The Daytona Motorsports Group visited Yamaha US's headquarters last week where they met with several execs at the tuning fork brand. Racing Manager Keith McCarty was part of the meeting with DMG. As of last night, McCarty and Yamaha are waiting for more details on DMG's program to emerge before making any judgments.

"I think that everybody was expecting a few of the things that came out, as far as the spec tires and maybe spec fuel. I have to say that there were some surprises based on the change of direction for class structure," McCarty said from his office in California.

"Ultimately, I believe that their goal in all of this is to bring more people to racing, and I think that has been the goal all along in this. The goal has been more fan participation in the sport and apparently we have not been doing a very good job. The purest enthusiast enjoys it and reads all the periodicals and your Web site and things but, obviously at a lot of the tracks, they just don't show up. It's paramount for them to fix that so this gets all the accolades that it deserves. As a sport, you definitely have to have fan participation at every round; not just at one or two of them. I guess if that is your goal and you look at the mousetrap that has been in place and that it hasn't accomplished what it is that you're trying to do--then that's the purest definition of insanity, to continue to do the same thing and expect a different result."

It seems that McCarty hasn't had much faith in the AMA to fix the long-standing issues that have plagued the series. "They haven't been able to do a great job. I pick up the industry newspapers every week and all there ever was was criticism--criticism on little points of what went wrong."

Yamaha seems to be on the fence as to whether they will support DMG or not, but they seem to be leaning towards support of the new regime. "I guess it's a little too soon to say whether I am for this or against this," McCarty said. "I think things are going to change, and it has a lot to do with how you view success. If you think that NASCAR is successful, then we've got the same people who are going to run our racing now that ran NASCAR. I think, on a lot of levels, that is very successful. But, I think there are certainly a lot of elements in NASCAR that don't work for motorcycle racing. The good news is that the folks that are running it are aware of that. They're not trying to put it into that position just yet."

"So, if you just put that out in front of ourselves first and then think about some of the motives...I don't know that anyone is in total disagreement with what has been proposed. We were presented a very high level of ideas without details. Without those details, I think that it's really hard to determine the overall impact to everybody. Whether it's financial or whatever--pick your part of it--it's difficult to understand that impact without the details. I'm hoping that, in the weeks to come, we are going to get more detail, which is what we will need to really do some planning and analysis on how this is going to impact us. Ultimately, everybody that is participating has a huge investment, and I don't think anybody was raising their hand to make that investment no longer valid. That has to be a concern--until we have a lot more detail--because there's more areas other than which classes. Testing days, the weekend days, how long the race weekend will be and such. All of these things have a financial impact."

Officially, as it stands today, there has been no mention of the continuation of a 1000cc Superbike class. McCarty said that DMG floated some items in their meeting, one of which was a 1000cc class. "I don't think that they ever said there wasn't going to be a 1000cc class," he said. "The way it was proposed to us, there will be a 1000cc class. But it was something more in an idea stage as opposed to what they are doing. They did propose 600s and 1000s to continue to run. I don't think that their motive is to prevent anybody from participating. But again, we don't have all the details. So it's difficult to see how this business is going to change."

With the US economy in a recession and the motorcycle industry slowing, as well, one subject that is raised time and again is that this is a bad time for drastic change. McCarty doesn't necessarily agree. "I think it's a challenging time. But the analogy I would want to use isn't too good of one: I'm not sure what the right time is. When things are really good, then everybody will say, 'Well, why are you trying to change things now?' Then, when things are bad, everybody will say, 'We can't afford to change now'. So I'm not sure that you can pick the right time for change in anything that we are doing. One thing that everybody will agree on is that change is required."

McCarty laments the presumed loss of the hard-negotiated 2009 AMA Superbike rules package, which would have moved the series to more of a production class. "I was a part of the rules committee that put together the 2009 Superbike rules," he explained. "I have to say that I was really happy with the set of rules that we had going for 2009. I think that they would have made an impact in a lot of ways. I think it was a first step. I've said before that I think that was the best committee I have ever been on--that the AMA assembled. It's unfortunate that those things are not going to be out there to see if our rules would have paid off or not."