What actual rocket scientists think about e-moto racing

My friend Lennon Rodgers - who was an actual rocket scientist before he returned to MIT to lead a team that fielded a bike in last year's TT Zero race - just sent me a draft version of a paper that he co-authored with Radu Gogoana and Thomas German. Their paper, entitled, Designing an electric motorcycle for the Isle of Man TT Zero race, and how electric vehicle racing could be used to spur innovation will be presented in Los Angeles in May. 

Since I'm always on the lookout for an interesting story - especially one that I can just cut-and-paste into this blog - I immediately asked him if I could excerpt it. He said that I could, and in the next few weeks, I'll get into a more detailed look at the MIT team's simulations and data captured during the event. Lennon tells me that some of the material they're presenting will put numbers to and provide explanations for the things that I've felt while actually riding electric motorcycles.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to preview this part of their paper which was primarily written by Tom German, who worked at Penske on both NASCAR and IndyCar projects. German, who is now a fellow at MIT's Sloan School of Management, looks at the role racing might play in the development of EV technology as a whole. 

The cliche is, 'Racing improves the breed.' I was interested to get the authors' take on a role for racing that is not just about improving individual bikes or selling a brand, but is about driving pure research improving consumer confidence in whole categories of vehicle.

Electric Racing

The Isle of Man TT Zero is an example of a new breed of “zero emission” races. The aim of these races is to spur innovation that will reduce the environmental impact of consumer vehicles. Racing has historically been a catalyst for innovation, particularly in the early years of motorcycles and automobiles [8]. New concepts were tested on the track, and the desire to win drove companies to produce superior technology. Consumer demand for better performance motivated companies to transfer the technology from the race track to the mass market.

The fundamental question is whether or not zero emission racing will yield the desired outcome. With the goal of contributing to the success of zero emission racing, this section outlines a set of guidelines for designing zero emission races that will yield relevant innovation. In this paper innovation is defined as the act of generating a product or service that (1) reduces the environmental impact of vehicles and (2) consumers want to purchase.

Drive technology

Many diverse participants, including inventors, academia, and corporate research labs, contribute to generating and developing innovative ideas. Consumer-focused companies choose relevant developments, refine them, and promote them to the consumer market. Identifying which ideas will succeed is a challenge facing all vehicle companies. Resources are often not available to invest in multiple emerging technologies. For example, it is costly for an automobile company to invest in batteries, fuel cells, and super capacitors simultaneously. Racing competitions should be structured to accelerate the transition from ideas to mass production and simultaneously facilitate the development of multiple technologies.

Provide valued entertainment

Any repeated event that the public finds entertaining will draw a large number of spectators both in person and through the media (e.g. internet, TV, etc.). Spectators and media drive advertising, which creates an influx of funds through team, rider and event sponsorship. These funds help finance the teams, who in turn develop the technology. Thus, valued entertainment is drawing in extra research and development funds that would otherwise not be available for that purpose (Figure 24). For example, an energy drink manufacturer might be indirectly funding battery research. This could translate into millions of dollars spent on zero emission innovation [9].

The influx of available sponsorship also reduces the risk that the team with the most personal wealth will win. In other words, sponsorships are typically chosen based on which team is likely to win; if the teams generating the most innovative vehicles are more likely to win, these teams would be rewarded through sponsorship funds to develop even better technology. 

Figure 24: Valued entertainment can produce millions of dollars in research and development funds. 

Consider the historical context

Gasoline vehicle racing has evolved dramatically over the last 100 years. Because of this, caution should be used when copying a modern gasoline race with a zero emission equivalent. Zero emission racing might require a different approach, and lessons may be learned from looking back into the beginnings of gasoline racing.

Patience will also be required when directly comparing modern gasoline and zero emission racing. It is easy to forget that it took decades for gasoline engines to make dramatic improvements. For example, it took 50 years for the first gasoline motorcycle to reach a 100 mph average lap at the TT. The electric motorcycles will likely reach the same milestone within 5 years.

Utilize the power of regulation

Regulations should be used as the fundamental tool to engineer a race for a desired outcome. For example, assume that consumers want to refuel their vehicle quickly; if winning a zero emission race is dependent on fast refueling, then the regulations are successfully guiding development. A successful racing innovation platform must focus on technology relevant to the consumer market.

Inspire consumer demand

It is critical that the races inspire consumers to purchase the technology that is found superior on the race track. Otherwise, true innovation will not be achieved through racing, and the objective of reducing the environmental impact of vehicles will not be achieved. One way this can be accomplished is through styling, and ensuring that the race vehicle has brand identity. For example, a motorcycle company should use styling that is distinct and that connects their race vehicle to their commercially available vehicles.

Secondly, inspiration can be found through education. The race should strive to inform the consumer of the environmental affects and implications of the various technologies.

Finally, races can inspire consumer demand by building confidence in new technologies. For example, racing could prove that rapid charging is feasible, which might convince the skeptical consumer that the technology will satisfy their needs.

It's clear that the organization and evolution of EV racing is, like EV technology itself, still in flux. Right now, there's a little too much posturing and rock-pissing going on, and not quite enough effort to actually create a racing series (or series, plural) that provide a rational forum for both competition and R&D. 

What we need are rational rules and a comprehensible 'ladder' from local series through a World Championship. Small-scale innovators need a place to prove concepts, and major sponsors need a potential return on investment. To the extent that proving the merits of EV motorcycles as practical road machines are one racing goal, the TT course remains a very relevant test - but it will never be recognized as such by the FIM or other international organizers. 

That said, what Lennon et al learned on the TT course was more relevant than anything that they could have learned on some short circuit. I'll delve into that in more detail in coming weeks.

Meeting Steve, 10 years on...

Although it's in the 20s here this morning, so far, this has been the winter that wasn't, in Kansas City. All of us motorcyclists are still riding. So it doesn't feel like the middle of January. Maybe that helps to explain the mild surprise I felt the other day when I realized it was ten years ago that I moved to the Isle of Man, with the goal of qualifying for and riding in the TT.

Last night, Mary and I had dinner with two friends, Jim Carns and Bill Jeffreys, who were on the Island with me when I raced there. We ate in a KC brew pub. I had a beer and fish & chips; sat in crowded booth with good company; left after dark in the cold. It brought back some memories.

Getting to know the Island; learning (or at least scratching the surface of) the Mountain Course; racing in the TT... in many ways the first half of 2002 served as a (the?) major milestone in my life. Whatever my experiences on the Isle of Man might have been, they were shaped by one person more than any other -- Steve Hodgson.

This is how I described meeting Steve, in Riding Man...

On the spur of the moment, I wander into the Padgett’s shop in Douglas. It’s a quiet day. There are a couple of guys clattering around a dank workshop, but there’s no one at all in the showroom. Up on the wall, a TV endlessly replays a highlight tape from the 1999 TT races. There’s a little office, off to the side of the entrance. I introduce myself, and Steve Hodgson, the manager of the business, does the same. We start talking, and for whatever reason, my story (“Here I am. I quit my job, sold everything I owned, and moved here to ride the TT,”) strikes him as rational. He’s laid-back. (In the end, I will get to know him well before I ever see flashes of the young Steve–a brain-out two-stroke racer, with a room full of trophies and Barry Sheene in his sights.) He first came to the Isle of Man as a fan, with his friend Phil Mellor. They stood in the front garden of a house on Bray Hill, right at the spot where a sidecar crash came to its gruesome, fatal conclusion. “That’s it!” Mellor said, “I’m never going to race here!”

Steve didn’t want to race here, either. He thought of himself as a circuit specialist. He did come back and race in the Manx Grand Prix, under pressure from his sponsors. The plan was to quickly qualify for a TT berth the following year. That all ended with a massive crash at Aintree, broken femurs, and a sudden desire to get a regular job. Still, like so many motorcyclists, he knew once he’d been here that it was his spiritual home. Mellor eventually rode here and stayed too–he killed himself at Doran’s Bend in 1989. He was fast, no question about that, but the way he rode, everyone had seen it coming.

All this comes out in a long, rambling conversation, uninterrupted by even a single paying customer. Padgett’s main shops are in Yorkshire, where they do enough business to bankroll a major race team. At one point, Steve interrupts his train of thought to point to the television. “Are you really sure you want to do this?” he asks, adding “Just watch.” The video shows a motorcycle (ridden by a guy named Paul Orritt) accelerating down Bray Hill. At well over a hundred miles an hour the handlebars suddenly begin to shake, violently throwing the machine and rider to the road. Orritt’s like a rag doll. We both laugh, rather cruelly.

I ask if Padgett’s still leases bikes for the TT. “Sure,” says Steve. In fact, they have a race-prepped R6 down in the shop right now. “Some American guy leased it in 2000 but he didn’t qualify.” I tell him that I’ve got my heart set on a Honda. We call Clive Padgett, who runs the racing side of the business. Clive tells me I can lease the brand new CBR that they have in the showroom here on the Island, break it in on the road–which will help me learn the course–then we’ll pull off the lights and race it. This’ll cost me £3,000. I could wait and see if anything materializes at Motorcyclist, but I realize that this uncertainty just weighs too much. I put £1,500 on each of my two credit cards, and in two minutes, I’ve got a deal. Although I’m spending money I don’t really have, it’s a huge relief to think that the bike issue has been resolved. 

That's Steve at right. The other two guys are Paul Smith, my Canadian mechanic and my nephew Kris Gardiner. Peter Riddihough, who shot the documentary film One Man's Island, took this photo when we were out on a deserted stretch of Manx road, trying to figure out how to bring the CBR's handling under control. We never did resolve it; we didn't have the right shock spring; we didn't have the right tires; we didn't have right fork mods. Any one or maybe two of those problems could've been over-ridden if we'd had the right rider, but I was stuck with me.

Over the course of the next few months, there was scarcely a day that I didn't drop into the Padgett's shop for a coffee; hardly a day that Steve and I didn't go to The Terminus for a beer after he closed up the shop. Steve was my guide and interpreter, my sponsor, and my friend. We lapped the TT course on motorcycles, and he even accompanied me on a bicycle lap that was nearly the death of him (but his doggedness in completing that lap gave me some real insight into the competitive fires that had burned in him as a racer.)

After I'd gotten to know Steve, I realized that he could be utterly brusque in dismissing people looking for favors. I saw a couple of guys rub him the wrong way, and he just about throw them out into the street. On one of those days I told him, "Wow, you really have your New York head on today," which made him laugh. But it made me realize that on a different day, I might have got that treatment, and my time on the Isle of Man would have been totally different.

I think that at some level we were drawn to each other because -- while we were both in the only place we really wanted to be -- we were both lonely. Both of us were, at the time, in relationships that failed. I'd overthrown my career. Steve's quit his job at Padgett's a few times, but always come back after a couple of weeks and the Padgetts always take him back; they love to hate each other.

Since leaving the Isle of Man, I met and married the right wife. Steve's divorced, met someone new and, in his fifties, now has two new kids. I hope they keep him young. I know that I'm infinitely happier in my home life, and I think he is, too.

Every motorcyclist who makes the pilgrimage to the TT will find that the Isle of Man is his spiritual home. Some, like Steve, will find a way to stay there forever. Most, like me, will leave but be reminded of the place every day of their lives. I'll be on some little stretch of road that reminds me of part of the TT course, or I'll eat fish & chips, or I'll step out into the cold (especially if it's drizzly, too) and I'll be transported back there. And whenever that happens, I wonder how my friend Steve is.

It wouldn't have been the same without you, man.

Motorcycles are dangerous. Especially the Iranian ones

Your mom was right of course, motorcycles are dangerous. But according to this CBC news report, if your mom is Iranian, what she probably means is, they're dangerous even if you're not on them.

Tehran's traffic is notoriously snarled almost all the time, so it's easy to imagine Mossad whacking a target in his car -- a sitting duck. The Farsi word for gridlock like this is 'Sholouq.'

Yesterday, an Iranian scientist involved in that country's nuclear program was stuck in Tehran's notoriously bad traffic when a motorcyclist pulled up beside his Peugot 405 car. A passenger on the bike attached two magnetic bombs to the car. The motorcycle sped away - disappearing into traffic - and the ensuing explosion killed the scientist, injuring two other passengers in the car. The Iranians pretty much came out and said, it was Mossad's handiwork.

That was worthy of minor note, but the article reminded me that in the last couple of years, there have been two other assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists that involved motorcycles. In one, a bomb-laden motorcycle parked near the target exploded, and in the other, a passenger on a motorcycle shot the victim who was, again, stuck in traffic.

I guess there's some Mossad hit man who realizes what millions of third-world up-and-comers also know: motorcycles provide mobility in traffic that brings cars to a halt. I wonder if he's a real biker? What does he ride at home? Is he staying in Iran between hits, and if so, is a motorcycle part of his cover?

Iran has a pretty substantial domestic automotive industry. Over 8 million motorcycles are currently registered in the country, with new registrations increasing that total by about 1,500/day, so tracing the hit man's motorcycle will be difficult. The situation is further clouded, literally, by the fact that motorcycles produce about a third of Tehran's equally noxious air pollution. If there's a Backmarker reader with any direct experience of motorcycling in Iran, please contact me. I'd love to know what bikes are popular and/or domestically produced.

My advice to surviving Iranian nuclear scientists: I suppose it might be time to consider a new line of employment, perhaps in another country under an alias. I'm guessing that the CIA will put you in some kind of witness-protection program.

But, if you insist on staying in your current job, get your own motorcycle! At least that way, you'll be a moving target.

Bubba Stewart, idiot savant of physics

Red Bull just released a promotional video of Bubba Stewart. It's the sort of hi-def, ultra-slo-mo stuff you'd expect. Bubba narrates it, providing a pretty bland and dull commentary. What interests me about it is his discussion of his greatest contribution to motocross, the 'Bubba Scrub'.



The scrub move gave Bubba a huge advantage coming up as a motocross racer. In the long travel suspension/SX era, speed over jumps is an important factor in race success, especially in SX races. Course designers make the challenge harder, by contouring landing areas or locating corners in places that make it more complicated than just hitting the takeoff ramp at a higher speed, flying further and higher, and landing with a higher retained speed.

I remember watching Bubba as a young 125 racer, and he was so much faster through the air than other riders that it seemed as if a different set of laws of physics applied to him. Time after time, he'd pass people in mid-air, on a visibly lower and faster trajectory.

While no one really seemed to know just how Bubba's trick on the takeoff ramps worked, all his rivals quickly realized that it did work, and before long it was part of every motocrosser or supercrosser's arsenal. On a big outdoor track, the scrub allows riders to hit takeoff ramps at higher speed without launching themselves into space; they get back to the ground faster, where their rear wheel can again begin transmitting power. On a supercross track, where landing areas are typically tighter, they can hit the jump harder without over-jumping.

The Red Bull video doesn't really have great shots of the key moment in the scrub -- which is when the rider essentially does a whip on the takeoff ramp, virtually crashing his bike into the ramp at the moment when it goes ballistic. But there are any number of great videos illustrating the technique, such as this one...



Bubba's own narration makes it clear that he has no idea how it works. He claims that it works by reducing aerodynamic drag in mid-air. That's why he's a motorcycle racer and I'm a frustrated genius. (Trust me, Bubba, you'd rather be you. Geniuses don't have groupies who'll boink them in their motorhomes. In fact, we don't even rate motorhomes. Put that way, I'd rather be you, too.)

But, the Scrub's got nothing to do with aerodynamic drag, for several reasons not the least of which is that with average SX lap speeds of about 30 mph, drag's minimal and that there's no reason why drag would be lower with the bike horizontal compared to vertical. If you watch the video clip above, you'll see that in fact during the mid-air recovery phase, his bike's turned broadside to the direction of travel, for maximum aero drag.

So why does the scrub actually work? It's all about getting a lower trajectory off any given launch ramp.

As noted, all else being equal, lower trajectory is faster for two reasons: It will get you back on the ground, with your rear wheel driving forward, ASAP. And/or, it will allow you to hit a jump faster without over jumping the landing area.

Pre-Bubba, motocross racers pretty much always ran up the launch ramp with their bikes straight up and down (or as straight as they could get 'em.) That meant that their bikes' center of mass left the jump on a trajectory parallel (and a couple of feet above) the angle of the launch ramp. (I'm simplifying ever so slightly here, and describing a sharp-edged ramp. It's more complex but the same principles apply over a jump with a rounded profile. Also, amateur physicists please note that I'm using the term 'bike's center of mass' but really mean, 'combined bike and rider center of mass.') (God, can I get one more parenthetical comment into this paragraph?)

Bubba himself accidentally gets part of the scrub explanation right in the Red Bull video when he says that you have to crash the bike as you leave the jump, and have faith that you can gather it back up and land on the wheels. That's pretty much what happens.

When a rider does the scrub, he's basically pushing his bike's center of mass down towards the track at the moment that he breaks contact with the ground and takes to the air. The path that the center of mass is taking through space at that moment defines the bike's ballistic trajectory in the air.

It's critical to understand that if the rider grossly mis-timed his scrub, and scrubbed well before the takeoff lip, he'd simply crash his bike into the ground. I've seen videos in which riders actually drag their cases off the jump. IE, at the moment they go ballistic, their bike's center of mass is at least a foot lower than it would be in the normal riding position. Considering that that one-foot drop happens on the launch ramp -- and as long as it's in progress at the moment the bike goes ballistic -- it effectively reduces the ramp angle by several degrees.

Anyone who remembers the days when Bubba first rode the 125 class (often posting times as fast or faster than the best 250 riders!) will recall seeing him pass many riders in mid-air; going a gear faster while magically traveling on a much lower trajectory.

Given Bubba's tendency to over-ride his bike, I imagine that this technique was simply discovered when he realized that he was on a takeoff ramp and committed to the jump, while traveling at a speed much too high for the situation. Either he'd carried too much speed out of the last corner and was still turning the bike on takeoff ramp, or he realized he was about to over jump a landing area followed by a corner and attempted to start turning the following corner before even leaving the jump. Regardless, he basically low-sided at high speed over the lip of the jump. Once in mid-air, his instincts took over; he'd already landed hundreds of show-offy whips, and this was no different. The Bubba Scrub was born.

Now, I presume that Bubba knows that, sometimes, you can break the law and just get away with it. I guess that's what he was hoping would happen last year, when he was arrested after impersonating a police officer and attempting to pull over... a real cop.

But the laws of physics are not like the law. You not only never get away with breaking them, you just can't break them, period. The flight trajectories of things like motorcycles -- with no appreciable lift or motive power in the air, it's a projectile -- are clearly defined by simple equations that can be found in any high-school physics text. The rider can do things that will adjust the bike's pitch, roll, and yaw in mid-air, but there is nothing he can do to prevent the motorcycle's center of mass from following a ballistic trajectory that is defined by simple physics.

Bubba can't break those laws any more than I can, but he did (probably accidentally) find a way to redefine his launch trajectory. Until he came along, motocross racers had always launched off a jump on a trajectory defined by the jump itself.

Realizing that he'd found a way to change that trajectory was Bubba's genius. I guess it doesn't matter whether he knows why it works or not.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

My wife forwarded this interesting video to me, which shows work in progress on a gyro-balanced, fully enclosed electric motorcycle made by an upstart company called Lit, in the Bay Area. They call this model the C1.



I think it's pretty cool, although whether it should be thought of as a motorcycle or not is one of the questions that go unanswered in the video. It's sort of a cross between a Segway, a BMW C1 and a Quasar, tweaked to run on batteries.

20-some Quasars were built in the 1970s in England.

The bodywork for the BMW C1 was built by Bertone. Users commented that they'd have liked a more enclosed design for improved weather protection.

Unlike either the C1 or Quasar of course, it's fully enclosed. The female model's seen hopping out of it sans helmet. BMW had originally hoped that countries that homologated the C1 would allow riders to operate it without a helmet, too. The C1 'bubble' was actually a pretty strong roll cage that BMW claimed provided protection comparable to most ultra-compact cars, and C1 riders sat in car-like seat equipped with a four-point seat belt.

Some countries did allow C1 users to go without helmets, although one reason it 'failed' was that one key market, the UK, maintained that it was a motorcycle and as such users needed a helmet. In fact, there was some concern voiced about the weight of a crash helmet exacerbating whiplash injuries in frontal or side collisions, assuming the operator was tightly strapped in. Sweden ruled that C1 users did have to wear crash helmets but didn't need to use the seat belts.

I've read that BMW sold about 20,000 C1s (there were two versions, one with a 125cc Rotax single and a nominal '200' that actually displaced 176cc.) I'm not sure what the years of production were, but the run was short (2-3 years) and ended in the very early 2000s. That made it a failure by BMW standards, although of course 20,000 units would be a wild success for any existing e-bike manufacturer.

If there's a cautionary tale for Lit here, it's got less to do with helmet regulations than the pitfalls of trying to market a vehicle that's neither car nor motorcycle. (And that it's highly unlikely they'll bring their vehicle to market as the 'C-1', a trademark that BMW will surely challenge, since it harbors its own ambitions for an electric version.)

The whole is-it-a-car-or-a-motorcycle question isn't just a marketing pitfall. One reason there are as many e-bike startups as e-car startups in the U.S., despite the fact that the car market offers vastly more commercial potential, is that motorcycles face far fewer regulatory hurdles. While Lit chose to show us a 'fender bender' which its virtual C-1 survives unscathed, the fact is that as a motorcycle it won't need to undergo a multimillion dollar crash test prior to U.S. homologation. That's a huge advantage for an upstart company, but it comes with an offsetting disadvantage, which is that only a tiny fraction of U.S. commuters are licensed to ride motorcycles.

There are plenty of motorcyclists who might be talked into (literally) a fully enclosed vehicle, although few motorcyclists will be swayed by Lit's gyro stabilization system. We already know that falling over, per se, isn't the problem. (Though I suppose that a combination of full enclosure and gyro stabilization might add up to a two wheeler that was practical on snowy winter roads.)

I note that the prototype is fitted with a steering wheel and not a handlebar. It's not that obvious to me whether the Lit C-1 would need to be countersteered like a motorcycle or simply steered like a car. In the slalom portion of the video, it seems to handling like a motorcycle. But their little proof-of-concept seems to be fit with two gyros. That, along with the C-1's spinning wheels, would mean that it presumably has gyros spinning on the x, y, and z axes.

They wouldn't need to spin all the time; motorcyclists keep their bikes on two wheels with no trouble at all once underway. But the gyros would inevitably have a spin-up delay that's not visible in the crash simulation, which leads me to think that Lit intends that the gyros will run all the time. If they do spin all the time, then, I don't really know why the C-1 needs to lean into turns.

Does anyone from Lit care to get in touch with me and explain the Lit system in more detail?

Until then, I have to say that - style wise, anyway - the vehicle's kind'a cool and aerodynamic. I've argued to 'bring back the dustbin' before, as a way to differentiate between Superbikes and MotoGP bikes. Oh well. As MotoGP moves towards production motorcycles, I guess I'm really a lone voice in the wilderness arguing that MotoGP designers should at least have the option of fielding bikes that are fully enclosed/streamlined. Longer, lower feet-forward designs would inevitably face cornering clearance issues, but throwing a few gyros into the equation might reduce cornering lean angles, or even eliminate them.

Advertising makes it happen. Now, who's got the 'nads to write the check?

I had occasion to revisit the nexus of my two previous lives -- motorcycles and advertising -- the other day, when I found myself writing about the nadir of motorcyclists' image in U.S. pop culture, in the early 'sixties.

Motorcycles were bad news after the breathless coverage of the Hollister ‘motorcycle riot’ in 1947. Those greatly exaggerated tales inspired The Wild One in 1954. Then, Hunter S. Thompson published ‘Hells Angels: The strange and terrible saga of outlaw motorcycle gangs’. It’s likely that Thompson’s account of life with the Hells Angels was almost as apocryphal as press accounts of Hollister had been, but by the mid-‘60s, the image of motorcycling in the U.S. could hardly have sunk any lower.

The American Motorcyclist Association wrung its hands and plaintively painted the outlaw crowd as ‘one percenters’, claiming that 99% of riders were regular folks, but the media sure weren’t buying it -- probably because that story didn’t sell newspapers.

It wasn’t the AMA that set motorcycles back on the road to respectability, it was Honda. Hollywood and the media had knocked motorcycles down, and Honda’s ad agency, Grey Advertising, knew that Hollywood had a role to play in redeeming them, too. Grey conceived the “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” ad campaign and pitched an audacious media plan to Kihicharo Kawashima, the head of American Honda.

Grey proposed running a pair of television commercials during the 1964 Academy Awards telecast. That would put two 90-second ‘nicest people’ ads in front of more than two-thirds of the U.S. television audience. Buying the two spots cost $300,000, which was enough to give Kawashima pause; it was the equivalent of the gross revenues -- not the profit mind you, the gross revenues -- on the sale of about 1,200 Honda 50s.

This is not the original, 90-second, 'You meet the nicest people on a Honda' ad. The original is not available on YouTube and in the spirit of full disclosure I should admit that while I've seen the campaign's print executions, I've never watched the original commercial. (Please, please, American Honda, scour your archives, digitize a copy, and post it!) 

The truth is, most people in the ad business felt that Grey Advertising was well-named. The agency had a reputation for safe, middle-of-the-road creative. That said, the strategic thinking behind the 'nicest people' campaign was worthy of Don Draper (and in one Mad Men episode, the fictional Sterling Cooper agency actually pitches the non-fictional Honda company business!) Overall, the real campaign played to Grey Advertising's strengths and Grey's tendency towards insipid creative was OK; the campaign was, after all, aimed at the middle of the bell curve. 

About a decade later, Grey was still at it. This ad, featuring a young John Travolta, acknowledges the first -- 1973 -- Arab oil embargo/price shock and the ensuing recession; the short-arsed motorcycle cop is probably a tip of the (half) helmet to Robert Blake in 'Electra Glide in Blue.'

Kawashima needn’t have worried. That ad campaign didn’t just plant Honda in the minds of millions of hitherto non-riding consumers, it helped convince the country’s media that it was not in their commercial interest to alienate the entire motorcycle industry. Life Magazine ran a famous photo of a drunken biker at Hollister in 1947 (the ethically questionable shot was set up days after the actual ‘riot’.) When Honda started buying full page ads in the ‘60s, Life’s editors stopped running negative motorcycle stories.

That $300,000 advertising investment really gave me pause, too. That was the equivalent of about $2,000,000 in 2011 dollars. I don't know, offhand, what American Honda's best-selling (current) motorcycle is, but if the company spent 1,200 x that model's revenues on a single night's advertising, it would amount to a lot more than two million bucks.

American Honda won't spend that much this year. Hell will freeze over before we'll see a breakout motorcycle ad in this year's Academy Awards or Superbowl. I get occasional press releases from manufacturers claiming year-over-year sales growth, and it's possible we've seen the worst of the post-2008 meltdown/housing bubble. But don't kid yourself; the motorcycle business is in the fucking toilet. Why is it that there's no chance American Honda will show that kind of leadership today?

Mister, we could use a man like Kawashima today.

I stole this pic from Honda's 'history' site. It's captioned as follows: Holding up the You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda. poster are Kihachiro Kawashima (then general manager of American Honda), left, and Takeo Fujisawa (then senior managing director of Honda Motor), second from right. I'm guessing the tall guy is from Grey Advertising.

For a slightly different take on Honda's rise in the U.S. (and a look at one of the 'nicest people' print executions) you can read this blog post by FrogDesign's Adam Richardson.

The Blind Man - an excerpt from Riding Man

There’s a natural evolution in motorcycle racing. Almost all racers have families and friends who race. Most amateur racers are their own mechanics; they start early, by borrowing their dads’ tools. Whether they should be mechanics is debatable (I suspect that my inability with tools may have improved my results; at least I never hurt my bikes’ performance.)

Over time, the typical clique of racing friends shrinks, as guys get tired of being injured or broke or backmarkers or some permutation of those three. Those left gradually coalesce into two groups: riders and mechanics. Sometimes, the mechanics are the handful of guys who are honest with themselves and ready to admit they don’t have the speed to get to the next level. Sometimes they run out of money to race, but can’t give up the scene. More rarely, they have a gift for it. The French have a great expression for this: they call it having “les doigts de fee,” which literally means “a fairy’s fingers”. The first mechanic I ever knew went a long way towards making me believe that a mechanic’s skill with tools was almost a magic power.

When I was a kid, my dad worked for a big international company. The company moved our family from Canada to Switzerland, so he could run their Geneva office. Our home was in Tannay, an agricultural village that looked down over orchards and vineyards to a big lake. Under Swiss law, at 14 I was allowed to ride a 50cc moped. In surrounding countries, mopeds had three-speed transmissions, but in Switzerland, models sold to teenagers had the top gear removed from the box. Thus, in theory, they were limited to 30 kilometers an hour. Trust the Swiss to take the fun out of everything.

I counted the days down to my fourteenth birthday anyway. My parents bought me the Cadillac of mopeds: a Puch Condor. To start it, I pedaled it like a bicycle. The pedals came in handy for assisting the motor on steep hills, or when we were racing out of slow turns (though digging the inside pedal into the pavement at maximum lean was definitely to be avoided!)

All the kids I knew had similarly restricted bikes, and we endlessly attempted to eke out a little more power. Since every single time any other kid went faster was a serious personal insult, our own neighborhood ‘arms race’ made the U.S.-Soviet debacle seem like an episode of Chip and Dale.

One night, mulling over the possibilities of increased compression, we decided to skim our cylinder heads. Unencumbered by knowledge of milling machines, we cast about for a suitable tool. We found it in a neighbor’s basement: a belt sander. Not one of us waited to see if it worked for anyone else first. We’d have got better results skimming our own stupid heads. Over the next few nights, quite a few local mopeds (which were often left parked outside front gates, in the convenient shadows of stone walls and overgrown hedges) lost their heads.

At every gas station; there was always a special premix pump for motorbikes only. We’d decide how much fuel we were going to buy, which was never much. We told the attendant how much fuel – and what percentage of premix oil – we wanted.

Knobs were set, and a handle was pulled down, sort of like the handle on an expresso machine. The customer was reassured to see a little spurt of oil sprayed onto the inner wall of the glass ‘fishbowl’ on top of the pump. Then a second handle released the gasoline, which swirled in after the oil, dissolving it. It was a special mixture – different than buying gas for a car – that may as well have been a magic potion. All of us idiots concluded that by reducing the percentage of oil to 2% from the recommended 3%, we could get 1% more gasoline, with a concomitant increase in horsepower.

Of course, nothing we did had any impact on performance at all, except to occasionally make it much worse. The top speed of every bike was pretty much determined by the luck of the draw, though since I was the smallest rider, I could pull taller gearing

While the bikes were simple and generally pretty rugged, we were awfully hard on them. We rode without helmets, so it’s amazing we didn’t find ways to kill ourselves, even at sorely restricted speeds. Low-siding on cow shit was a common excuse; once, I took to the ditch at full speed when a tractor and trailer laden with 200 bushels of apples emerged from a hedgerow in front of me. Damage from such wipeouts had to be repaired at the local shop. If my bike would still roll, it was an easy push; just up the street from my house.

The mechanic’s shop was basically a two-bay garage, which along with a tiny beauty salon, made up the ground floor of a two-story house. He worked on bicycles and mopeds, while his wife was the beautician. In general, his customers were not spoiled foreign children, they were real Swiss; farmers, cops, shopkeepers and like, who relied on motorbikes for day-to-day transportation. The wives and girlfriends of those guys were the customers for the mechanic’s wife. All of them were xenophobes, and their treatment of foreigners usually ranged from outright scorn to something resembling the Amish concept of ‘shunning’, unless money was changing hands.

If I was pushing in the bike, or walking in to pick it up, I’d always make a little noise, sort of like throat clearing, to warn him of my arrival. He was an intimidating character for a 14-year-old to deal with. He was old. 60 or 70. Tall and gaunt. Shaking his hand was like grabbing a bunch of walnuts. When he talked to me, he’d walk up to the sound of my voice, but stare straight out over my head. That was because cataracts had, long since rendered him completely blind. Hiscorneas were as opaque as a boiled trout’s.

He did everything by feel. Routine maintenance, stuff like fitting a new inner tube and tire, was absolutely no problem; sighted mechanics could do that with their eyes closed too, maybe. But he rebuilt top ends, replaced brake shoes; stuff that utterly baffled me. A few hours a week, he had a sighted assistant that came in, but usually he was alone. When I went there, there was always some little thing he’d borrow my eyes for, like having me read the tiny numbers on a carb jet.

Occasionally, I’d stop by his shop just to fill up my tires. (The Condor actually came with a bicycle pump for the purpose, but you had to pump like a madman to overcome leakage in the pump itself. He had a pump powered by a foot treadle that allowed me to run the rock-hard tires I preferred for minimal rolling resistance.) When I asked if I could borrow his pump, he always sternly warned me to replace it exactly – exactly – where I’d found it.

Luckily for him, the bikes he worked on were simple. They were all piston-port two-strokes, whose basic design hadn’t changed since the introduction of the NSU ‘Quickly’ in about 1947. When my bike arrived at his shop for the first time, though, he was fascinated. Until then, most Swiss-market mopeds were sold with rigid front forks, like a bicycle. Mine had an inch or two of suspension travel, thanks to a bogus leading-link arrangement in which a little block of rubber served as both spring and damper. He spent a long time ‘looking’ at it, stroking and probing the workings with his fingers, memorizing the arrangement of the parts. It was not long before he got the chance to repair those forks.

He had a name of course, but we just called him ‘the blind man’. By the time I was old enough to get a moped, my family had lived in Switzerland for several years, and I spoke fluent French. Other foreign families came and went every year or two, so I occasionally introduced new customers to the blind man, and acted as a translator. Since his ability was so extraordinary, I sort of ‘showed him off’, I guess. He always took the work. He and his wife were making their living about five bucks at a time, so there was no turning away paying jobs.

After Switzerland, my family moved back to Canada, to Calgary. Out west. Cowboy country. It seemed good, for me, because I could have a bigger bike. I ended up getting a finicky, disc-valve Kawasaki. While it ran, it was just fast enough to illustrate the fact that despite my intense desire, I was incapable of intuiting just how people rode motorcycles really quickly. My inability to keep it going was one of the reasons I ended up giving up motorcycles for a long time.