American Motorcycle Dealer AMD 180 July 2014 | Page 4

Biggest ever World Championship?
ts easy to fall into the hype trap! Everyone is always describing their
"thing" as the newest, biggest, bestest. Of course they are - such is
the beastly nature of the beast!
In the case of shows and events for example, custom bike shows in particular,
there are many different ways of hyping an event - number of bikes entered, number
of competitors entering those bikes, in the case of international events the number
of countries those competitors have travelled from, and so on.
Throughout the ten years so far of operating and developing the AMD World
Championship of Custom Bike Building bike numbers, and especially competitor
numbers, have been important calibrations for the project.
Indeed given the international nature of the program the 'country-count' has
always been an important factor too. The Affiliate custom show program that we
operated while we were staging the Championship in the United States always
ensured that the event had a goodly proportion of builders and bikes from outside
North America. Especially for the eight years we held
it in The Black Hills during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Needless to say though the number of countries
represented grew massively with the move to Europe,
but one of the biggest issues that we had never yet
been able to address had been attendance public/consumer and trade/dealer.
The creation of BIG BIKE EUROPE as a stand alone custom parts, accessory and
performance expo with the Championship at its heart as a principal draw was a
decision that many said had been ten years late in the making, and the reaction to
the first BBE last year was universally positive.
We left Essen in May 2013 with the show successfully launched, and with a
product that we could now expect to be able build the kind of relevant attendance
for in a way that we never could in the United States, even at a Rally such as Sturgis.
The problem we encountered there was one of relevance. The vast majority of
Rally visitors do not go there in order to buy parts or accessories, and the vast
majority are strictly stock riders with a very light weight grasp of, and attitude
towards, customising.
Rally visitors are there for the riding experience - which is fantastic, as it should
be, and long may it continue to be.
Conversely the minority of rally attendees who are custom bike owners tend to
be lower mileage riders who actually trailer their precious investments in to the
area for a once or twice a year opportunity to "feel real"!
That is fine too, in its own way, but the AMD World Championship was always
about so much more - it was always and remains being about design and
engineering, and showcasing the work that custom shops and pro-builders can do
for a rider - from the mild to the wild.
It was never designed as a custom bike sales fest, as such, but as a demonstration

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of the "art of the possible" and the kind of diversity that stock riders can aspire to
within the limitations of their own budgets and their own riding lifestyle preferences
and habits.
So it was with great enthusiasm that accepted the opportunity to let our own
BIG BIKE EUROPE expo become an alternate annual rather than yearly event (as
originally envisaged) when INTERMOT came a calling and offered us the
opportunity to take our market's creativity and craftsmanship to an established
attendance of 200,000 riders and dealers.
This immediately accelerated the BIG BIKE EUROPE project by decades in terms
of the attendance and exposure we'd be creating for our competitors and exhibitors,
and immediately provided the final piece in the puzzle we'd been working towards
finishing for so long.
So, all hype aside, there is now no question that this year's AMD World
Championship of Custom Bike Building will not only be the best attended World
Championship so far, but by far the best attended
international custom motorcycle show there has ever
been - ever, anywhere. Period.
Those visitors, the INTERMOT visitor footprint, is a
serious riding one, riders who take their miles and how
they do them very seriously indeed, and attend the
show with spending on bikes, parts and accessories at
the very top of the list of their event experience priorities.
What is more the (long awaited!) recovery that is now underway in Europe,
including in Germany, means that attendance expectations are trending towards
there being record numbers of visitors of all kinds at INTERMOT this year, and for
those who have never been to the show, and are unlikely to ever have the
opportunity to do so (it is held every-other October at Cologne, Germany) it is eight
giant halls of walk-to-wall bikes, accessories, performance, tuning, service and
workshop tech and bike-geek heaven where only the most righteous of industry
professionals and the consumers they sell to dare to tread!
INTERMOT is an expo where you get serious bang for your buck. An expo where
lightweights get converted and where high mileage riders go with serious intent
to spend seriously.
Memo to all custom bike builders and custom parts and accessory vendors when was the last ti YH[