Zemek and his crewchief, John Ethell, at VIR. image by jimola

Jake Zemke is next up in Soup's trifecta of rider interviews, conducted during the Suzuki Big Kahuna Nationals at VIR. Because of the huge uncertainties regarding AMA roadracing in 2009, the riders have been remarkably candid. Pull on an unassuming thread in the discussion, and the riders open up - suddenly the vulnerability and humanity of these remarkable athletes becomes evident. It's clear that these guys have opinions that they are anxious to express.

Paddock scuttlebutt puts Zemke in the subset of riders who might join the World Superbike Championship next year, and we were eager to get Jake's take on the rumors, so we started there...

Q When people talk about riders who may be going to World Superbike next year, you're one of the names that gets mentioned. What's your take on that?

A If the right opportunity's there, I'm definitely willing and able. My family's behind it. My wife loves Italy, so she's ready to move right now [Laughing]. But we'll just have to wait and see how things unfold here. They're not quite - well, their silly season's kind of already started, but it's - most of that was just hinging around BMW and ... as far as everything else goes, it's - there's definitely going to be some open seats over there. How they get filled is another question. Obviously, the biggest knock on American riders is, "how would they do on European tracks, tracks they don't know?" I also know there are some guys that'll probably be getting dropped out of MotoGP, like Checa did this year, that'll be hunting to keep racing, so they're going to be -

Q West will be gone, for sure.

A Yeah. There's a few guys - there's a couple guys over there that, well, if you would've said it a couple races ago, four races ago, there'd be a handful of guys you would've said that are definitely going to be looking for a ride next year. I think now it's kind of ... it's going to sort itself out pretty quickly. But they've already got a talent pool over there to pull from with World Supersport. Obviously you've got guys there that are going to be coming back from MotoGP into World Superbike, possibly. So it's the same situation as we have here. There's a lot more riders than there is rides. I've got my management working on it, so I don't really involve myself too much with it. They take care of everything, and at the end of the day, they'll just bring me the offers that are there, and we'll go from there.

A Yeah, exactly. It seemed like we weren't quite getting there. But regardless, I think a guy's motivation is a guy's motivation, whether some guys are motivated by money, some guys are motivated by a goal or a dream, where they want to be. In this line of work, most likely you're not going to keep getting pay increases every year. That's just the nature of our sport, being that it hinges on our economy, because motorcycles in the United States aren't used for transportation, they're luxury toys. So when times are getting tough for people, the first thing to go is the toys. And that hurts our industry quite badly, whereas I think if you look at the European market, where motorcycles are a way of life, those guys are paying a lot more for gas than we are - granted, their countries are a lot smaller and they're not traveling as much, but still - they see motorcycles as transportation, and they use them in that way. Motorcycles, scooters. And I think that that, for one, draws more interest to the sport, because more people are involved with it -


Q They can relate to it.

A And they can relate to it. They see bikes on the street all day, every day, and it's a way of life. It's transportation. They use it as a transportation mode, whereas in America - it's getting better, I think. I've seen a lot more motorcycles on the road these days. But they're not new bikes, I can tell you that. They're - I think I saw a cherry '74 XL350 the other day. I don't even know what it was. People are pulling bikes out of mothballs to ride them to work these days. But that's a start. People are seeing motorcycles as transportation. I think things'll get better. It's just like anything. If you thought the real estate market was going to keep soaring forever in California, well, then, you were badly mistaken, and I think the motorcycle industry is the same way. There was a lot of good years there, the last few years, where sales just kept - they were turning over 20, 25% more profit every year, every year, every year. Well, at some point that's going to drop off, or level off.

Q Or it might change the nature of what's selling. If you go in and try to buy a small displacement dual-sport or sport bike, like Honda 230 dual-sport or a Ninja 250 or something like that, they're sold out at all the dealers. And the big bikes -



A Are sitting.

Q Are sitting. So it's going to change the nature of what's going on.


I wanted to ask you what you thought, then - because it sounds like, if I were to try to think about "How would Jake think about the possibility of the DMG thing next year?", I would guess, based on everything that you just said, that there might be a level of optimism there, that there might actually be something that comes out of it that you could actually ride and be positive about. Is that a fair statement to make? Do you have any optimism about how things are going, or going to go down next year?


A I'm a pretty optimistic person by nature. I always try to look for the good in things. Obviously, things haven't rolled real smoothly so far with the transition. But you can't really expect things to always run smoothly, either. In our race teams, things don't always run smoothly. Sometimes things happen. And we have to work around it and figure out what's the best solution for it.

Q It seemed like the definition of "smooth," for some people in the paddock, was to remain with the Superbike rules for next year - to not change. What do you think about the viability of having stayed with those rules, or the soundness of that, at least in that particular class?

A It's hard for me to say. Honestly, I think the best answer for everybody involved - the manufacturers, the riders, for everybody - would be one unified rulebook that's World Superbike, BSB, here. Because obviously that eases the pain of the manufacturers to create parts for separate series, which in the past, the teams have done, I know, like Honda, they've got to build a different bike for America than they do for World Superbike, different bike for Japan Superbike, different bike for British Superbike. It just goes on and on. From the manufacturers' standpoint, for sure, if they had one set of rules, it'd make everybody's lives a lot easier. Even Ducati. Here's a small factory, comparatively, to the Japanese factories. When they were racing here before, I think that there was - not problems for them to create different bikes, but it is. It's a small factory. How do you tool different parts for different race teams around the world?


Q And it wasn't at the same level of competitive machinery as it was in World Superbike.

A Yeah.

Q So they were handicapped in that respect.


A Yeah. I think, honestly, one set of rules would definitely help things. And then, I think obviously the possibility of having Americans as wild card riders at American rounds, that becomes a lot easier if, like in the old days, I remember watching most of the American riders race, like at Laguna, in World Superbike, as wild cards.



Q Because they could run whatever tires they wanted to.



A For one, the tires weren't a problem. For two, the equipment wasn't a problem. The equipment - it was and it wasn't. The AMA spec wasn't up to the World Superbike spec, but they could still go out there and be competitive on them. I think that if everything's the same, it makes it a lot easier to allow guys who are interested in riding as a wild card, and/or may be interested in getting into a series, it makes the transition a little bit smoother for them.



Q Well, there's probably zero per cent chance that Pirelli is going to be the spec tire next year in AMA, simply because the guys from Pirelli have said, "Hey, no one has any idea of the logistics behind showing up at a racetrack with 6,000 tires every weekend." It doesn't seem like they can do it and still do World Superbike. So it's probably going to end up being Dunlop. So even if the bikes were the same, unfortunately, you're still probably not going to see what you'd like to see in a World Superbike race in America.


A Who knows. This is all down the road. I don't foresee any of this stuff happening right away. That's just - in my world, if I was writing the rules, that's probably how I would have gone about it. I don't know that ... And there's so much involved with it, too. It's not one guy saying, "Oh, this is going to work," or "This is going to be okay." As you go to the manufacturers, these are huge corporations, and they have people to answer to as well. The Japanese manufacturers, a lot of times things have to go back to Japan, and "What are you guys able to supply us with?," and "At what level can you guys help and support?" That has a lot to do with things, as well. There's so many things that the common person, or even myself, who's kind of inside the paddock, there's stuff that goes on behind closed doors that we have no clue about. I can feel for the manufacturers. I can feel for the guys trying to run the series. I can feel for the riders, because I'm one of them. I can see it from a lot of different angles. I can feel for the fans, who are just as confused as everybody else. I've got people walking up to me asking me, "What's going on? What are you guys racing on next year? What's happening?" I don't have answers for them.



Q A lot of fans have said - one of the criticisms has been that the fans over the past few years haven't really been sure what the difference is between Xtreme, Supersport, Superstock. Granted, everybody's confused, even the people who are writing about it. But there's been criticism of confusion a lot over the past few years.



A Yeah, definitely. I know people that are involved in motorcycles - I know guys that are professional motocross racers, coming to a road race, and they've got no clue what's going on. Because all the bikes look the same, all the number plate backgrounds are the same. At least in Supercross/Motocross, at least you've got different color backgrounds to differentiate the bikes. The common person can't tell a 250 from a 450, but they see a white number plate and a black number plate, they know what the difference of which class is out there on the racetrack.



Q A lot of that is also buildup, and how the announcers do it, and building excitement towards the premiere class, and all that, too.



A Sure. In my own opinion, I think that there's probably currently too many classes out there on the racetrack. We've got redundancy. Two 600 classes. Two 1000 classes. Super this, Super that, Super everything. It's just redundancy. And it just spreads the paddock too thin, as well. There's a lot of good riders in this paddock, but I also think that there's riders spread out all over the place in different classes, as well. People talk about how great World Superbike is. All these guys within a second and a half, two seconds of each other. Well, if you got all the best riders in America all in the same class, we'd have 20, at least 20 guys that are all within a couple seconds. The depth of our field would be there if we could get everybody in the same class. And that's one of the big knocks of - you hear people from Europe, is that they don't think our series is strong enough because it's not deep. Well, there's plenty of riders for it to be deep. It's just that they're spread out. So if we could ever get all the guys in the same class, it'd be outstanding. You would see a lot of racing going on, because I just know the level of the riders that are here, and it's good. There's a lot of good riders in this paddock, and hopefully things'll get sorted out here. What the end result or the vision is for the future of AMA, I don't know what it is. I don't know what the goal is and where they're going with things. I haven't been told that. From a rider's standpoint, all the riders know is what they've read on the Internet. Nobody's come to the riders and said, "Okay, this is what we're all about. This is where we're going with things." Basically, all you have to do is sit down and read and believe what you want to in what you read. A lot of it is just hearsay, unless you're hearing it from the horse's mouth, I guess. It's hard to say what's going to happen here. But the manufacturers have carried racing in America for as long as it's been around, pretty much. So hopefully the manufacturers don't feel alienated and want to pack up and go home. At this point, our series can't have that. We can't have a split series. We can't have a series with two manufacturers in it. It just doesn't work. The CART/IRL is the perfect scenario for us to look at and go, "Okay. This would be the absolute worst case scenario that could happen to us, would be to go down the road that CART and IRL did." Because look at where they're at now. Back to blended, to one series, because it can't - it was no longer going to survive with two series.


Q You're right, nobody knows. It seems highly unlikely this late in the season that the manufacturers are all going to get together, create an alternative series, go to all the tracks, promote it, in this period of time. What could happen is something like World Superbike, where they say to the series organizers, "We don't like the fact that you're going to a single tire and that you've messed around with the rules for 1000 cc inline fours, so we're going to stay out of it." But then what they do is, they have these independent teams that they support, kind of covertly. In 2004 and 2005 in World Superbike, you had Suzuki there kind of officially, and you had Ducati officially. Everybody else that was there, was there through the back door, unofficially supporting teams. So it might be a couple of years of that. Who knows.


I wanted to ask you one last question. You're a master craftsman in FX, and I'm sure you'd be extremely proud to win the FX championship this year. Fast forward to next year. Would you be extremely proud to be the Daytona Superbikes Champion?


A Like I said, as long as I've got competitive equipment under me, it doesn't really matter what class, what country, whatever. It really comes down to me. I've been at this long enough that I've got nothing left to prove except I just want to go out and race and win, and be competitive. That's all I can ask for, at this point. I'm not really worried about what class I'm in, what country I'm in. I worry about some things, such as safety issues and things like that. But from a pure racing standpoint, yeah, I want to go race the best guys that we've got in this paddock, but at the same time, if I don't have competitive equipment to go do that, but I could have competitive equipment in a different class, that's where I'll be.


Q Spoken like a man who's been here for a long time and knows where he wants to be.

A [Laughing] Not too long! Not too long! I haven't been here too long! I've got a lot left in me, that's for sure.