I suppose Buell's announcement that they will cease operations was, for a lot of people, shocking. I'm not among them, frankly. I'm saddened for anyone who works at Buell and for Buell's small, but vocal, group of passionate customers and evangelists. Sad, but not shocked; not at all.

Since the beginning, the addition of Buell to the Harley-Davidson company has been an odd mix, both in Milwaukee and on the dealership floor. Inside Harley, Buell has always been a weird stepchild few at "The Motor Company" embraced. For many years, and it still may be true today, if you wanted to get your jaw wired in place for six weeks, a great way to have that done was to walk into any bar near a Harley-Davidson assembly plant and proclaim that Buells were Harleys because they share the same powerplant. Pow! Inside the Motor Company, there were Harley people and then there were the Buell outcasts. To say that it was any other way is simply not truthful. On the dealer floor, dealers that I know who carried both brands were confused; many times the Buell models just sat and seemed to gather dust as a parade of Harleys were sold and serviced.

Harley stuck a fortune into Buell, in buying it and in fixing all the early recalls and then trying to build it into a brand--although I always wondered what that brand would be, or could be, with such a dominant parent company. Most expected that at some point Buell would become Harley but it never did. When times were good at Harley and quarter after quarter of record profits rolled in, the money that Buell cost them was just a blip, a few sentences worth of mention on an investor conference call. Those days, I'm afraid, are gone.

The video on the Buell Web site of Eric with a K telling the tale that Buell was finished was sobering to watch even for me, someone who wasn't Erik's biggest disciple in the press corp--Lord knows there were enough of those. Buell, broken, ashen-faced, and seemingly at times on the verge of tears, spelled out that the company that he'd spent a lifetime building would be no more.
Just because he's gutted, it didn't stop Buell from spinning his company's saddest accomplishment. In the video, Buell says that, in 2009 "... in competition at the highest level, the Rossmeyer Geico team took the AMA Pro SportBike championship, competing against the much larger, factory-backed teams from Japan and Europe, proving to all that (Buell) innovation and technology is world class."

There was, of course, no mention of the fact that the Buell is 1200cc while the Japanese brands entered anemic 600s, bikes so slow that one factory rider termed his 600 not just the slowest 600 he'd ever ridden, or the slowest race bike he'd ever ridden, but, in fact, the slowest motorcycle he'd ever ridden. Let's be real, the bias in the DMG Daytona Sport Bike rules destroyed any chance Buell had at racing credibility in 2009.

I've said this privately for a long time: Buell Motorcycles would have been more successful if Erik had retired and left the company in the hands of someone else. The PR spin on Erik is that he was focused and passionate, the great defender of the Buell crest. Another perspective might see it differently: Erik could also be divisive, and on a personal level, you were either with him or against him, it seemed. Anybody who didn't join Erik's special little club "had an agenda" and was frozen out.

That method of dealing with people is tolerable if your products are absolutely kicking ass in the marketplace. You can be as mercurial as Steve Jobs when your products fly off the shelves. You can re-wire an entire industry when the re-wiring results in business success. But, for whatever reason, Erik's bikes remained machines with a small and cult-ish following. The technological tangents that Erik became so passionate about--fuel in the frame, goofy brakes, and all the rest--were they the best use of Buell's resources?

I understand that Erik wanted to solidify his legacy in the motorcycle industry. But in all honestly, just because you use your own press releases to call yourself a "visionary" doesn't make it so.

I think, if Erik had left the company and ten more years passed-- enough time to see the retirement of most of the old guard at Harley who didn't like it when The Motor Company acquired a stake in Buell in the early 1990s--and a newer generation of people who only knew Harley as being attached to Buell came on board, then Buell might have seen some real success.

In a wider scope, Buell folding up shop signals another bad business decision by DMG. Here is where they sit after sticking their index finger into the eyeballs of the Japanese manufacturers. All that conflict, all that turmoil, while they stood shoulder to shoulder with Erik Buell against those "Japanese factories' barely disguised race bikes".

DMG sacrificed all remaining credibility when they allowed the clearly illegal Buell 1125 Superbike into the Superbike class and bristled at the suggestion that it was anything but legal. All that skullduggery, and for what? All for the champion in Daytona SportBike, DMG's star class to now be riding a motorcycle made by a defunct company. All those relationships burned willingly, almost gleefully, by DMG so they could pledge allegiance to their pace bike, the Buell, which is as of today, no longer being produced.

Daytona Sport Bike champion and Buell hero Danny Eslick told Cycle News that he expects to go racing in 2010, to defend his title, on a Buell. Would anything more profoundly demonstrate DMG's efforts at running a series into the ground than to have the number one plate in the "Daytona" class be on a motorcycle made by a defunct manufacturer?

Will Buell's demise be the shockwave that forces DMG to mediate a peace with Honda and the rest? Please. With the press conference at Laguna Seca fresh in my mind, I feel that this is not how DMG operates; there is no admission of mistakes made and a plea for forgiveness. There are more companies to use as a pivot against the Japanese--Aprilia, BMW, etc.--and more double-the-displacement-against-glorified-vacuum-cleaner rules and enemies lists to compile.

Supposedly, there are no second acts in America. And, while Erik Buell looked like a broken man in the video, I have a hard time believing that the closing of Buell Motor Company will finally silence Erik Buell.