Opinion: Years of hard work

Hero MotoCorp announced that they are now partners with Erik Buell Racing and that there will be two race teams in the US wearing the Hero name on Buell's 1190RS racebike. And that the two will work together, the latter helping the Indians develop products.

What does all that mean?

First let's get past the stuff that isn't directly important to us. The US race teams. I would have been a lot more optimistic or interested in the Indian angle to the race team if the two Buells had been in some form of global racing series. But they aren't. The AMA is the US national racing series. So I'm thinking that's part of the contract. It serves to help Erik keep racing - something he loves and has done from the start. Maybe this means Hero will spend some of its incredible TV budgets getting the AMA series telecast here as well. I wouldn't complain. Plus it gets Hero's name to certain countries where US stuff is popular. Like Mexico or Brazil. Most of the Americas, actually. Places where it might be (or is) exporting its products.

Second, the Buells of old. Erik has always thought outside the box and his bikes yell and scream this. They have done this from day one. A large part of his career was spent, one way or another, with Harley engine-d motorcycles. His turning the cruiser into proper sports bikes, the only really American sportsbikes in recent production history, operation was unique and successful. Then Harley bought into the operation and Buell officially became part of, well, branch of, Harley-Davidson. Some fearsome motorcycles came out of there. They looked different from everything, went different from everything else and the engineering solutions that Erik and team came up with were unique. Representative of an innovative engineer who learnt to work and solve issues on his own budget and time scales.

However, while I don't know the exact terms that became contractual obligations when Buell was closed officially by Harley-Davidson, I am sure the Harley engines wouldn't be part of any Hero-Buell deal. It would be easy to replace the V-twin with a, say S&S engine - easily available... And the chassis tech was anyway Buell at work, so won't be hard to make a great chassis again... But it sounds like something Erik Buell wouldn't do, to be honest. It's too commercial, too simple, too glib. Buell was using a Rotax-built engine (I think it was Buell designed, but I cannot remember for sure) for their final model under production when the close came. And now there is only the Erik Buell Racing racebike.

So I don't think there's any superbikes that Hero MotoCorp will get access to and bring here overnight. They most certainly won't be Buells (like the Blast, Cyclone, Lightning or Firebolt). At best they'd be new Buells, I don't know what name would be on the tank, but that's an exciting prospect.

What that leaves is Hero MotoCorp having on its team one of the most innovative motorcycle engineers. That's exciting. If they start work today, their first ground-up new motorcycle will be ready in mid-2014, I think. That's perfect timing. Plus Erik has done the full lifecycle. From being a small time motorcycle maker doing his own R&D to being part of one of the biggest with much larger budgets and a proper R&D department. Such expertise and experience is hard to get. If Hero use his knowledge wisely and well, there's a lot of good to come from this partnership. He is perhaps the right person to help grow the R&D department, build its capability from aggregates and subsystems to full cycle motorcycle platform engineering, from sketches to productionising. It's a savvy, astute choice of partner for Hero MotoCorp. And I cannot wait for the products this partnership will dish out.