Some rare issues of Privateer/Sportbike Magazine.

With Road Racer X ceasing publication it got me thinking about another publication I was involved with in the mid-1980s. I doubt there are many people who remember this short-lived publication. It was launched as Privateer and changed its name to Sportbike Magazine a few months later. Unfortunately that was just before the magazine’s demise.

Launched in June of 1986, Privateer/Sportbike Magazine was the brainchild of a WERA racer from Indianapolis named Brook Watson. Brook was a major enthusiast who had no experience whatsoever in publishing. He worked at a printing shop, so he had the ability to produce the magazine fairly cheaply.

I remember when Brook first approached me about doing work for the magazine. I asked him who he’d hired to sell advertising. “Advertising,” he said quizzically. “We’re not going to need advertising. We’ll make enough from subscriptions to pay for all the costs.”

Like I said, enthusiastic?  Absolutely. Knowledgeable on how to run a publication? Not so much.

I knew that Brook had very little hope of making the magazine a success, but he won me over with his blind faith. Besides I was just a kid myself in my mid-20s hoping to figure out a way to scrape together a living photographing and writing about my favorite sport.

With no art director or real editor the magazine was a bit on the amateurish side no doubt (note: the redundant header on the cover Premier Issue and First Issue), but I will say I  did some of my best early journalism in its pages. I wrote a piece about Yamaha’s very successful club racing contingency program and Yamaha officials opened up to me and gave me a great deal of info on how those programs worked and practically paid for themselves (at least in those days) by replacement parts the racers purchased for their race bikes. I also once did a WERA Grand National Final preview article where I predicted almost perfectly the top 10 finishers in the Suzuki GSXR and Honda Interceptor finals. I also did my first Top 40 rider article, where I polled riders and industry insiders to come up with a list of the top 40 road racers in the country. That was a lot of fun and I later took that concept over to American Roadracing where it became one of the most popular features of the year and became the basis for a special “American Roadracing Top 40 Issue” every winter.

Writers and photographers like Riley Tharp and David Dewhurst (both Cycle Guide refugees) and Randy Marrs contributed and added a modicum of respectability to Privateer/Sportbike.

Unfortunately Brook found out the hard way that a new publication cannot make it on subscriptions alone. We traveled to just about every AMA national and countless club races that year and Brook and I did our best to sell subscriptions, but I doubt the number of subscriptions we sold even paid for the expenses of traveling to the races. Eventually Brook tried to sell advertising and Terry Vance was a big supporter and Vance & Hines ads probably kept the magazine going several months longer than it would have otherwise.

I came to the office one morning and my key didn’t work. The magazine apparently hadn’t paid the rent for the office space and all our stuff was in the building being held ransom by the office complex owners. The thing I felt worst about was that a young up-and-coming photographer named Patrick Gosling (who later co-founded the well known Gold & Goose photo agency with David Goldman) had sent in a ton of his beautiful Grand Prix slides from his first full year on the circuit. Years later Patrick told me it was nearly a full collection of his best photos from that year, all original slides, and he never saw them again.

I don’t remember exactly, but I think the magazine ceased publication after five or six issues. We’d changed the name to Sportbike and the issue that was set to go out had actually improved to the point that it was starting to look respectable. It was fun while it lasted and I give a credit to Brook for going out there and giving it a shot at making a magazine that covered everything from club road racing to GP. It would be four more years before Roadracing World emerged and finally got the formula to work.