For additional reaction to Wednesday’s announcement of a proposed MIC-organized United States Super Bike series that will compete directly with AMA Pro Racing’s series in 2009 Roadracingworld.com contacted Steve Page, President and General Manager of Infineon Raceway, which has hosted AMA National motorcycle road races since 1977. Roadracingworld.com: Generally, what are your thoughts on the announcement of the USSB Superbike racing series that is going to compete with the Daytona Motorsports Group(DMG)/AMA Pro Racing series? Page: Well, I will be very frank with you. There’s nothing to react to. There’s nothing there. It was a press release with no information. There’s no schedule, there’s no tracks, there’s no manufacturers, there’s no riders. This has been a charade that is getting very tiresome. I’ve sort of held my tongue here over the last few weeks on this, and I think it’s time to stop doing that because I think this thing has turned into a circular firing squad and I think that if something doesn’t get resolved in the next very short period then Pro motorcycle racing in the U.S. is going to be a thing of the past. RW.com: You have first-hand experience of the split in open-wheel car racing, right? Page: Sure. This is a movie we’ve all seen before. It’s astounding to me that intelligent people in this industry, having seen what has happened in the past, are willing to allow something like this to potentially happen again. It’s crazy, because the amount of money, if you look at it from a promoter’s perspective, and the promoters are the ones who have really not been plugged into this whole effort in a visible way, the numbers that we’re talking about are so small that trying to divide up a pie that is so small to begin with, I mean, I think we’re very quickly going to reach the point that there’s no point in being involved in Pro motorcycle racing anymore. RW.com: Is that an opinion you share with the other motorcycle road racing promoters? Page: I don’t want to speak for anyone else. What I can say with confidence is that there is tremendous frustration at the way this is all coming to bear. RW.com: Your racetrack hosted meetings with Roger Edmondson and the promoters and with MIC President Tim Buche and the promoters. Can you summarize what each of those meetings was like and what you went into the meetings with and what you came out of the meetings with? Page: The meeting with Roger was very substantive. Like it or not, and there are mixed opinions and I don’t like everything that Roger has proposed, but Roger has put concrete proposals with specific dollar amounts to the specific plan on the table for anyone to evaluate. After we met with Roger we spent two and a half hours with Tim Buche, and I felt stupider after the meeting than I did before. Because it was two and a half hours of conversation with zero information being given. And what we’re seeing with this latest press release from MIC is a continuation. The [MIC] purpose seems to be to muddy the waters just enough to prevent people from making a commitment to DMG and sort of let Roger flounder until a point when the whole thing collapses. Then I don’t know who thinks they’re going to make something of what’s left, because there really won’t be anything left. If you were being asked to evaluate two competing, substantive proposals that would be one thing, but the MIC thing is just air. There’s nothing there. The whole process with these guys has been like a bad striptease. RW.com: Roger Edmondson said he has some written commitments for his 2009 schedule. He didn’t say who. Are you one of those who has committed to his series? Page: I will tell you that we have committed to Roger that if he is able to accumulate commitments from enough tracks to make a creditable schedule that we will commit to him. But that commitment is based on Roger’s assurance that there will be an on-going effort to bring a full contingent of manufacturers into the sport. But that is a provisional commitment. We’re not going to jump alone. But we’ve also told Roger that if we can bring a collection of tracks into the program that we’re prepared to go with him. RW.com: What is your big picture view of this whole situation. Page: My perspective on it is we’ve been promoting AMA Pro Racing now for probably about 15 years. If you measured the amount of money we’ve invested in track improvements specifically to make ours a better and safer racetrack for motorcycling and then you look at the revenue we generate from AMA racing, it just doesn’t make any sense. And the idea of continuing to make bikes faster, at some point the tracks just aren’t going to be able to accommodate it because the numbers just don’t make sense. We could rent the track and make more money than we do on an AMA weekend and save a whole lot of time and heartache and activity on the part of our staff. We have the perspective of being a track that promotes nearly every major professional racing series in the country. From NASCAR to Indy Car to NHRA, we deal with first-rate sanctioning bodies that know what they’re doing and take charge. For the last 10 years AMA motorcycle racing has been the most poorly organized, miserably promoted enterprise that we have ever been associated with. And if it weren’t for the fact that we feel a certain responsibility to the very active motorcycle racing community in Northern California we would have thrown our hands up, or should have thrown our hands up years ago and just gotten out of the business, which I think we are close to doing now. The thing that is so frustrating is the product we have been promoting for the last few years is so bad. There has been no promotion outside of what the promoter does on its own. The competitors are beholden to the manufacturers alone. They are completely out of control. You can’t get support from riders to do media and promotional events. They shoot their mouths off and say whatever they want, and they’re not answerable to anybody. I mean, there are times when our management team sits around and says, ‘Why the Hell are we doing this?’ Regardless of the fact that MIC has put nothing substantive on the table, the one thing that is clear is that it would be a manufacturer-promoted series, which in my mind would ratchet up all of the things that make this a bad product right now and would eliminate the strong sanctioning body management that makes every other successful series in this country successful. RW.com: Listening to all of that it sounds like your decision is whether to go with the AMA/DMG series or to not go with motorcycles at all? Page: Well, right now there is only one substantive proposal on the table. So I only see one alternative. The whole MIC thing so far has just been smoke. If you parse through their press release there’s no information there. There is nothing to react to. So in that sense, right now we have one alternative on the table, and that’s the one DMG has presented. We have to make some decisions on our schedule pretty quickly. I think we’re close to a decision point if this thing can’t get pulled across the finish line pretty quickly.