Years of hard work

Hero MotoCorp announced that they are now partners with Erik Buell Racing and that there will be two race teams in the US wearing the Hero name on Buell's 1190RS racebike. And that the two will work together, the latter helping the Indians develop products.

What does all that mean?

First let's get past the stuff that isn't directly important to us. The US race teams. I would have been a lot more optimistic or interested in the Indian angle to the race team if the two Buells had been in some global racing series. But they aren't. The AMA is the US national racing series. So I'm thinking that's part of the contract. It serves to help Erik keep racing - something he loves and has done from the start. Maybe this means Hero will spend some of its incredible TV budget getting the AMA series telecast here as well. I wouldn't complain. Plus it gets Hero's name to certain countries where US stuff is popular. Like Mexico or Brazil. Most of the Americans, actually. Places where it might be (or is) exporting its products.

Second, the Buells of old. Erik has always thought outside the box and his bikes yell and scream this. They have done this from day one. A large part of his career was spent, one way or another, with Harley engine-d motorcycles. His turning the cruiser into proper sports bikes, the only really American sportsbikes in recent production history, operation was unique and successful. Then Harley bought into the operation and Buell officially became part of, well, branch of, Harley-Davidson. Some fearsome motorcycles came out of there. They looked different from everything, went different from everything else and the engineering solutions that Erik and team came up with were unique. Representative of an innovative engineer who learnt to work and solve issues on his own budget and time scales.

Now to see what Buell can bring to Hero MotoCorp.