Penske, who needed Kenny?

Selling tickets and camping would start traditionally at Laguna on January 1^st, so I had to sort out prices early. This is how I met my third, last and best wife, Alexandria, Xan, or Madame X as she was to become. Xan was the Ticketing Manager for Laguna, so I naturally asked her advice about pricing, where our buyers would come from, and how to reach them. Xan thought I was a genius, no other promoter had ever asked her anything about the customer, but why not, I was a new boy here. She is a very smart lady, and I fell in love with her mind before her body. One of the decisions involved the camping which was a problem similar to Bathurst, the Sherriff turned up Saturday evening with the SWAT team and a riot started. The County took most of the money for the camping anyway, Laguna is in a County Park, and there are not that many spaces, so I doubled the price. The usual campers said they were not coming which suited me fine, they were the problem. We sold the campsites anyway to people who would not have come because of the trouble makers. At the event the Sherriff turned up as usual, despite my asking him not to, but they went home as there was no trouble and they were bored.

So early 1993, we start the campaign with a stand at the San Francisco Motorcycle Show in company with Laguna. I also attend the motorsport journalists annual dinner, we are going to promote this beyond the motorcycle world, and actually would get better coverage in magazines like Road and Track than your average motorcycle mag which is geared to touring. I met the Chief Medical man for Laguna, Dr. Dan Delgado, who is a road trauma specialist out of Fresno and perfect for the job, but does not understand his role is managing doctors and paramedics, not treating patients. We take him to Australia to show him how it is run elsewhere in the world, and he then gets it and does a great job for us. We need to improve all the medical side, especially the medical center, which is basically non-existent. By the commitment to improve it we get help from all sides, Art Ting, probably one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the world, brings his team down for the race, free of charge. Philips bring an MRI machine in a truck, so we go from no facility to probably the best, even if it is in two trailers. We will continue to have issues with the ambulance service that has the County contract and is associated with a Director of SCRAMP, Jim Lacalamita, who we are to have a lot of problems with. Even though we hire ambulances from them they cannot guarantee that they will not be called away to attend and accident on the highway, so we instigate fast cars around the track like F1, which can transport most riders other than possible spinal problems.

Bill meantime is addressing problems like the traffic and parking, always a problem at Laguna. There are four roads in, pretty good for a track, but they do not open them all every day, so they change the way you go in, and they send you out a different way as I found out to my cost at the CART race, I had no idea where I was. We asked why they did not open all the roads each day, I am a great believer in “programming” people, and we were told that as three went through Fort Ord, the major Army Base, then they could not open them weekdays. Now Laguna was originally built on Army land, and once the Army got fed up with it they sliced the land off and gave it to the County to run. Never being one to take a silly answer for granted I asked the Army if we could use the roads. Of course they said. When I asked why Laguna did not know that they said that Laguna had never asked! I suspect SCRAMP did not want to pay for people to man the gates. I say “pay” but as I said SCRAMP is a charity and they use the volunteers from their member organizations and pay them an hourly rate for their time. The rate is the profit for the year divided by the number of hours volunteers have put in. The volunteers only do a couple of hours each and are not really interested in what goes on, as I was to find out.

So we had the access sorted and Bill went to work with SCRAMP devising a system of color coding the parking lots and signing directions to them so that people came, and went, in a logical way. One main parking area is “the swale” which is inside the track over the one vehicle bridge, and which is the only way to the paddock. SCRAMP gives so many passes out for this they can have a traffic jam on a Thursday morning, but they like the swale full so it looks like there is a big crowd on TV. For one CART race the swale was supposed to be for teams, media, corporate, but on Saturday it was full, so they produced a flyer to put under the wiper of all those cars parked without the correct sticker. How did they get there you ask? I told you about volunteers. Did the flyer say you are illegally parked and do not park here again. Hell no, it said if you are not in here by 7am Sunday you will not get in, so you guessed it, it was full again Sunday!

SCRAMP would eventually ask me for twice as many parking passes as they had parking attendants. Yes I had learned from Bernie to control the passes. They actually asked me for “all access passes”, and when I asked them why they needed them, they could just park in the lot they were manning, I was told they had to get to the BBQ. When I asked what BBQ I was told the BBQ for the volunteers that was held at noon on Sunday at the rear of the paddock, which was why they needed the all access pass. I politely told SCRAMP that I did not know what they were doing at noon on Sunday, but I was running the 250cc GP. I also said that if each of their parking volunteers could drive two cars in I would gladly give them two passes. SCRAMP did not like me. The system worked very well, the Marlboro sponsor man, Leo Degraffenried, called from his hotel a half an hour after the last event to tell us how easy it was to get out.

Bill was working on the race officials too. We had Ross and Dr. Dan, and would bring in the AMA Tech Inspector, Meryl Van Der Slice, but for the bulk of the manpower we were talking to the local SCCA, the car guys, and USARM, Jan Bash?, a local motorcycle flag group, who we eventually used, and glad that we did. Race operations ran very well with no major hiccups as I recall. The AMA came to me, Ed Youngblood, to ask if they could sanction the race and I agreed, having their logo on our poster gave us some additional authority and it cost us nothing. I took the opportunity to do something that has not been done before or since to my knowledge, and that was to point out to the AMA that the FIM Sporting Code restricted a country with an FIM GP from calling any other race a “Grand Prix.” Almost anything is called a GP in the US, so the public do not see the value in going to the real thing. I had it stopped for one year anyway in motorcycle racing.

It was always the promotion side that was going to be difficult, but Kenny was in this for the long haul we had a nine year contract for the race and for the lease of the track, and Kenny figured it would be four or five years to break even, but in the meantime building the sport. Dorna had an office in LA that mainly looked after signage at NBA games. We expected them to help us out on the major sponsorship side, but in the end they were Americans too and did not get the motorcycle bit. During the trip to the Australian GP I was approached by Serge Rosset of ROC about signage at the GP for a sponsor of his, who he would not name. I told Serge that the only signage I had to sell would go with the naming rights. He said OK, send me a package for that, which I did for around $300,000, pretty cheap. Serge said that looked good and we would do a deal later in the season. I felt OK with that as there was little else on the horizon. As we got closer to the event I started to press him for the name as I needed it for the signage production, program, and other promotional items. Serge told me it was an oil company. Great, I knew he had relations with Mobil in the past so assumed that was who it was. About a month to go and I really, really need to have artwork. OK says Serge, but his sponsor is just sorting things out with the State Department. Big alarm bells going off, we had just fought the first Gulf War. It is not Iraq, I ask? No, it is Libya says Serge. Now France has had dealings with Libya for years so he could not see the problem, but can you imagine a Libyan State Oil Company sponsoring the US Motorcycle GP in 1993? Grid girls in yashmaks, milk on the podium, and the Libyan suicide squad doing parachute drops at the start. Kenny asks if anyone will know, we need the money. Yes I tell him, the media will know, we do not take the money. No major sponsor. Where was Red Bull?

Merchandise was another potential income stream for us, and I could not talk Kenny out of producing our own instead of just licensing others. I think it was a quality control issue, but you can do that with licensing by approving samples. At least I talked him out of actually making items like T-shirts ourselves with off season farmers. We split the merchandise between Ken and the D’s, with Ken procuring the high end stuff like Letterman Jackets and Chambray shirts, and the D’s doing the t-shirts, primarily with the posters on them as I have found that sells well. I say posters as we had two. Bernie has one specified of course, so that is the official one we printed just for the event, and the D’s produced a good one that we used all year. The problem always with buying your own merchandise is what to buy and how much of what size? There are industry standards for size and sex for t-shirts, but things like the letterman jackets were expensive, $125 each, so Kenny said don’t buy too many. We sold out the first day at $250 each and Kenny walked around all weekend beating himself up that he told me not to buy too many. Chambray shirts all sold, and we had to reprint t-shirts over Saturday night, so things sold well, just not all of them. It was the small $2-3 stuff we thought people would buy to take back as gifts that did not sell, and we ended up giving that away at trade shows later. We also did mail order with a fulfillment house, but I don’t know that was a success, cost too much to run the fulfillment. We also gave away too much to family and friends. I was also told to buy US made merchandise as Americans would not buy it otherwise, what happened to that in the last decade?

One key issue was the appearance of the place, it had to look professional and world class. Laguna at that time had no garages, so we had to use tents set up in the paddock, there was not enough room in the typical US pit lane and hot pits set up. I say tents, but we would use the European aluminium frame structures for the garages, media center and corporate set ups. We had to find a company large enough to have all this, and Robert Jackson and I went down to the Rose Bowl where the Superbowl was being played that year to look at what was there and who had it. We followed up with the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, I was getting a tour of America’s major events. We found the right guys out of LA and I laid out what I wanted, which included all the garages being the same size tents. One it was then the same for everyone, and two it would look great from the air. I obviously did not explain that properly as when they went up they were all different sizes, and the project manager could not work out why I was not happy, we had the same square footage? After the race and he had seen the aerial shots he understood.

Kenny also wanted corporate boxes along the pits like a European circuit. Now Laguna had something like this that they rented from the Long Beach GP, but it was seating only with patrons dining on the ground behind them, did not make much sense to me. Laguna also had three events in a four week period, the Historics in late August, us in early September followed by the CART race, each with corporate and all different set ups. I tried to talk them into using our set up and split the cost, but no, they had to have their usual, so it was a big job to set up and take down. We designed a scaffold platform down what would be the “hot pits” the area behind pit lane behind a low wall, American racing does not like teams out in pit lane, but the bikes are not an issue, there are usually no pit stops. Then on top of this we erected some beautiful frame tents that the company had, looked great and worked well. We sent the plans to the Fire Marshal for approval, which we received, but when we started erecting them he turned up in a great rush one day. He was doing an inspection on a house on a hill overlooking the track and saw what was going up. It was all per the plan we said, but he said “yes, but it did not look that big on the plan.” He spent two days going over it before deciding we knew what we were doing and OK’d it.

These boxes were not an easy sell though, nothing new ever is. Dunlop bought one because they were Kenny’s tire supplier, and when we went to photograph people eating in them for next year’s promotion we found the tire changers. Of course after the race they said that now they understand and would have two next year and bring their main dealers, but there was to be no next year. We did sell most of them, but the deserved better use and have never been set up again.

Laguna actually looked great with these corporate tents, the trade show, Honda Island, and the overall “dressing.” Dan Gurney drove the pace car for us and he said that when he drove over the hill into the track he did not recognize it it looked so good. Dan and his guys from All American Racers were all bike fans, but they did not ride up from LA, put the bikes in the team truck and drove up.

To improve the event even more we had to tackle the catering. Previously the teams had the local Chinese restaurant providing food in the paddock, and all you could get up by the corkscrew were boiled hot dogs. Why, because there is no power up there. Have you not heard of a generator I asked? Laguna used all small local food providers and said that was because there was no one big enough in the US to do it all! Now there are a couple in Australia so I knew that had to be wrong. Luckily I was introduced to Rudi, as Swiss caterer living in San Francisco. When he first came to see us I offered him instant coffee and he nearly died. He was the importer for Saeco Italian coffee machines, “I’ll send you one,” he said, and he did and I have been hooked ever since. Rudi knew exactly what the teams wanted and gave it to them, and also did a great job on the general spectators. Coffee carts first thing in the morning, Oktoberfest Tent in the trade show area etc. Kenny did not like the fried squid usually served up, but the crowd love it so we had to keep it, but we wanted to bring in some of the fast food chains, which we did and McDonalds later ran the main food outlet at Laguna for many years. Interesting how my ideas are totally foreign at first and then become the norm after I’ve gone.

Now Kenny was involved in a lot of this, but only made brief appearances and I had to grab him when I could to give the OK to things like the logo. The person who really took an interest was Wayne Rainey. Wayne had a house overlooking the track and when he was home he would come down and spend hours going over what we were doing, he was very much a part of this event, which made the end even more poignant. Pushing motorcycle racing at the GP level to the media was a vital part of what we were about. We set up a fax machine to distribute results from races sent by the team directly to the sports editor of the 100 largest newspapers in the US, and sent copies of Motocourse to the top 30. Kenny arranged to stage a test at Laguna prior to the season, instead of in Australia, so we could expose the machinery to the US media. We invited the usual motorcycle press, plus the car guys, and the general media in the local area, including LA and San Fran. We did the usual thing of dedicating a time so the team were not interrupted more than that time, and promised the press total access. We ended up with more media than Nigel Mansell had received a week or so earlier during his CART testing. Kenny and Wayne were totally blown away. How did we do it? Well Ken Vreeke had great credentials, but we gave them a hands on look at a GP bike, and the journo’s could not believe the amount of electronics on them even at that time. We were to receive the whole back page of the LA Times Sports section twice during the lead up to the GP, unheard of. Michael McCaffrey, our US freight importer, called me all excited from San Fran one day to tell me we had six column inches in the Chronicle. So I looked and they were tucked away inside and thought so what. “So what,” he said, “you do not understand, they have never published anything about motorcycle racing before!”

Having articles or even ads in the motorcycle magazines was much harder. They are closed for an issue so far in advance of publishing date we were lucky to get any exposure at all. I still do not understand that when Solo Moto in Spain is printed the next day after a GP with stories and results. Much against Garry Howards advice we ran a sweepstakes competition for a trip to the GP, but it turned into just the usual people who enter sweepstakes who neither knew nor cared about the GP, Garry was right, and it was just a pain to run. 

One of the problems I had to address is that Monterey is a convention city with conferences and events on all the time from the Pebble Beach Pro-Am to the Jazz Festival, so we were just something else going on, and several miles out of town and a million miles out of mind. I needed to make the locals aware that it was happening and how important it was, if only for the business it brought. I approached the Chamber of Commerce who told me they would rather not have the bikes, too much trouble. I left them a copy of the Economic Impact report from Phillip Island, and next time I went I received a much better reception, funny about that. $44m makes a lot of friends. We joined the Chamber and went to the mixers, and held one at the track with SCRAMP. Rudi did the catering, we gave rides around the track, showed the race from PI, and for many it was their first time out there, a big hit. Kenny had a show bike made up for us out of pieces from last year’s machines which we took to dealers, shows and other races. It worked great as no one can usually get that close to one. I had a couple of volunteers helping out, Larry Spector and Herod Lowery. They convinced me to let them take it down to the Paso Robles Mid State Fair. The Fair goes for two weeks and has 250,000 people go through it, but it is so small a town I thought, wrongly, this was just the same people going each day, so why go for two weeks? I went down on the Friday and was blown away. The Fair was huge, stages full of the best country singers and people from all over California. I agreed to pay for a hotel room for them for another couple of nights, and planned to be there for two weeks next year.

And how were Xan and I getting along I hear you ask? Well one night before my wife came over Bill and I took Xan and a friend out to Cibo’s for a drink and I managed to surprise Xan for once in her life. Thankfully Bill and Xan’s roommate were discreet. We managed to keep our affair secret even after Di came, I had a lot of speaking engagements, and Xan will not let me go to a Lions meeting now. Scott Atherton was running Laguna by now and felt Xan was a little too close to the GP office, but he did not realize how close. He never could work out how the towel rack in the men’s room at his office got bent, and why it disappeared when Xan left. We have it as a trophy.

Ken Vreeke and I hatched a plan to produce the event program as the forerunner to a quarterly magazine on GP Motorcycle Racing. We were to produce two versions, one with the Bernie cover and one as GP Quarterly, and perfect bound so we could put a hard cover on about 200 of them that we had Kenny sign to give away as promotion tools for next year. The quality of the program in respect of the standard of the articles, quality of the photos and the paper we sued has not been equaled in my opinion. We asked the top photographers for their best shots for as photo gallery, and they were excellent, but when they saw what we did they said, “next year we give you the really good stuff.” Next year, what high hopes we had for what we could build on this base we were putting down. Convincing advertisers was not easy, but I had people the day after the event wanting to book for ’94.  

And so the year progressed. Mick Doohan was riding with a broken leg and a thumb brake, but still giving us a run for our money. Wayne was setting up to win his fourth Championship on the trot and with Laguna being almost the last race it looked like he could wrap it up here. What a prospect. My volunteer, Big Chris, flew himself to Laguna to work for us for two weeks, what a guy. Things were all going well, despite SCRAMP hating my guts. I had the temerity to suggest that since this was our event and we were paying them for the track the Directors might like to take just eight free tickets each instead of the twelve they usually receive. What an insult! Then the world fell apart. Kenny calls from Italy, Misano, to say Wayne has fallen and broken his back, paraplegic and lucky to be alive. Who cares about the race? I just wanted to walk away, but Kenny said that if I did that Wayne would come and kick my arse. So we went on, but the seal was set, nothing could change the atmosphere that hung over it.

That week was just a joy, thanks to SCRAMP. I had suggested that I needed to put aerials on the closed circuit TV’s, especially for the timing results, but was told that it was not necessary, the track was cabled for TV. Just one small snippet of information missing there. The cable went into the outside broadcast truck and then was distributed from there, and when did the outside broadcast truck arrive? Saturday afternoon. First practice Friday I have a media tent full of outraged press and Dick Lee, SCRAMP President cannot understand the problem. Then my friend Lacalamita who controls the phones around the track does not understand that teams want a phone to work from the time they arrive on Tuesday, not just Sunday. They tell me that they had not seen anybody get reamed that bad and survived. But we go on, and the event is a success. I tell the media we have 50,000 there race day, and they tell me that we have many more than that, but Xan tells me we sold 17,000 tickets. Thanks SCRAMP and your volunteers. Doohan falls off at the corkscrew and breaks his collarbone, now he can get his leg fixed by Dr. Ting, John Kocinski wins the race for Cagiva, and Kevin Schwantz wins the Championship. The live TV decides that they only have one feed, so when America goes to an ad the world takes a break and the cameramen give them shots of the sky and the landscape, thanks guys. Lots of irate viewers around the world, and a Dorna staff at Laguna. It is just one of several problems that crop up, along with the usual whining about how “someone else’s sign is getting better coverage than mine.” Sitting in the event office gives you a jaundiced view of what’s happening, people keep coming in or calling with problems to fix, so when you finally go out and someone says “isn’t it going well” you want to ask them if they are mad. Truth is to the average Joe it is going well, that is the trick, to make sure the public do not see the problems, fix them first.

I lose a lot of Kenny’s money, more than he expected, and much more than I did. He has never chided me for it, on the contrary Chuck told me I did exactly what he wanted. Kenny is no mood to talk about next year, he and Wayne were very close and the accident has affected him deeply. I have no instructions and must just wait. During the build up to the event Robert Jackson asked me how I was doing as I had no “goal posts.” It’s true I had no stated objectives, but I thought I knew what Kenny wanted and how I should go about it. The economy did not help, we were promoting a sport that had a small following in the US, and trying new things, so I think what we achieved was very good in retrospect. Most if not all of the ideas have been copied and used since.

Two weeks after the event I meet with SCRAMP’s Board who proceed to tell me it was the worst weekend of their life, “you changed everything.” Not quite, I kept Jesus the toilet contractor, he was great. The rest? Laguna was voted the worst race or close to each year, why wouldn’t I change everything? SCRAMP say they are now not sure they want to do it again. Neither is Garry Howard or Kenny. Mind you we did not receive the final accounts from SCRAMP until late November, how does it take that long. When I ran Road Atlanta later our accounts guy Michael had the figures for Dan Murphy before the AMA event was over. Dorna USA reappears and there are discussions about moving the race to Mid-Ohio, but Kenny and I are convinced Laguna is the only track acceptable.    

We receive many nice congratulatory letters from ordinary fans, trade show participants, and sponsors like Suzuki, “the best week’s press we ever had.” The Monterey Hotels Assn says they were the winners at the event, and that is probably true. But my checkered flag has dropped. Kenny does what he usually does with team people and stops paying them at the end of the year, a rude shock and one that will cause a rift. I hang on in Monterey, not much to go home for, and wait. 1994 and Dorna is to run the GP this year, but no one wants my advice it seems. One morning when I know Kenny has a meeting about the GP he asks me to breakfast, so I think at last I will have a say, but no, he just wants me to run someone to the airport. I am asked for an interview by a motorcycle magazine in which I express my disappointment at some of this which I probably should not have aired, but I am not good at saying nothing, and saying it to Kenny is not easy.

I get the call to come to Spain, which actually lets me obtain my H1 visa as you have to be outside the US to get it. Kenny is talking to Phillip Morris Europe, PM, about a flat track series in stadiums around the world, the first in Jerez during the GP. If I can sort out how to do it and get PM to agree to pay for it, again as a way of getting around tobacco advertising bans, then I have a job. So off to Lausanne to meet with PM and “blue sky” where this could go. Kenny actually has Sparky building the motorcycles, we have booked rooms in Jerez and have guys like Jay Springsteen lined up to ride. The wheels fall off before we even start. The Mayor of Jerez that controls the stadium is not keen, and the article comes out in the US. Kenny is not impressed and has Chuck call me to check if I really said those things, which I did, so that is the end of the collaboration, but not the friendship.

It just happens that Di is coming to Spain for a couple of weeks holiday, so we take it anyway. Not the best trip and it gets worse when I tell her late one night about Xan. Leaving Xan in the US was a very hard thing to do, but I know she knew we would get back together, and in the back of my mind I probably did too, but for now I was going back to Australia to “do the right thing” by Di and my creditors, who were there and waiting. My partners, you know the ones who thought we should stick together had all done deals, so now it was just me.