AMD World Championship matures as a bellwether of the market's futureFOR anybody reading my comment this month, it would be a good idea to do so having read my review of this year's 11th annual AMD World Championship of Custom Bike Building elsewhere in this edition.
Following our decision to move the Championship to Europe, and subsequently to embrace the opportunity that last year's Big Bike Europe gave us to stage the event at the INTERMOT expo at Cologne, Germany, the Championship program is now in the clichéd position of having taken ten years to become an overnight success.
The ten years that got us to this point were necessary in terms of time served to earn the opportunity to embrace what has been the primary objective all along.
Namely, to allow custom bike building, and those who seek to make their livelihoods from it, to break out of their past and embrace the new future that the industry was always going to have to start facing up to.
Even before the impacts of the downturn it had started to become obvious that endless recycling of the design and build values of the past would be no more viable as the 21st century unfolded, than the values of pre-WWII design and performance was to the boomers who embraced Captain America and the Billy bike.
The recession has been the final impetus behind changes that were already in play when the custom build market peaked around May 2006, but in so dramatically accelerating these changes, as so dramatically throwing the changes in motorcycle ownership and riding expectations into such sharp contrast with the past, the impacts of the downturn have coincided with the beginnings of the emergence of a new generation of riders for whom the pre-internet world is as strange as pre-hydrocarbon-burning eras were to 20th century consumers.
The combined effect of the social, economic and regulatory changes that are at play will render the so-called "traditional" custom v-twin bike building market obsolete unless the industry finds opportunities to show its wares to the millions of buyers for whom traditional custom bike values, references and events are alien, and unless it finds ways of tuning its "offer" to meet the expectations of those buyers.
Those who have had the patience to follow my ramblings throughout the last ten years will recollect that I was among the very few to be pointing to the ultimate demise of the custom v-twin market as defined at the time, right at the point where it appeared that its then seemingly unstoppable growth couldn't possibly be reversed.
In certain circles that made me deeply unpopular. Those who wished to see the custom market campaign for "dirty law" exemptions, and who sought to impose a cookie-cutter of design and engineering conservatism on a market originally characterized by innovation and individualism, now stand starkly exposed as the future-trend nay-sayers they always were.
Quite apart from the massive audience of genuine riders that we were able to take the custom industry to at INTERMOT, the news about the standard of design and engineering that was evident at this year's AMD World Championship in Hall 10 at the Cologne exhibition centre reverberated around the OE and parts and accessory booths of INTERMOT's other five halls like a shockwave.
The twin-fold objectives of giving builders access to an unprecedented audience in numerical terms, and of allowing the mainstream international motorcycle industry to see just how far custom design and engineering has travelled, have been achieved in spades.
Far from sneering dismissively at the custom market, the major mainstream motorcycle manufacturers are now tumbling over themselves in almost unseemly haste to get a share of that action, and to sign up custom bike builders so that their ideas and grass-roots understanding of what the riders of the future will buy can feed into their own showroom offerings in the years to come.
There are many things that those who have been involved in the AMD World Championship program down the years can be proud of, but not least among them is the already stupendous archive and record of custom bike design and engineering evolution at this critical time of change that our determination to fully photograph every bike in competition has now become - in the guise of the bike registry at the event website.
We have been exposed to many anecdotes down the years about the influence that the AMD World Championship archive is having, and indeed this year was no different, with one young custom bike shop owner becoming a first time World Championship competitor as a result of seeing the World Championship bikes online as a teenager, and dedicating his life to one day being able to come up with a project that, as he put it, "was worthy."
We have always maintained that we are merely the facilitators of a showcase, but a showcase with a mission and a purpose whose real importance would only become fully apparent when the custom motorcycle market had to face up to a world that had changed around it.
We are now in such a world, and when this year's photography has been uploaded, the 11th annual AMD World Championship will be seen as the one at which the impacts of changing demographics, the downturn and regulations will finally have passed top-dead-center, and at which an altogether new suite of rider references and expectations started to take ownership of the future of the industry.