When "Classic" Loses Its Luster...

I was up at New Hampshire Motor Speedway this weekend. This time, it wasn't for anything NASCAR-related. Instead, I joined my best friend Carmine for a couple hours of motorcycle racing, something far more up his alley than mine. The weekend's action, branded as the 88th Loudon Classic, has traditionally been one of the cornerstones of Laconia Motorcycle Week, an annual celebration of motorcycles that draws visitors from across the country to New Hampshire's Lakes Region to share their passion with other motorcycle enthusiasts. Bike Week is a controversial staple of New Hampshire tourism; critics point to the stigmas of gang behavior and lewd activity that follow motorcycle culture, and supporters praise the opportunity to share their love of motorcycles in a welcoming atmosphere. (To be fair, the event is much tamer than it was when I was a kid.)

The atmosphere of the Loudon Classic has changed, too. In its heyday, the Loudon Classic was an AMA-sanctioned race, the oldest motorcycle race in America. At one point, the Loudon Classic welcomed 35,000 fans to the track. This weekend, the track estimated attendance at just under 10,000 over two days of racing. Plenty of reasons could have been cited; the race was a week later than last year, there wasn't much advertising, and even the Classic itself was moved to Saturday under concerns that fans would want to head home Sunday for Father's Day.

The biggest change, of course, is that the AMA no longer sanctions the Loudon Classic, having withdrawn sanctioning some years ago due to safety concerns about the track. The motorcycles race on New Hampshire Motor Speedway's road course, a temporary 1.6-mile layout that incorporates parts of the oval and a lengthy loop outside the backstretch. The concern was that the premier AMA sportbikes were simply too fast and powerful for a compact temporary track. With the current AMA Pro Road Racing circuit competing at large purpose-built road courses like Road America and Laguna Seca, the NHMS road course seems a bit outclassed.

The loss of the AMA sanction is nothing new. But without the backing of a national body like the AMA, the prestige and the excitement of featuring some of the world's best motorcycle racers is missing. Instead, the weekend's events are locally-sanctioned and feature local talent. Even the "Loudon Classic" itself was little more than a twenty-lap race, halted after fourteen laps when the red flag was thrown for an incident on the track. It would be like hosting a few privateers in a short race at Indy Raceway Park and telling everyone it was the Indy 500.

And so on Sunday, a bunch of professional motorcycle racers showcased their skills to a nearly-empty grandstand. We were only there for a couple hours, but in that time I can say there were a lot more cars and motorcycles going than coming, and not much traffic from the south on Route 106 headed to the track. As for the on-track action, Carmine and I enjoyed ourselves, but I can say with some certainty that neither of our girlfriends (who, admittedly, are not racing fans) were terribly entertained. I would venture to say there was a greater buzz of activity in the pit area, where the friends and family of competitors would surely be hanging out.

So on a race weekend where the emptiness of the grandstands eclipsed the quality of the racing in my memory, one has to wonder, how much longer can this go on?

It's a dark question that has come up in motorsports more times than I can remember in the last ten years. Motor racing of any sort is an expensive endeavor for all involved. For the teams, the costs are high, the risks are high, and at anything but the highest echelons of motorsport, the winnings are a pittance. For track owners and promoters, one can only imagine the cost of operating and insuring a facility where people go dangerously fast separated by about fifteen feet and a chainlink fence from a bunch of drunk fans watching people go dangerously fast. The key, of course, is the presence of the fans. Fans buy tickets and support the venue. Fans support the sponsors that pay the bills for the teams.

Empty grandstands don't buy tickets. Empty grandstands don't support sponsors. And in any spectator event, whether baseball or hockey or motor racing, empty grandstands will only be tolerated so long. When Rockingham Speedway, Atlanta Motor Speedway and Auto Club Speedway could no longer fill the grandstands, they had race dates written off the schedule, moved to tracks where seats were selling out. Even the venerable Darlington Raceway, a longtime staple on the NASCAR schedules, lost a race date when ticket sales were weak. Sentimental ties and history only last so long. This is, after all, a business.

How long can history alone save the Loudon Classic?

Part of the problem is that the Loudon Classic's place on the Bike Week itinerary is shaky at best. The origins of Laconia Motorcycle Week trace back to the days of the motorcycle "gypsy tours" that stopped in Laconia for a long weekend, while travelers organized motorcycle races and hillclimbs. From those races came the Loudon Classic, though the races were an element of the rally itself. Since then, Bike Week has gained its own identity, after struggling to break the negative stigma of gang-related fights and activities that colored some events in the mid-1960s. These days, Bike Week is more a celebration of biker culture, of tattoos and leather and southern rock and country and tricked-out cruiser motorcycles. The hub of the action is Weirs Beach, a strip in Laconia lined with bars, restaurants, live music and the boardwalk arcade that opposes the pier on Lake Winnipesaukee. For most Bike Week attendees, the fact that there are sportbikes racing a few miles south of Laconia never falls on the radar; it's a different sort of culture. Bike Week and the Loudon Classic are no longer two integral events; they're just two events that happen to fall on the same week on the calendar.

And as a stand-alone event, the Loudon Classic is far from a star-studded affair. I don't mean that to be critical of grassroots and local racing. But from a promotions standpoint, and I say this as a fan and not someone who's attended the RPM sessions in Daytona, if you're going to promote a big annual event, you want there to be something notable about it. A few weeks ago, I went to Star Speedway in Epping, NH, for a touring-type Modified race that was scheduled to draw some of the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour drivers, including Ted Christopher. I don't normally go to Star's weekly shows, but having TC, Ryan Preece and Mike Stefanik (who actually was a no-show) on the night's card put my butt in the grandstands that Saturday night. On any other night, you're most likely to attract the diehards and the fans who know someone on the track that evening.

By contrast, the events scheduled for the Loudon Classic weekend featured a combination of sidecar racers, Legends cars, plus the Loudon Road Racing Series and American SportBike Racing motorcycle events. That's a fine card to draw the local diehard fan base and the friends-and-family attendees. But if you want to draw big numbers, you need something to draw casual fans. To his credit, NHMS general manager Jerry Gappens, who took control after Speedway Motorsports bought the track, has been courting the AMA to see if they would entertain a return to NHMS. The AMA left over safety concerns with the track, though, and it seems unlikely to me that Speedway Motorsports is going to put a lot of money into improving the temporary road course at a venue that makes most of its money from three big weekends of oval-track racing, especially considering the capital improvements they've made across the track grounds since 2008. But Jerry Gappens has a point, that the success of the Classic will be dependent upon more than the friends and family of a few local racers.

Maybe one alternative, though it may be a bit far-fetched, could be rechristening the Loudon Classic as an open-competition motorcycle race. Put up a high-profile purse, and invite not only veterans and rookies from the local motorcycle clubs, but also ASRA racers from other regions, AMA racers and maybe even a couple MotoGP stars. This is the sort of formula behind The Dream at Eldora Speedway, a race that pays enough money and fame to win that dirt racers from across the country flock to Eldora in hopes of qualifying, never mind winning. Actually, it's probably more similar to the Prelude to The Dream all-star race held a few days before The Dream. I'm guessing that most professional motorcycle racers would hesitate to put their careers on the line to race in a non-points, winner-takes-most contest. But I think that having a driver with the name recognition of, say, Valentino Rossi would go a long way toward putting butts in the seats.

Either way, if nothing changes, I can't imagine this event staying on life support much longer. Jerry Gappens went on record in the Union Leader saying that he doesn't want to be "the guy who ends the longest running motorcycle race." I sympathize with Jerry; as a track manager and promoter, he has the challenge of drawing fans to each and every event and keeping NHMS in the news. If he has to write a poorly-attended race off the schedule, there will surely be some fan backlash. But race tracks are expensive to operate for a weekend, and even with reduced staff and only key services open (the track's concession booths were closed on Sunday), there have to be enough ticket sales to justify keeping the track open. Ultimately, it's going to be a business decision; a race cannot run at a loss forever.

It's surely a tragedy when someone holds a race and no one shows up to watch. But it could be a bigger tragedy if the race disappeared off next year's schedule and no one noticed.