Don't get many moto-events here in the Big Apple, unless you count the occasional BMW cocktail reception, or when they line up the new Ducatis for a couple hours outside the showroom in Tribeca. And while it takes a lot to stir me out of my Brooklyn bed at 7 AM on a Saturday morning to schlep into Manhattan, a new R1 rollout will do it. With a nice big Soup ad and a full-page spread upfront in the Village Voice as well, it looked like Yamaha was putting itself out in a Honda-esque way—and the new/old R1 colors look cool as hell.

Bottom line: there's gotta be a t-shirt in it.

The ad said "the first 1,000 people to show a motorcycle key get in free on Saturday," which proved to be optimistic—at 9:01 me and the only other two people in sight were trying to talk our way into the Wollman Rink at Central Park, and being told by an apologetic security guard to wait an hour. If they were trying to manufacture a photo op of a long line, that was okay with me—I bleed Yamaha red. Or, blue. No, make that yellow and black with white trim.

After three quarters of an hour reading the newspaper by the concrete chess boards, where I found myself dodging such suspicious propositions as "would you like to play some chess?," I got on the queue behind a couple of sportbike clubbers from Jersey. They recalled a recent episode where one of them—a thirtysomething baldheaded guy who sounded Croatian—had been ticketed for four violations, including eluding, though he claimed he just hadn't seen the cop in his mirrors while slaloming through traffic doing a buck-twenty. For $500 he had gotten a lawyer who got him off all four.

Another beefy middleaged squid from Bayonne managed to combine a tire recommendation for my R6 with a distinct implication that, never having tossed it with the stock tires, I must ride like a pussy. He knew a lot more about the new R1 than I did—"That limited edition has Marchesini wheels, an Ohlins suspension, and a slipper clutch"—but then again, almost everyone knows more about technical specs than I do, though I do know that a slipper clutch is one that is operable whilst wearing a slipper. The baldheaded guy had already been to his dealer to put a down payment on the new limited edition, though he didn't know what the price was going to be, but we all agreed 16k sounded about right.

Around ten-thirty a crew wearing the new old colors starting handing out t-shirts—"looks kinda like a Charlie Brown shirt knockoff," judged Beef Squid aptly—and within a few minutes we were ushered into the little conference area above the Wollman skating rink—and yes, they checked for keys. On the rink surface below, a hundred classic cars were parked for the Concours d'Elegance classic-car show, a sort of blueblood swap meet (lots of blazers and Germans).

Yamaha Communications director Bob Starr, who got a big hand, kicked off the video by introducing the head of Yamaha for a standup, then brought out Eddie Lawson and Jason DiSalvo—Eddie appearing to focus on not looking like he had better things to do, Jason looking to score team points by gearing up the charm. Starr then started the 25-minute Yamaha Sportbike movie on the four flatscreen TVs, not before proudly announcing the Qatar results.

The promo was a big hit with the crowd. After a few raceway shots, Colin Edwards comes on to announce "Stickers don't win races." This induced a momentary existential crisis in many of us ("what?! but that old Motul sticker is holding my faring together!"), quickly dispelled by more shots of Edwards leaning in, followed by details of the impressive new specs of the R1—tweaked Deltabox, built-in lap timer, something something about the valves -- it looked so pretty zooming around the track, hardly anyone listened. Edwards gives only a cursory introduction to the R1 in the promo, but they put Jason DiSalvo to work touting the new R6 (new, short GP-style muffler, 4-way adustable rear shock)—good thinking, since his knowledgeable gee-whiz enthusiasm goes over very well. Biggest crowd pop: a shot of the tach, with DiSalvo gushing about the 17,500-rpm redline before winding it up to the top.

Enthusiasm waned a bit as the film hit the sport-tourers, though the section about the FJR1300R's electric shift stirred up a murmur of morbid curiosity—did that voiceover guy say "automatic transmission"? Well, not exactly—it's clutchless shifting via paddles on the handlbar. Cool.

I have never seen any of Eddie (Lawson's) baby pictures, but I'll wager that man was melting rocks with that look of his when he was still in the crib. As he signed one enthusiast's decades-old photographs, he said to Jason (Disalvo), apropos of nothing, "that was before you were born." Yeah, take that, kid.

Very few of the 300 or so attendees went for the free soft drinks—no doubt fearing that more Pepsi might mean fewer goodies—fewer still went for the Trump brand bottled water (Trump rebuilt the rink some years ago) understandably fearing anything sold as "Donald Trump's water." As the crowd filed downstairs to inspect the bikes and collect parting loot—along with the t-shirt, we got a picture frame and several posters—I pulled Starr aside, and tried to hug him out of gratitude for bringing Yamaha up to us ice people.

"It's our fiftieth anniversary, so we have a lot going on this year," he said. "We had a big dealer meeting in June in Las Vegas to introduce our cruisers and our dirtbikes and our ATVs—we had the B-52s and Huey Lewis, and we had like 35 champions there. It was a big deal.

"We knew we had a lot of sportbikes coming in the fall. And we couldn't have a dealer meeting, logistically it's just hard to get all the dealers together—and one of the directions of the company is we really want to try to do a little bit more for the customer. So we had this idea, let's do a consumer show—and me personally, I grew up in New Hampshire, and I felt if I would like to do anything, we need to do something in New York.

"Because New York gets the short end of the stick—there's a huge amount of sportbike enthusiasts in the Northeast, and they get screwed all the time. And so I said if I do anything, I'd like to do it in New York City, in Central Park, and it just so happened they were having this event here, and it all fit together."

Realizing I had run out of intelligent questions, Starr snuck away politely, and I ran downstairs to kick the tires and get my fair share of swag. Altogether there probably about 350 in attendance—at least half dressed in Yamaha regalia. Booty included three posters, aforementioned t-shirt, and a heavy aluminum picture frame with three photos to rotate.

Happy birthday, Yamaha—I should look so good at fifty.