A beautiful 1947 Indian Chief poses in the bike show at AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days 2015.
Back around 2006, when people were sure that real estate prices were going to go up 20 percent a year minimum, forever, and therefore lots of people thought it was a brilliant idea to take out a HELOC to buy an extreme, $40,000 chopper that was almost impossible to ride and was so uncomfortable you couldn’t stand to go further than the nearest bar, I remember seeing an epic traffic jam at AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days.
I worked at the AMA at the time and I remember the PR guy telling me that traffic was backed up all the way from the entrance to the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course into the nearby village of Lexington, Ohio. All those people were trying to get into our event. It was a good problem to have.
Of course it wasn’t much later that things changed.
Charlie Ransom grabs tips from spectators’ hands during the Wall of Death show at VMD.
The housing bubble burst, as all bubbles do (seen a chart of Chinese tech stocks recently?), the TV shows with tattooed guys building unrideable choppers got canceled, lots of people lost their jobs, and then they lost the homes they’d leveraged to the hilt, that PR guy (and a bunch of others) at the AMA got fired by the genius of a president who has led the association to its largest membership decline probably ever, and I’m sure there was some other depressing stuff, too, but it escapes me at the moment.
Summit County Vintage Racing always brings some sweet Kawasakis to VMD. Sadly, Sam Williams was taken by cancer and no longer returns to VMD to continue his colorful and accidental roadracing career.
The stuff sitting in the parking lot at VMD is often the equal of the bikes on display in other shows. You can potentially find your dream bike. Fancy an H2?
I’ve been back to VMD a few times since, and with perfect weather on tap for Saturday, after a month of rain that would test the imagination of Gabriel García Márquez, I decided to scope out the scene. VMD is still a fine vintage, a good way for anyone who loves motorcycles to spend a summer Saturday. But the event has definitely trailed off a little from a decade ago. Hasn’t everything?
It’s still a fun time. The thing I’ve always liked best about VMD is that it’s the most diverse motorcycle event I’ve ever been to. Sure, it celebrates old bikes. But you can see a greater diversity of motorcycles in the parking lot at VMD than you can see just about anywhere else, from old to new.
I always see something at VMD that I’ve never seen before. This year, it was a Japan-only 1954 Honda Dream for sale in the swap meet area. I can always count on that.
This Japan-only 1954 Honda Dream was for sale in the swap meet. Very sweet.
In other respects, however, VMD is not quite as, ah… robust as it used to be. There aren’t as many entries in the bike show and there used to be a bike show specifically for motorcycles that had to complete a road ride, first, but that seems to have disappeared from the schedule. There used to be half a dozen marques giving demo rides. This year, it was just BMW and KTM. The roadracing used to be huge, but that was before the AMA and AHRMA split. I think there were two entries in the sidecar class this year. I guess that’s good for them. Show up and you’re guaranteed a podium. Hardly any clubs use the event as a site for their annual rallies, like they used to do. And so on.
Part of that is because VMD revealed the potential of the vintage market and others jumped in, most notably the Barber Vintage Festival at the Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama. Those other events have drained off some of VMD’s attendance.
The fields aren’t as deep as in the past, but the roadracing still goes on at VMD.
The most surprising element to me is that the swap meet remains huge. I can’t figure it out. With Ebay, Craigslist, model-specific forums and a dozen other ways to buy and sell the weird and rare parts you need for that project in your garage, why do people still want to pay to pitch a tent in the mud and spend a weekend trying to sell random turn signals to sweaty strangers? I don’t know, but it’s a certified phenomenon. The VMD swap meet remains as big as ever, even when other elements of VMD aren’t.
VMD ain’t what it used to be, in the same way that Las Vegas real estate prices, Jesse James TV ratings and AMA membership figures ain’t what they used to be, either. But it’s still a fine way to spend a Saturday.
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