I spent most of Monday morning with George Barber, the man behind the Barber Motorsports racetrack and museum. Barber is a frank-speaking Southern gentleman with a passion for two things: motorcycles and his hometown of Birmingham Alabama. His plan with the Barber Motorsports facility is to create a Mecca to motorcycles that will both be known as the best motorcycle museum on the planet, one that will draw people from all over the world to Birmingham in order to see the best.

Barber and I talked while sitting at a table inside the archives department at the museum. It was barely eighteen hours after he'd promoted his first Superbike race.

Q. You had your first professional motorcycle race yesterday. How did things go from your perspective?

A. Man, I think they went great. We had a few little glitches, which you always do, but I'm amazed that for our first big race, how well things went. We've had some smaller events, some smaller WERA stuff, got our feet wet on that, but you'll never know how things work until you get the big AMA. I think it worked out great. Everything I heard was positive, there were very very few complaints. Some of the complaints were that maybe they had to stand in line a minute and a half longer than they should have. Or wanted to.

Q. Is it true that you actually ran out of tickets to sell? There were a few stories that were going around on Saturday, that you'd run out of tickets and also that you stopped selling tickets because you didn't want the fans inside to be too feel crowded.

A. We ran out of three-day tickets. We just sold them two-day tickets instead and let them stay, of course. We did run out of three-day tickets though.

Q. To a very enthusiastic crowd. It's one of the most enthusiastic crowds I've ever seen in America, rivaling the Laguna Seca World Superbike crowd.

A. Wasn't it great? I finally got in a position where I could see the group of people who were across from the pit area who were hollering and screaming and clapping; and I was just amazed. I hadn't heard that at many events.

I was going to say that most people in Alabama are not familiar with motorcycle racing. They are about NASCAR. However, I think about seventy percent of the tickets we sold went out of state. We sold to 44 states including Alaska. It's great for Alabama.

Q. Which must be heart-warming for you. You're a life-long Alabama resident, correct?

A. I was born and raised here, been here all my life.

Q. Can you take me through the process of how this track and museum became reality? I know that you had an informal museum and an AHRMA (vintage) racing team in the 1990s. How did you get here?

A. I start here: I raced Porsches for ten years, from about 1960 until 1971 or '72. I ended up with 63 first place trophies. In the 1970s my dad died, and I had to start racing in the milk business. Which was a hell of a lot more dangerous.

Through that whole period, when I was taking care of business, I still had this passion for racing in my system. I love racing. But I was just too busy with my business to do anything.

After a while, we started re-manufacturing our own distribution trucks that we used in the milk business. These were our retail ice cream and milk trucks. We'd take them down to the frame and really do the job on them, re-build them from there. It would be a brand new truck when we finished. I got to the point where a lot of the trucks in our fleet were brand new, but they were also 20 years old. We could not really get parts for them ... make parts ... so we had to wind down that operation.

In doing so, I said to our guys, 'Hey, lets do a car or two'. They did, and these are truck guys, so it didn't work. You'd say you wanted it perfect, and they did not understand perfect. Perfect to a truck mechanic is not the same as to a restorer.

So, the guy who was running this for me, Dave Hopper, a long-time friend and employee, he said, 'Hey, lets try a bike'. He actually gave me a few bikes to start with and then we bought two or three.

I started to look at the motorcycles and see how they were put together. I looked at the brakes and the chassis and things like that. The engines too of course. I liked that you can really follow the engineering on a motorcycle. It was very interesting, whereas cars, it's a beautiful paint job and a set of hub caps.

We went a little further along with the motorcycles, (and) I thought, if I really pushed this thing, I can really have the best motorcycle collection in the world. I think I can do that. And if I did that it'll mean a lot to Birmingham, hopefully someday, to be able to say that. It would bring people from all over the world here.

Well, here we are. 860 motorcycles and growing, and I think we have the best collection of motorcycles in the world. And I think people will come from all over the world to see this. And that's what this is all about.

This is a foundation and I gave the money to the foundation. They spend the money on the collection and the racetrack, the building. I can't benefit from this thing in any way. This is really for the city of Birmingham and for Alabama. That's what it's all about.

I think that this weekend, when we saw (people from) 44 states including Alaska come here to Birmingham, and I think they got a positive feel for it is what I'm all about.

Q. I think at several points if you'd been pointed out at the track, fans would have picked you up and put you on their shoulders. They seemed that happy to come to a place like this.

A. I think they would have. I tried to spend as much time as I could walking through the pits and through the museum; it was amazing the people who just said thank you, thank you. There was a great amount of enthusiasm for the place, so I think I've done something great here.

Q. What were your models for what you wanted in a racetrack? What other tracks did you look at?

A. Having raced cars for ten years, I pretty well knew what I wanted to do in terms of creating a racetrack. Museum-wise, we designed it, and by we, I mean our team at Barber Motorsport. We designed this building; we knew what we had and knew how to display it. An architect just could not cut it for us, we had to do it. I think we've hit it.

Q. What can we expect to see in the future at the museum?

A. Well, there's 300 motorcycles still in Birmingham that are not here yet. We didn't have time to get them out here. We'll be adding to what we have here, we'll be rotating bikes over time as well, so that if someone comes here now, maybe in a year or two they can come back and see bikes that they've not seen yet here. There'll always be something new, I can promise you that.

Q. Many times an affluent enthusiast starts collecting in a Citizen Kane "Rosebud" kind of way; they start collecting to get the bikes of their youth. But, you were not a motorcycle enthusiast as a young man, correct?

A. No, I really wasn't. I rode a bike a little bit in college, but the passion for racing overwhelmed me and the bikes were just secondary. I didn't really think too much about them at the time.

The engineering is what did it for me. When I look and see how things have evolved and how the technology has changed, that's where I'm coming from. I worked on my own cars when I raced cars so I'm really bent for the mechanical end of it.

End of part one