A 65-12 months-antique sports league that’s fallen into obscurity is funneling millions of dollars into rebuilding its dependable and profitable fan following.
American Flat Track, the collection that capabilities competition sliding their bikes upwards of 140 mph around a dirt oval, opened its 0.33 season in Daytona, Fla., on Thursday with hopes of making a family name.
“We will do something we want to do to make bigger the footprint, to extend the reach of the sport,” CEO Michael Lock advised Fortune.
Interest in the series, which started in 1954 under the call AMA Pro Racing, waned over a long time with the upward push of other sorts of motorbike racing. Lock, a former Ducati chief govt, rebranded the collection as American Flat Track in 2016 and started imposing measures to resurrect the game, from raising price tag charges to imparting a play location for youngsters.
The efforts appear to be running: sales from price ticket income have accelerated at a double-digit clip because the rebranding project commenced. In 2017, nine 500 people became out for a single race, more than the roughly 4,000 expected. In the last 12 months, crowds surpassed 10,000-robust twice. Meanwhile, Lock is gambling up the sport’s grassroots appeal, emphasizing Flat Tune’s drama and the talent and bravado of its competition. One flat track racer, Johnny Lewis, compared the bikes’ thrilling lack of grip and balance to “ballet on dirt.”
“There’s not enough cash in the game but for the athletes to come to be cynical,” Lock said. “They run like old-school athletes.” American Flat Track goes upscale, peddling perks, including reserved seating, favored parking, and concessions delivered to the stands to build a target audience. “The early adopters buy the most highly-priced tickets,” he stated.
The opposition to clients’ interests and wallets is fierce, particularly for an unmarried-day occasion.
“It’s no longer that tough to convince people to do something quick and finite for a couple of hours, or longer like a two- or 3-day song pageant,” Lock said, “to say ‘Come and do something for an afternoon, or three-quarters of an afternoon,’ is to get murdered.”
Meanwhile, the collection must also discern how to entice home viewers who livestream the races. “There’s a compelling case to do that,” Lock stated. “Sometimes more compelling than to go to an event two, 3, four hours away.” American Flat Track also started out airing tape-not on-time broadcasts on NBC but desires at least 1/2 a million visitors to signal blue-chip sponsors like Coke or M&M’s. “I don’t think we can get there on a tape-behind-schedule display,” he said. Reaching a target audience of 500,000-strong could “exchange our world.”
He additionally took into consideration setting the collection’s content behind a paywall, but “anybody I’ve spoken to who’s performed that asserts you will lose 75% of your target market.” Meanwhile, Lock is exploring how to enhance the sport’s profile the world over, which he thinks can resonate with viewers and sponsors such as American motorbike makers seeking to develop past the U.S. “Motorcycles are well-known, whether you’re in Bangkok or London,” he said. “We’ve been given a product that is quite packageable.”
Lock said American Flat Track should appoint a strategy similar to the NFL, which hosted exhibitions in London earlier than regular-season video games that can check the weather for a local franchise. Said Lock, “They’re growing a fan base for something that 20 or 30 years in the past changed into inconceivable.”
