Welcome to Momentum, a motorsports podcast powered by High Gear Success. I'm your host, Heather Wilson-Shilts. Here we share the stories and strategies that keep the world of motorsports moving forward. Today's guest is Larry Lawrence, a motorcycle journalist and historian, an author, and the owner of riderfiles.com. So Larry, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me, Heather. So you have been documenting motorcycle history for a long time now, but where did your love of riding and history, specifically in motorcycling, start? Well, I was working for the AMA. uh I worked for AMA Pro Racing. I was communications manager. um at the time, I don't even remember the guy's name. The guy was directing the Motorcycle Hall of Fame. When they started in 1998, they needed someone to write the bios, the bios of all the inductees of the Hall of Fame. And I want to say that they They felt like they had to catch up with history. they did like a mass induction of like 98 uh inductees in that first year in 98. So I had a lot of bios to write. uh that got me started in delving into motorcycling history and whatnot. So just started interviewing the riders who are still alive, uh families of those who weren't. uh doing, you know, just going into old magazine articles, books, ah you know, websites, anything I could do to find information on these guys. And then that, you know, that started giving me a really good foundation on the history of the sport. And then when did you start rider files? Has that been a more recent project? ah Yeah, I started it, I want to say 2008 or nine. uh I started that because I, you know, I was a photographer, racing photographer before I started the AMA. So from the early 80s to when I started the AMA in 95, I shot races, you know, all over the country, mostly road races, but I also did motocross, a little bit of motocross, a little bit of flat track. and even a little bit of hillclimb and maybe a few off-road events. so I thought, you know, I should digitize these photos. So I started digitizing. That was mid-2000s. I bought a scanner and started digitizing the photos. And after I had, you know, most of them digitized, I thought, what am I going to do with these? So I started Rider Files basically just to share those photos. And it sort of just grew from there. people... really enjoyed seeing these old photos and would start discussions. And really when I started on social media, especially Facebook is when things really took off because Facebook makes it really easy to have discussions with the comments sections. that went along fine. then Cycle News, oh, Henny Ray Abrams died. A good friend of mine passed away and he'd been shooting. since the 70s and he lived in Europe. So he had GP stuff and motocross GP all the domestic stuff here in the United States. It was a really comprehensive collection and his family um asked me to you know, take his files and digitize them and curate that and just keep his memory alive through his photos. So that began a really long. mean he had hundreds of thousands maybe towards a million. uh, images, racing images. So I started scanning those. And, uh, at, at one point I got close to the end of scanning them and I, and I knew CycleNews probably had a lot of his stuff cause he shot for CycleNews. So I went to California, Paul Carruthers was the editor at the time. And we went through the, their storage place and they had just file, just dozens of filing cabinets full of old, old, uh, slides and negatives. And so I'm going through there trying to find Henny stuff. uh And Paul just said, so we found a bunch of Henny stuff. And Paul said, if there's anything else you want to scan that's neat, just, you you have room for it, take it. So I had these big giant Rubbermaid tubs, you know, that we didn't even think about it at first, but we filled those things up and they weighed about 80 or 90 pounds a piece. So we're both picking these things up and taking them to my van. But anyway, so I ended up getting a not only Hennie stuff, but a lot of CycleNews stuff. And so I started scanning that as well. So it just expanded the universe of the images I had available to feature on the website. How do you categorize them or tag them electronically? And do you feel like a lot of the photos had good information as to what event it was, who's in the picture, or were you trying to figure that out as well? They were pretty good, especially after Paul Crothers came on uh board. uh He really stressed this to the people who were working in the lab. CycleNews was a pretty big operation back in the 80s and 90s. They had a lot of people working for them, and they had a lab crew of about three or four people. uh they were pretty good, I would say, for the most part, of marking on the... They would develop the negatives. and do contact sheets, what they call contact sheets, which are, you know, just shows every image in that film strip. And then they would write on the back of that, you know, like Hangtown 1982 or whatever, and then write the photographer. So I would say for the most part, 80 % of CycleNews and stuff is well marked. But then there was another 20 % that had no identification, no markings at all. And it was funny because I scanned the stuff that was identified first. And I didn't even think when I got to the end, all I would have was stuff that I didn't know what it was. uh Sometimes I did, but what's great about social media and the internet and whatnot is I can post these things on there and I'll say, hey, this is an unmarked negative. someone recognize this rider or this tracker, you know, whatever. Nine times out of 10, mean, within a few minutes, someone knows who the person is. So it's been a real benefit to get the ID for these photos. So obviously you've experienced the era from print to digital media and now social media platforms as well. Do you feel like that has changed the way that stories are told even in motorsports? Not just the difference between like a hard copy print and a digital, but like, do you feel like that's actually changed the way that the stories are told? definitely, definitely. think so. I mean, I remember, you know, dating myself, but going back to the old days, uh I started covering races in the early 80s. And back then it was literally, literally typing it on paper and then faxing it, you know, to, to CycleNews. And then you would, you would take the film and develop it and then, you know, next day air the prints to them or. or if it was really, they were gonna run it in that next issue, you would go to an airport and find a plane that was going to uh Long Beach or LAX or something, and you'd find a passenger, this was in the days when you could just go up to the gate. There was no checking or anything like that, no TSA or anything. And I'd just walk up to a gate and go, uh with a $20 bill and I'd have a roll of, you know, in a bag of eight rolls of film or something. And I'd say, Hey, can you take this film with you? And someone's going to meet you there at the, at the airport when you land and pick it up from you. And I'd give them a 20, 20 or dollar bill. And they're like, yeah, sure. And, you know, so they they'd fly across the country, you know, to LAX and there'd be someone from CycleNews. They're meeting at the gate and you know, they'd be holding up a sign, you know, CycleNews and They'd give them the film and they'd rush off and develop it and get it in the next day's paper. So yeah, it's changed a lot. That's so cool. That's such like a crazy story, but that is so cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, you know, and the other thing that was sort of cool about it, you know, when you were covering the stories, usually there was, you know, like the CycleNews would go to print on Monday. So usually at a Sunday race, you didn't have to have it until the following Monday, you know, not the next day on most races. So, you know, you had time to, you know, like after the race was over, you'd go out buddies and and, you know, go get dinner or, you know, do whatever, you know, just you had time to socialize and stuff like that. And when, the internet came along, all of that went away because you had to feed the beast, you know, you had to get, had to get information out there immediately. So I found when the internet came along and AMA started his website, we had to, you know, type stories all day constantly and put it into, into the website. it really changed the way we covered races for sure. With kind of the rise of the internet and instant information and even social media, I feel like accelerated that there's so much content being created today, but I kind of feel like not all of it will withstand the test of time. So in your opinion, what separates just content feeding the beast from actually something that becomes a part of history? Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. you know, take any supercross, for example. You know, I just went to the Indy supercross, Indianapolis supercross here a few weeks ago. And, you know, you go to the media, the press meeting, the press day, and, you know, there's like 50 people in there. And you realize what it is, it's every team has their own social media person. uh Individual writers have social media people. And so they're just, they're constantly feeding, you know, short little reels and bits of information. So, so you can get a lot more information than you could in the old days from various sources. And, uh, but you know, supercross issues, a news release afterwards. And, know, I don't sit there and watch the races and type up a race report. just, you know, I like almost every other website. I. I use the news release. They're excellent releases, but you know, that's not real journalism. I mean, that's like watching there, you know, going to the race, watching it, uh, going out and getting interviews and, know, making sure you have the story you're, sort of getting the story as supercross wants to tell it. So I think that's one part that's sort of missing now is that, um, you're getting sort of the corporate line of, of, of what happened that weekend versus, you know, maybe a reporter's perspective on what happened. Because I don't think there's any publications that actually send. mean, there are, but a lot of them are dual purpose. Like a lot of them are doing PR for Monster or whatever. It's sort of a different beast these days as far as the media is concerned. Yeah, you kind of have like the live happenings, like the play-by-play reports as things are happening during the race. know, maybe somebody crashed or somebody got injured or something like that. then a lot of it's like more behind the scenes kind of cultural phenomenon type stuff, like you said, more so than strictly kind of recapping or writing a race report. Yeah, so it's definitely far more comprehensive these days than it was in the old days. I mean, you know, you wouldn't find out you wouldn't get a quote from anybody off the podium usually, unless they were a major writer that was in the points, you know, high up in the point standing and they they crash or had a bad night or something. But most of the time you'd only get a report and only talk, you know, only have quotes from the top three or four writers. And now if you want to, you can almost get you know, find out what every individual writer, even guys who didn't make the main what happened to them. And so so the information is a lot richer, deeper than it was in the old days. uh But again, you're not getting it from an objective standpoint from a reporter that's there with journalistic standards, you know, you're getting it from the people themselves, and there's no filter. But sometimes the filter is they're putting out what they want to put out, you know? But I think it's definitely better today because if you're really into it, there's just a lot more content to be had. I think it will be interesting though as time goes on to see what kind of lives long term. Like what, if you're looking back, you know, decades from today, like what content are you going to be finding? and especially with social media, like it comes and it goes and they change things and they delete things. And so I think it'll be interesting to see kind of what content withstands the test of time. Yeah, that's a good point. I websites come and go. uh Social media, you know, sometimes I try to find something that I posted on Facebook, you know, five or 10 years ago and I can't find it, you know, it's uh so yeah, it's it's not like, you know, if you have a magazine and you have it in your closet, you can go back and refer to that, you know, 50 years from now. uh But yeah, it will be interesting to see I think about the same thing with images. you know, we've got all these images I've been scanning. There's a negative or a slide or print and they're there. They're physical. And, you know, even though I've scanned them and digitized them, I still keep the originals. And so there's a physical thing there, you know, like, but what happens if, you know, somebody's got all their photos on a hard drive that blows up or some website has it and it goes away or whatever. So yeah, I a little bit about the permanence of our history. It seems counterintuitive with so much information out there, but there are some worries long term, 10, 20, 30 years down the road. You kind of hit on what I was going to go to next of the worry of history being lost. We are kind of talking in the technology realm, but also as generations pass. So do you feel like that's urgent work that needs to be done, that we need to be getting pieces of history from the people that are still alive before it's too late? Yeah, I think so. mean, I think it's interesting when they do some of these things where uh they'll show a current day rider a picture of, you know, a great champion, say Bob Hannah or something like that. And maybe two out of 10 will even know who it is. motorcycling is always looking forward. Motorcycle racing specifically is always looking forward. I think motocross does a good job tying in, and supercross, the history. bring back some of the old champions to be honored at these events. And they'll do features of, here's who won this supercross race in 1996, whatever. They do a pretty good job with that. I think that some of the other organizations may be a little lacking on that maybe, you road racing, they're they're a little lacking on that maybe flat track, maybe off road, I don't know. But yeah, I think the motocross and supercross sets a good example of what we should do to try to tie in the past to the to the current day racing scene. Yeah, I definitely think that there are certain disciplines that are underrepresented from like a historical context. Maybe they have the information, maybe they're just not sharing it, maybe it was never collected. Definitely feel like certain disciplines do a better job at that than others. Yeah, I would like to see the AMA. mean, the AMA is the sort of the keeper, right, of the information. But you go on their website and you're not going to be able to find who won a national enduro in 1972 or something like that. I think it would be great if they would go back and, uh you know, have a section on their website that has past race results to start with, and then maybe build upon that. Then you have a biography of of the champion of each year, know, biography of, uh, you know, John Pinton, uh, you know, bill Baird, you know, just going on up to, you know, Cunningham to, know, all the way, you know, all these guys, same thing with motocross road racing. I think they should build sort of a, know, they have the motorcycle hall of fame, which does that to a certain extent, but I think they should have a, a racing history specific section of their website that you can go back and find out. First, the last place finishes at every race. I mean, this would be my ideal. You know what their competitions numbers were during that race, know, so you could go back and for me, ID old photos, uh bios of champions and then even expand down, you know, in the future. I mean, all this stuff I would love to see and that would that would help uh keep history, keep the history available to everyone without having to go into deep research. mean, as it is now, uh if you want to find out who won uh some national juror in 1974, you know, you have to have a magazine collection or you have to have a subscription. Cycle News has their archives. You can subscribe to that. There are a few ways to find it, but it's sort of difficult. Yeah. And we're primarily talking high level national events too, right? And so there's obviously a lot more racing even beyond that, um, the local racing scene, regional stuff. so I also think people should think about that in documenting their local race series history, whether it's in photos and writing or interviews, like what would be your advice for somebody that is, is just maybe doing it for fun or. They are very seriously wanting to document their local racing scene. What would you tell them to start doing? I think a good starting place are the AMA districts. A lot of them, I mean, almost all of them have websites. It'd be great if each of those districts could have people who would go back and gather the history and document all that of the regional races and the local races and stuff like that. That would be ideal. It's a lot of work. You have to find someone who's into it, know, that likes to go back and... find that old information. But yeah, that, you know, the district websites would be a good place to do that. Even the AMA going back to the AMA. I mean, they should, they should do that as well for the regional series, you know, and go back and make sure all that history is not lost. uh It's, it would be even sort of hard to find some that stuff if you go back several years, because I know when I worked at the AMA, I was, uh that's one of the things I did when I started 95. I'll never forget Kawasaki called and they said uh they had Ryan Hughes, Damon Huffman and someone else. uh I can't remember. Anyway, there are three riders that they had signed for the factory team that year and they wanted their past history, how they finished in all their races leading up to that. And Connie Fleming, who is, you know, working in pro racing at the time and sort of uh the keeper of that stuff. goes, well, We have it, but we have to go up to the storage attic and find the points cards for each year and then find out. I'm like, what? This is 95. We're well into the computer age. So I said, we have to start digitizing, or we have to start documenting these results and putting them in a database. So we did. We started getting these points cards down and putting them in a database and eventually we got motocross, road racing and uh supercross and maybe flat track for sure. And maybe even hillclimb. Although we, funny story about hillclimb, we didn't have, we couldn't find points cards for hillclimb anywhere. And Bill Boyce, who was this guy who'd been around the AMA since the fifties, he was still alive. He goes, well, I think I know someone who may have those results and it was Earl. Bowlby this this classic old hillclimb champion and he was one of these guys who Saved everything and we went to hit we drove down and we called him before and he said yeah I got all the information For when they started the hillclimb as a national championship series It used to just be one race at term and then they started a series at some point He goes. Yeah, I've got all those races we went down. He had file folders all meticulously in in order by year in every race and we pulled them out and there's the result sheets and the times and the bikes they were racing and I'm like, thank you Earl. It was, uh and that's how we were able to get the hillclimb results data-based. So yeah, a lot of that stuff when they started computers in the 80s, they were on these tape reels, know, like big old reel to reel tapes. And so I think a lot of the history would be on that and you'd have to have some way, you'd have to send that off somewhere to get the data off of it because certainly they don't have the computers anymore that can read that stuff. It would be a big task, no doubt about it. Have you ever had a situation where two sources remembered the same event completely differently? Oh yeah. Yeah. I had a really funny story. Marty Tripes, I interviewed him for the hall of fame motorcycle hall of fame. I was out in Santee, California where he lives and we were sitting in a Mexican restaurant and I just had my tape recorder on and I'm just asking him what happened year by year. And he remembered winning, uh, like a Denver national motocross race when he was 14. And then someone ratted him out and he was suspended or something. And so I went back and I looked at the, you know, the reporting on the race and he didn't win it. He remembered that he won it, but he had and he would finished on the podium. I think he was third or something. And then he got ratted out and then he was suspended for a year and really didn't make any difference because he wouldn't be eligible to race until that year was up anyway, because of his age. But he did. He finished on the podium when he was like 14 years old. And, uh, but he remembered it as a win. yeah, you, you get that memory is a funny thing. you say something over and over again and before long, you know, you're that's the way you remember it. but yeah, you get two different people and they have two different memories of who took who out and so on and so forth. Yeah. At what point did you feel like you realized you went from just kind of like being a photographer or a writer to like really preserving the sports history and did that take on like a different meaning for you? Well, yeah, I mean, you when I started working in the industry, it was as a PR person for pro racing actually started with WERA W-E-R-A road racing at first, they had a where a pro series in this series called Formula USA. And I was the PR guy for that series and then immediately went into the AMA. So I was always just about uh current day racing, current riders, uh getting them in the media, getting them in newspapers, radio, TV stations. You know, that was my whole thing. And I didn't really think about the history that much. Although I always, I always liked to know the results from the past races because I wanted to say, you know, if Miguel Duhamel broke the record for the most superbike wins, I wanted to be able to know that. So we had to go back and gather that history to make sure we, we knew that basic stuff. But, um, when I started doing the hall of fame things that really, that's when I realized, you know, there's a lot to this and I got to really study this and do these interviews and really get to learn the sport. And as I did that, was a hall of fame biographer for 10 years. And I think by the end of that, and then I started a CycleNews history column called archives. And I did that for 15 years. So I realized after I've done all this stuff for, for years and years and years that I, you know, gathered a lot of knowledge and um that And then people started coming to me all the time for information, you know, to this day, they call me and they, want to know what happened here. You know, do you have an image of this, you know, this, that, and the other. I realized I'm sort of, uh, one of the keepers of, you know, of information of the sport. And I take it really seriously. You know, I want to, I want to see the. Or I'm gone, you know, so I'm, I'm, I'm strategizing ways to, you know, get this history out there where everybody can see it and use it. Well, and just like having the information, it can exist, but being able to sort through it can be a very time consuming thing or knowing the right source to find the information. I know I was writing some race reports for a national level series and I would love to have like a kind of almost like a statistics book that I could very quickly reference. Like, was this their first career win? Was it their 10th career win? What year did they start racing? And. for me to go and figure that out for just a race report would take hours and hours. So it just really wasn't worth the effort in that moment. But it's information that I would love to have readily available and quickly be able to find it. Yeah, and that's one of the things I did when I started the AMA. We started doing media guides. Here's one of them. uh This is the 97 super I just reach up on my shelf and grabbed one, but you can see it's pretty thick. You know it's got a lot of information in there. Say year by year, you know uh point standings. All the first to last place finishes from the year before. bios on the on past champions bios on current riders. I mean, there's just a lot of information in there and we used to do those for every series, you know, road racing, supercross motocross, flat track and hillclimb uh every year. So those things don't exist anymore in print anyway. I don't know if anybody does them digitally, but yeah, something like that's very important to exist. We started to do national Enduro. Bill Amick took over They called it amateur racing back then. I think they called it AMA Sports or something like that. It's like the amateur level or the the non. Pro stuff, I guess, if you will, although you know Enduro and GNCC, that's certainly pro stuff, but we started to do national Enduro. Bill gave me a couple of years worth of results. copies of those and I was supposed to database them and I and we were going to database the whole series and I did a couple of years and I don't know what happened. I think that may have been the time when I left the AMA or something like that and it just never got done. So came close, but the National Enduro stuff still out there to be done. Yeah. Something else exciting that I want to make sure that we chat about is that you just released a new book, The Immortals of American Motocross and I had it on pre-order, so I got it like the day that they would deliver it to me. I've gotten to read a little bit of it now. That's awesome. But this book is really cool. Really nice, like hardcover kind of coffee table style book. I'm always a big fan of like big images in it. So yeah, kind of tell us where the inspiration for this book came from and how you chose who went into it. Well, that was the biggest task. this company approached Paul Carruthers to write a road racing book, The Immortals of American Road Racing. And Paul was working at MotoAmerica at the time. And he said, I'd love to, but I just don't have the time to do that. And they said, do you know anybody who might be able to do it? And he gave him my name. And I'd done a book on Ben Spies before, a world superbike champion and a motoGP rider and a multi-time AMA champion. And uh so I had some experience writing books, a book. And so uh they contacted me and we were talking about road racing. sort of wish I would have. done the road racing because it's more in my wheelhouse. That's what I started covering when I first started. And I know that sport inside and out probably better than just about anyone. But I just in one of the meetings I had with the publishing company, em you know, we were doing a zoom meeting and I said, have you guys considered motocross? Because I think it's a, you know, it's a bigger sport. I mean, it's, it's just, you know, you get a lot more people coming to motocross races and And I think it, you know, it would probably be a better seller. And I was just thinking like, I'll do the road racing one. And then down the road, I'd do the motocross one. But then they, they said, okay, well, we're going to do some research and get back with you. This is a big publishing company. It's part of Simon and Schuster. And, you know, they had, you know, a team of people and they got back with me. We think we want to do the motocross one now. uh So I'm like, boy, wish I hadn't said that, but. So anyway, fortunately, I had interviewed every one of these guys with the Motorcycle Hall of Fame or with Cycle News, my archives. I had extensive interviews with these guys, some of them multiple interviews. So I was able to go back. And in some cases, I went back and talked to them again. But a lot of these, I already had so much interview information that I could do it from what I had. So it turned out to be not that difficult to do. The hardest part was, so I sat down, I think the first rider I wrote was Jeremy McGrath because I had a lot of interviews with him and I got all those interviews and I transcribed them. and they wanted like 3,000 words per rider And I was just typing away, going, going at it, and I'm like, okay, done, got Jeremy McGrath. And I did, I looked at the word count and it was 6,000 words. Like, oh no, how am I going to fit Jeremy McGrath's career into 3,000 words or all of these guys, you know, how am I going to do that? So that was the biggest challenge was trying to, fit an entire career into 3000 words. But, in terms of how I did the ranking, that was, that was the hardest. part of all. uh It was not easy because I called Ricky, Jeremy, uh Hannah, a bunch of guys. I'm like, hey, would you give me a list of your top 20 guys who rank, you know, and none of them wanted to do it. uh They're like, there's no way you can compare eras and stuff like that. And then I, so I called a bunch of uh motor cross journalists. And I said, Hey, can you none of them want it? They're like, nah, I don't want to put my name, you know, so nobody really wanted to. And I knew when I did this book, they were going to be a lot of, know, it's one of those books that you're going to see reviews eventually on Amazon. It says this guy's crazy. He's got, know, Jeremy McGrath at number three. There's no way McGrath, you know, that kind of thing. So what I did is I came up with a formula and I worked with several writers and journalists to do this. But We came up with a formula of, know, OK, this rider has so many championships, so many wins, you know, wins in 250 wins in 125 or 450 and 250 now, you know, super, you know, interams, transams. And we just came up with a formula that we plugged and chugged. And we also gave a little bit of a boost to people who raced in what we considered sort of the golden era of the sport, which would have been the 80s and early 90s because there were so many great champions in that era and they were all battling against each other. So, but we came up with a formula and I plugged and chugged all the numbers in it took a while to do and I built it, you know, a spreadsheet and I did it and that's how we came up with the rankings. It is funny though, because you know, you do something like that and guys are, you know, that are great riders are not in there and you're like, my gosh, you know. Right and I can totally understand people not wanting to attach their names to like a ranking list just You know, how that goes. the other problem with it is I finished this book about this time last year. I mean, was done with the book last year. It takes that long. There's that long of a lead time. So that was before Jett Lawrence won the Motocross and SMX. maybe even before uh Cooper Webb won Supercross last year. So those guys would have climbed in the rankings had I been including last year's races. So that's a problem too. The minute you put it out, it's sort of uh outdated in a sense. But I just thought, well, it's a good document of this point in time, who were the best up to this point in history, the first. 50 years or so of motocross. Yeah, and I think this book also will make a really great gift for the motocross or the motorcycle lover in somebody's life. So I'll be sure to link where they can purchase this in the show notes as well. Anyplace else that you want people to connect with you online to follow you or any of your work? Well, yeah, like I said, you can always go to rider files.com. I'm really active on Facebook, the rider, go to Facebook and rider files. That's where I, I just do a lot of extra stuff that I don't put anywhere else. I have a small following on Instagram too. then in CycleNews, I do the, the throwback Thursday every week, you know, the throwback Thursday picture. So that's sort of fun that they can, they can follow that as well. Nice. Well, thank you for joining me and thanks to everybody for tuning into Momentum. This has been a production of High Gear Success. If you want to connect or recommend a guest, head to MomentumMotorsportsPodcast.com. Until next time, keep the momentum rolling.