Ray Blank had a presence unlike anyone I ever met. If you were lucky enough to attend a Honda Dealer Convention when Ray served as emcee and the massive convention hall was packed with thousands of Honda dealers eagerly awaiting the reveal of the new year’s models, programs and race teams, you know what I mean. Every sentence intelligently crafted and delivered with perfect timing—you could hear a pin drop when Ray had the mic.
Ray loved motorcycles, was an exceptional rider, could talk at any engineering level about any product, and he especially loved racing—and not just because he hired so many riders over the years that would become legends in this sport.


He was a fan long before he became a boss, he loved the competition, appreciated the intellectual side of racing (Miguel Duhamel liked to say, ‘With Ray, you knew you weren’t playing checkers anymore. This was chess.’), deeply understood the complexity of it all, and had great respect not just for the riders, but for the people and processes involved in getting to the top of the box.
I worked closely with Ray for nearly 30 years on every marketing project imaginable. Indeed, many of those projects were imagined for the first time in the motorcycle industry under Ray’s leadership. Ray intuitively knew the right path and was the greatest mentor I ever had. If it mattered to Ray, it mattered to me. He had that effect on people. He was a wonderful writer, had a great eye for graphics, and always treated everyone at my agency with professional respect. I never worked at an agency until I started one, and Honda was our first client. From day one, Ray stood by us when the detractors had their doubts, and he made us proud to be part of something bigger than anything we could have envisioned.

Whether it was a family dirt-bike camping trip together with our kids or a challenging project with an impossible deadline, Ray was always the same—calm, considerate, humble, witty, philosophic, respectful, intelligent. Ray Blank was many things, but mostly he was a best friend.