It was great to run into old friends this past weekend at the Dania Beach Vintage Motorcycle Show. The weather was beautiful and Clare Frost and Clive Taylor put on a spectacular motorcycle show! Congratulations on another great success.
Riding Into History will be doing some changes on classes and adding some new awards this year. Please read the updates. We are excited about our new added awards.
Reflecting the growing interest in collectible Japanese motorcycles, this year we are expanding that category with two new classes. Our current class structure is date oriented. We split them, to the degree possible, on dates of technology changes and landmark bike introductions.
In past years, there have been three classes for Japanese motorcycle; pre-1969 (Vintage), 1969-80 (Classic), 1981-90 (Modern). In 2016 the latter two classes were very large, making for a long day for the judges and difficult to reward all the very good bikes shown. Knowing we needed to create more classes, we analyzed the data from the past three years to see how best to achieve this.
We found that in both the Classic and Modern classes about half were one or two cylinder motorcycles and half were multi-cylinder. While this breaks with our date centric convention, to us it makes sense to divide the simpler bikes from the more complex machines.
The bottom line is there will now be five classes for Japanese motorcycles providing better, fairer competition, and more awards.
Last year we introduced the Don Bradley Award honoring our late, great friend and creator of our famous posters. For this award we select a motorcycle that we think Don would have liked, one that fits his imagination and taste. Last year Kathy Siller’s 1949 BSA Competition won the award. Who will win it this year?
We are adding another award this year, the Spirit of RIH Award. We are not going to divulge the guidelines at this time so as not to influence the contestants. All will be revealed at the awards ceremony at 3:00PM on May 20th.
Beyond the new class we are happy to announce that JTSprockets (www.jtsprockets.com/) is sponsoring the award for the Best Japanese Motorcycle at this year’s show. JT is the world’s leading manufacturer of motorcycle sprockets.
Registration forms are now available online and there is still no charge to enter your motorcycle. We really try to keep the cost to our participants reasonable, however, this year we have raised the price of the Grand Marshal Dinner to $55 due to the high quality of our venue at the World Golf Hall of Fame. Thank you for your understanding.