Erik Buell Unplugged and Uncut: The Death of Buell Motorcycles

You never really needed to go through channels to talk to Erik Buell if you wanted to, and you never had to cool your jets in a corporate antechamber before being granted a short audience, during which all you'd get was the company line. Nothing much has changed. If you want to talk to EB today, visiting www.erikbuellracing.com and clicking the "contact" link isn't difficult. And when you get Buell on the phone, he's gracious and sounds genuinely glad to hear from you, like an old friend.

We got EB on the horn when he was in Pittsburgh at his mother's farm. Mrs. Buell died a few years ago, and Erik was finally able to find the time to take care of things; boxing up belongings, separating what needs keeping from what will go in the dumpster so the farm can be sold. It took a few years, Erik says, to come to the conclusion he's never going back there. Life moves forward, not backward.

Naturally, you tell him you're sorry about Harley-Davidson's decision to kill off his company, Buell Motorcycles. And of course everybody wants to know: What's next?****

CW: What is the deal with Erik Buell Racing; what's on the docket? ****

EB: Basically, it's a way to keep some guys together that did a heck of a job last year, won a championship. And support Buell racers and work on some stuff we had on the table that was coming along. When Harley shut Buell down, the thing they definitely weren't gonna do was build any more race parts. That was a small business for Buell, and Buell was such a small part of them , infinitesimal, a pain in the neck. I proposed to them that I would do it, and kind of invest in it. They gave me a license to make parts and even new Buell race bikes until December 31, 2010—so I can actually make more 1125RRs. And other versions, and parts and information. It helps them sell existing inventory and parts, too, and customers who need service... it was a win for them and for me. Just like guys have a license to put Harley-Davidson on a T-shirt, I have a license to put Buell on a motorcycle this year. ****

CW: What's your take on the Harley-Davidson statement about not selling Buell because it was too deeply integrated into the company and H-D dealerships?

EB: Yeah, well, I'm just an engineer. I don't know the complexities of what they were talking about, I didn't really understand it myself. They were pretty adamant, that was the way it was going to be. I think they wanted to be sure their dealers still kept the service business and parts business and all that. I wish it hadn't happened but it was their decision to make.

CW: Were you as taken by surprise as everybody else?

EB: The shutdown? I knew only slightly before. Days, not weeks.

CW: The whole time you've been building Buells, you've been tilting at windmills, battling—until what, the last six or seven years? To me, the XB9S could maybe be the streetbike of the last decade, in my own humble opinion. Anyway my point is, you've always found a way to keep going. How about now? Will you be moving to an island and building custom guitars? ****

EB: No, I'll be back in the motorcycle industry. I still believe we can build an American sportbike that's a valid product, and I think we were there. ****

CW: Seemed very close.

EB: But that's the thing, we got hit by the recession and the whole industry was hammered, especially sportbikes. H-D felt like they had to invest every dollar they had in the Harley-Davidson brand, so no more investment in anything but Harley. I don't agree with them, but I won't vilify them. I'm still a believer that a sportbike brand from the U.S. has a lot of legs, a lot of potential, and we were only starting to scratch the surface. We were struggling with the fact that being in Harley dealers, to a lot of our customers, was a little bit of a negative. We had excellent dealers. Our best dealers were probably the best in the sportbike industry; the ones who did it well were incredible. But it was always a challenge for the guy who'd been riding Hondas and Yamahas to even make the first step into the dealership. And if the dealer wasn't a particularly strong one—and every brand has weak dealerships—well, they were already sticking their toe tentatively into this Hog shop, ya know? If they weren't met by somebody who knew what they're talking about, well, they'd bounce right back out the door again. We were working on overcoming that. Anyway, less than half of Harley dealers were Buell dealers, and some of those didn't like it. So when H-D asks, "Where should we put our money?" Well, most of them would not have said Buell. To me that doesn't mean our business isn't viable, it means the way we ran it was not.

We needed a water-cooled motor for a long time and we got one. I was a strong believer that we should've been racing at a high level from the very get-go. That made no sense to Harley-Davidson; they do racing for fun, they don't do it as an image-building thing. Racing is just one of the things to do on a Harley—"Let's go to the drag races this weekend"—but the brand isn't built around it at all. They didn't understand when I'd say how crucial it was for Buell to race; in our market if you don't race, you're not considered the real deal.

CW: What year did you plan to be in World Superbike?

EB: My plans tend to be a little more aggressive, my plan was to be there in 2011. We were going to run American Superbike this year and hoping to do really well, and go to World Superbike the following year. Hopefully when you see the bikes Erik Buell Racing builds—and some of the stuff won't be legal because we're so small now we can't build the volume—but some of what you will see is the streetbike thatwould've been, but in Superbike racing form. It'll be a little taste of where we would've been.

And we had some other things going on too. It was tough to do it with Harley. It doesn't mean they're bad.... Anytime you have a big company working with a small company, your chances for success are low, in any business. When you add in the customer passion being such a crucial part of it, like it is in motorcycles, it just about squares the problem.

CW: From the outside, it seems like if you were only a small percentage of the Harley-Davidson pie, it might have made sense for them to hold on until things got better economically. What's your take?

EB: Well the new guy they brought on board felt like he had to make dramatic, decisive moves to show he was changing what the company was doing. And time will tell whether they were the right ones or not. But I want to go after again and I'm not sure what form that's gonna be in a year or two, I'm still a believer. I know we were building great motorcycles. We were still struggling, but I think had we gone racing and gotten, um,pride, I think a lot of the negativism that got stuck on us would've died out. It was always easy to take a whack at us. And it would've been harder once we'd been successful.

Man, I was so excited about Superbike, because we ran last year with just that first version. Two young riders without much experience, and those guys were battling in the lead pack. The only place we were down was in power. Corey West went around the outside of Neil Hodgson and Ben Bostrom—world champions. Factory riders from other teams were coming over to me and saying, "that's the best... handling motorcycle I've ever seen."

Larry Pegram said his bike has wonderful power, but was a little hard to bend into the corners... "I always thought that was a Twin thing," he told me. "Until today." That was a great thing. And that would've really made people's eyes open. The chassis design principles and the things that we were doing were not goofy, off-the-wall, weirdo things from guys trying to build Harleys into sportbikes. We didn't expect to win everything, but we did have strengths and would've made the whole field that much more interesting.

The Ducatis have their strong suits—power, and in the fast sweeping stuff. In the tight stuff they struggle a little compared to the four-cylinders. We were a little of both, and this year's bike would've been better, enough to be in the hunt—and I just think it would've been exciting as hell. I think people would've stopped talking about Buell being weird. And that would've been all we needed to make it. I was so excited, and I was just floored when they shut us down. They just didn't understand it. An executive comment was, "Geez, we're losing money, what are we doing funding Erik's racing hobby?"

It means they didn't understand the customer. And from the perspective of a company that's only two percent of sales, well, those guys only have so much brain capacity and only so much capability to deal with a ton of information. And they were managing both brands. They're talking to the dealers and the dealers are saying, "Nah, racing's not important." Maybe if we'd been in dealers with a Honda or Suzuki dealership on the side, they might've heard, "Hell yes, you need to be racing!" But there were only a few Harley/Buell dealers who understood the importance of that.It was a scope thing. I'd love to prove that what we were doing is feasible, but they came to the conclusion that the sportbike business is not a good business. Honda and Yamaha and all the sportbike brands took a beating. That's what happens in recessions, but combine that with the fact they had a big shift, and they themselves were taking a beating, and you can understand why they would yell, "Enough! I don't want to think about this stuff anymore."