The Motorcycle Industry Council, a lobby group for the major manufacturers and importers in the U.S., has announced that it’s going to launch a racing series in the United States for the 2009 season.
This is basically a repudiation of the AMA sale of its racing properties to the Daytona Motorsports Group earlier this year, and DMG’s plans for the future of U.S. road racing.
There’s all kinds of pfaff out there about this call at the moment, most of it laughably self-serving. The bottom line is that MIC has set up a "sanctioning body" at the request of Honda, Suzuki, and Kawasaki, to run a competing race series to the DMG (formerly AMA) series.
Yamaha, to its credit, has announced that pending further analysis of the situation (i.e,. who folds first), it’s sticking with the existing DMG format.
People in the know about racing will realize that splitting up a small pie into even smaller bits is a seriously stupid response to rules changes you don’t like. Ask the IRL/CART Indy car racers how well the last decade has been to them … and the transporters for one of those teams would probably carry the cost of three AMA superbike teams.
Well I don’t know which tracks MIC will use. DMG has announced they have signed a letter of intent with all the existing tracks with options on an extra 2.
Similar to the IRL-Cart split, the only winners in this shall be MotoGP and World Superbike.
Interest in American racing shall plummet, and the fans shall go directly to the Big-Leagues,