Favorite Book of The Year - Hodgson’s Back on Track
With the year quickly coming to a close there’s a certain amount of self-reflection hanging in the air. That quasi-introspective light that reveals both the magnificent and the less then stellar, the things you admire and the thing you’d like to alter when next season comes.
Clearly this hasn’t been the best year for my personal riding because I just haven’t had enough time to actually do it and I’ve spent far more hours away from the bikes than near them. On one level that eats away - rather constantly - at my sense of ‘what’s right in the world’, however the desire to be ‘near’ bikes has shown itself in a variety of different forms. Some of which are relatively obvious - like the hours spent working on moto-docs, while others were surprisingly unexpected.
In particular the vast amount of moto-reading that I found myself consuming over the course of the past year. Some of these escapes where brand specific while others era specific, and a few were merely tangentially moto-related, yet of all the books I flew through this year none was nearly as illuminating as Back on Track
Generally speaking I’m always somewhat hesitant to pick up a biography written with or by the subject themselves, as often times these sorts of books are crafted in the glowing light of perfection and rarely shed insight into the person themselves. Instead these sort of ‘tell all’ experiences feels less like the truth and more like you’re reading what is essentially one very hefty Nike commercial that’s sole purpose is to help stir the subjects celebrity status. However Back on Track is remarkably different than other puff-piece Bios — Because it isn’t one.
The book was not written during a Championship season, nor does it paint a perfect picture of Neil or pretend that he is in fact a perfect person. Instead Back on Track offers the most candid look that I’ve ever read on what it takes to run among the big boys in WSBK. From the highs to the lows to the constant search for that little bit of extra speed in every corner, Hodgson and co-writer Neil Bramwell lay it all out there for the audience to relive and learn from.
Perusing the pages you get the sense that the actual act of racing is almost the easiest part of being a professional World Superbike rider. Rather it’s the constant movement and motion from one place to another and the assortment of issues that go along with living a vagabond existence that seems to be the most trying part of professional racing.
In addition to the absolute sense of honesty that the book portrays, Back On Track is surprisingly open about what works and what doesn’t when you’re racing. Considering that at the World Superbike level of racing it is truly everyman for themselves and an arena where success is often predicated on secrecy, it truly astonishing that Neil is as open about what goes on in the pits and how that ultimately affects his outcomes during a race. He and his team spend the year constantly plagued with parts that don’t work, bikes that blow up, a lack of factory support and a somewhat elusive search for better results. The way that they go about sorting these issues out is really the core of the book and the journey from the first race of the season to the last offers a surprising amount of knowledge that applicable not only on the track but in the everyday real world when you’re not even around a bike…
“The Honda Myth: The Genius and His Wake” - Go Read It!
A few weekends back I was kicking tires and telling lies inside the paddock during the AMA races at Fontana when the topic of Honda Motor Corp’s rapid historical ascent to the top spot in worldwide manufacturing came up in conversation. Even though I’ve clearly been hooked by the uniquely articulated passion of the Italian motorcycle industry, I’m not naive enough to ignore the tremendous historical contributions and implications that the Japanese motorcycle industry, and the Honda Motor Corp. in specific, has offered to motorcycling in general. In relatively short order, a mere twenty to thirty years post World War II, Honda went from a bit player in Japan to a dominant force worldwide. That’s an amazing amount of growth and a tremendous story to say the least.
My fascination with the brand’s history undoubtedly hit a high point during the Twist The Throttle shoot, when we visited one of the Honda factories in Japan and spent time with some of their folks inside their Tokyo headquarters. The way their “associates” (what Honda call its employees) spoke about the brand seemed remarkably different then the rest of the companies we visited. They were equally as passionate, but in a much more concrete way - almost as if the presence of Soichiro Honda still existed.
The tangible nature of the old man’s impact is one of the key differences that separates Honda from the other brands, partially I suspect because unlike the founders of Suzuki or Kawasaki for example, both of which started in the late eighteen-hundreds and in completely different business, Soichiro is still part of the company’s relatively ‘modern’ history. In the grand scheme of things, he really hasn’t been gone all that long. Therefore the fact that his drive and ambition still strongly echo probably should be all that surprising to the general motorcycle fan.
As I recounted my respect for what I’d seen and for what Soichiro accomplished, one of the folks I highly respect in the moto-landscape suggested that if I really was curious about how Honda got its start, then I ought to pick up a copy of “The Honda Myth: The Genius and His Wake” by Masaaki Sato (a former writer for the Nikkei paper in Japan, which is effectively their equivalent of the Wall Street Journal)… More After the jump… (more…)
Ducati People by Kevin Ash
Once The West Wing wrapped earlier tonight - seriously, has there been a better season? - I stole a few moments and finished the last few pages of Kevin Ash’s book, “Ducati People : Exploring The Passion Beind This Legendary Marque”. After ripping right through “Ducati 999 : Birth of a Legend” picking up another Ducatisti based book seemed like a no brainer.
Usually I find that most motor-related books that deal with company histories tend to be very bland on the character and very heavy on the details. Ash however treats the history of Ducati a bit differently. Instead of turning each page and finding what feels like a monotonous desmotronic valve discussion, he focuses on the people instead. The book features a rather large ensemble cast of twenty-four folks for whom beign associated with Ducati is a passion. They all have a varying degree of importance to the marque, but each is given their own chapter in essence to tell their unique piece of the Ducati story. By no means does this offer a comprehensive history of the brand, but instead small glimpses into the very foundation of what I would call the essence of the brand. None of the chapters are amazingly long in length, but they’re distilled down to one basic core element; feelings. What it felt like to be somewhere or do something. On a personal level I find this sort of editorial slant much more satisfying because let’s be honest here, I don’t really care what millimeter bolt the factory used in ‘73 but I do care about how the factory got from 1973 to today.
The book also offers some interesting perspectives by way of dedicating individual chapters to people you normally would never hear from in the more nuts & bolt history books. One of the women interviewed is a female factory test rider who started on the assembly line. Another is a rather ordinary desk jockey with no fancy title. Both offer very glowing opinions about working at Ducati, but not in an overhanded PR sensibility. (more…)
Ducati Design In the Sign of Emotion
In my continuing quest to read as much as I can about Ducati Motorcycles, tonight I’d like to add one more rather opinionated review of yet another Ducati book. For the past month and a half I’ve been working my way through “Ducati Design In the Sign of Emotion” by Decio Giulio Riccardo Cagugati and earlier tonight I basically wrapped up reading it.
Usually this is where I gush endlessly over what a fantastic read such-and-such book was, only tonight I can’t say I feel very passionate about “Ducati Design In the Sign of Emotion”. While I’d love to say that it’s yet another fantastic read for the Ducatisti faithful, sitting here right now I find it hard to describe how little I feel personally invested in the book. Completely let down might be to strong of a phrase to use, but I had hoped that Cagugati’s book would shead all sorts of light into the design process at Ducati over the years - much like “Ducati 999 Birth of a Legend” did in a very specific manor for the new 999 and 749 models. Yet ‘Ducati Design’ makes me feel less connected to marque perhaps because even though the words ‘design’ and ‘emotion’ are in the title the truth is this is really a history book - not a thesis on the creative process within the walls of Ducati over the years.
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Ducati 999: Birth of a Legend
Apparently in my continuing quest to become all things Ducati, I have one more opinionated review to pass forward into cyberspace…
Tonight I found myself completely engaged and engrossed in Alan Cathcart and Marc Cook’s recent book, “Ducati 999: Birth of a Legend”. Luckily for motorcycle fans in general and Ducatisti everywhere David Bull Publishing had both the guts to bring this wonderfully open and at times honest feeling book to the marketplace and also the ability to get the Ducati factory behind its creation.
The book details in no uncertain terms how the Ducati 999 came to be. As the sucessor to the venerable and iconic Ducati 916 motorcycle platform that revolutionized the sportbike world, the team at Ducati clearly had their hands full when they set their sights on redesigning the “it” motorcycle of the ninties. Alan & Marc capture this monumentual design journey from the inital sketching and pre-planning stages all the way through the final assembly and in the process shed a wonderful amount of light on what goes into rethinking a living legend. They share early design sketches, CAD drawings, mockups and mules that give the reader a wonderful sense of how the process works and truly gives you a behinds the scenes look at how this bike platform was created.
The book is not for the faint of heart however - while they clearly had tremendous access at Ducati, both to the people and the facilities, they go into rather amazing detail about some of the arguements and disagreements that took place while rebuilding and reinventing a legend. This is not a glossy new bike write up by an of the moment motorcycle mag.
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