Larry Lawrence | May 11, 2016
The 2010s have proven to be a pretty poor decade to be a motorcycle racer, literally. Very few riders make money from money from racing motorcycles in America today, in fact, except for the few factory riders out there, most racers today end up in the red by participating in the sport. It turns out that’s the way it’s been for most of the sports 100-plus year history with a couple of notable exceptions.
It’s an especially tough pill to swallow for some of the veteran racers of today, who were able to enjoy, at least the tail end of one of the golden eras of motorcycle racing in this country. For a decade-long period from roughly the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s there were actually quite a few pro riders making a very good living from racing. Talking to riders and managers in the know, during that time frame there were several dozen riders across disciplines, who were making six-figure incomes from racing and associated sponsorships, with a few of the elites making even more annually. It’s safe to say that riders like Jeremy McGrath, Ricky Carmichael, James Stewart, Mat Mladin, Nicky Hayden and Miguel Duhamel were likely the highest paid riders in the history of the sport in this country.
As it turns out those salad days of motorcycle racing from the late ‘90s and early 2000s were an anomaly. Other than that period, and the Americans who made massive paychecks in Grand Prix racing, there was only one other period of motorcycle racing where riders made a hefty salary and surprisingly, that was the first decade of motorcycle racing.
From the mid-1900s up to the advent of World War I, being a motorcycle racer in this country could be a lucrative profession. There were a couple of dozen American manufacturers battling it out at the time and they paid top dollar for the best riders. We know this in large part due to the writings of one of the racers of the era, Arthur Chapple, who laid out in straightforward fashion, the pay scale of motorcycle racers from his era of board track racing.
In a 1913 article in Motorcycle Illustrated Chapple spoke of the plight of the Class B or non-factory riders. And even those privateer or support riders of the board track era made pretty decent pay. It was only in comparing them with the Class A rider, the factory guys, did their pay look small in comparison.
Who much did a factory racer make in 1913?
Keep in mind the average American made $15 per week in 1913. You could buy a nice house for $3000 and a car for about $500.
According to Chapple, Class A riders normally signed a contract with race promoters to receive a guarantee of $50 per meet, and there were often three meets per week. That means from guarantee money alone a factory rider could make $150 per week, ten times the normal weekly pay of an average American. And the top riders could race nearly year round by going to California in the winter months. So just on guarantee money, riders made roughly what would be equivalent to $10,000 per week in today’s money.
And that doesn’t take into account the prize money a rider could win at an event. The average Class A race paid four places with the winner getting $50, second $30, third $20 and fourth-place $10. So if a rider got on a hot streak they could substantially increase their pay above the $50 guarantee per event.
The support riders (or Class B) only made $10 guarantee show money and they only had the chance to earn $25, $15 and $10 for the first three finishing positions. Still a Class B rider was making at least double the average American in guarantee money, although Chapple points out in his article that with that money they had to keep their machine in racing condition.
Interestingly the board track promoters were the ones really making out like bandits in those days. Chapple estimated based on crowd size and ticket prices that promoters at the smaller board tracks typically cleared $1600 per meet and at the bigger tracks about $2200 per, and that was after paying all their expenses. This was huge money, roughly a little over $50,000 per meet in today’s money and they earned that three times per week during the racing season. And in the pre-organized labor days, the promoters need pay nothing to riders or track workers should there be a rainout, so the risk was minimal.
Chapple wrote, “On this basis consider the returns for a season of racing and you’ll find that the track promoters have had a pretty soft thing of it. With the riders getting next to nothing and the track owners free to handle the boys about as they are inclined to, it is not strange that there has been a scramble for F.A.M track franchises during the last few months.”
While it appears everyone involved in board track motorcycle racing in the 1910s were cleaning up, it should be noted that riders were lucky to survive the brutal conditions of the boards, which often were oil-slick from the open-valve motors, with riders hitting 80 miles per hour with no brakes and only massive splinters or worse to greet them if they should tumble. And track owners weren’t immune from peril. Several tracks suffered major damage when a bike caught fire, or worse and if they crashed through the thin boards separating the bikes from the spectators. So risks were everywhere.
The dangers of the sport meant it attracted the kind of personality who liked to live fast and spend freely. While the Class A board riders of the era often made big clumps of cash, you can rest assured most of them weren’t meeting every week with their investment managers. Instead many of them blew their earnings as quickly as they made it on wine, women and song, as they artfully put it in those days.
The loss of life was a dreadful part of the sport in that era, but with the money being paid there was no shortage of riders willing to play the game of two-wheeled roulette for fame and glory.