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For The Future Indicative, Ep 6 Part 2
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Motorsports.
ROB McISAAC
“The only reason that people go racing is for marketing. As they used to like to say in the motorcycle world and in the car world—race on Sunday, win on Sunday, sell on Monday.
Whether it’s NASCAR back in the 1960s, or sports car racing today, or motorcycle racing on either of those endpoints, the whole idea is to build your brand so that you can sell stuff.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Rob McIsaac, the CEO and President of RPM Ventures NC, an advisory services firm for insurance CIOs. Previously, Rob and I worked together at Novarica (see my first episode, titled Origin). He wrote the thought leadership; I managed their research, editing, and publication. About three years ago, he began RPM Ventures as the start to his “Third Act.” He described it as an expansion of his study on innovation ecosystems, in areas like Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts. As well as dipping into other things that were complementary to his former work, and not competitive with it.
But I did not know what these complementary things were. What began as a conversation on insurance technology and how CIOs endure disaster recovery and support business continuity, became something a whole lot more.
We both have interests outside the job. I am creatively invested in art, literature, and history. Rob is also interested in history, and that history includes cars, motorcycles, and their racing. It may be complementary to Rob’s work, but it is, in fact, incredibly competitive. And for Rob, his personal and professional interests go back to the same time and place.
ROB McISAAC
“My father was very much into fast cars, fast motorcycles, airplanes. As my mother said, “He had perfected the art of turning money into noise.” And as a young boy, I spent an awful lot of time with him.
I never was a racer on my own. But there were particular moments along the way that I think were galvanizing for me. I graduated from high school in 1975. My dad and I spent a lot of time motorcycling in that era. He bought a brand new BMW that year, so 1975 was kind of a seminal year.”
ALEX EFFGEN
One year later, BMW would make its mark in the world of motorcycle racing.
ROB McISAAC
“In the spring of 1976, BMW—which was not noted for racing—shows up at Daytona International Speedway with a trio of bikes like nobody has ever seen before. And they go on to win not only the Daytona race, but the championship for that season. And they didn’t just win. They crushed the competition, and they finished one, two, three for the season.”
And for me, these things very quickly—at the time—became commingled. I was involved obviously with BMW motorcycling at that point. My professional career in insurance started two years later at Prudential.
So in 1978, a few blocks away actually from where the BMW dealership was in North Jersey, I started working in insurance. And ironically, I suppose, going back and forth to work, I actually rode my BMW motorcycle to the Prudential headquarters office that I worked in.
And many of my ventures or adventures in that era, actually combined my interest in BMWs—not so much racing, but touring—and the funding mechanism that I had, which was Prudential.”
ALEX EFFGEN
We can talk to Rob later in the year about insurance and technology. But the story of BMW motorcycles can’t wait. Afterall, it’s been 50 years since the checkered flag.
ROB McISAAC
“While many Americans, in fact, many people don’t really know much about the story of BMW in 1976, there was a movie that came out recently called Ford vs Ferrari, which traces the Ford passion a decade earlier, in the 1960s, when they were going after high performance, they were using it as a marketing pitch. They wanted to buy Ferrari. They were unable to for a variety of reasons. They built their own car. They used a fascinating group of people to do it. Some of whom actually have a tie to the BMW team in 1976.
I think the engineering that’s required to build these things is fascinating because you’ve got to build something that has to meet very specific performance specs. That has to live for a particular period of time.
Cook Nielsen, who was the editor of Cycle magazine, had an opportunity to review what BMW introduced that year. And one of the all-time best quotes from racing came out when he said, “It appears that we have fallen well behind on our cheating.”
And of course, they weren’t really cheating. What they had done was they read the rule book, and they had taken the rule book all the way to the edge.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Taking the rule book all the way to the edge requires specialization. SPECIALIZE is the first turn for a business to be in business. I have argued that you need three more turns to cross the finish line:
SPECIALIZE: What is this?
SELL: Who needs this?
SECURE: What can disrupt this?
SCALE: How do we expand this?
Next month (March 2026), Rob McIsaac and RPM Ventures NC are going to Daytona International Speedway to commemorate the 50th anniversary of BMW’s win at the inaugural AMA Superbike race in 1976. RPM Ventures is bringing many of the winning BMW racers and engineers, as well as the original BMW R90S motorcycles in their Daytona Orange. Today’s episode of The Future Indicative will test its Four S of business on the track, using Rob as our historian and expert in all things vehicular.
At the top of this episode, you heard Rob mention “..the only reason that people go racing is for marketing.”
Race on Sunday, win on Sunday, sell on Monday.
ROB McISAAC
“In 1976, after BMW won that race at Daytona, they couldn’t keep motorcycles on the floor, the showroom floor, that looked like the ones that had just won those races because there was a halo effect. It’s all about building brand awareness, brand loyalty, getting people in showrooms.
General Motors never really sold that many Corvettes. What they used the Corvette to do was draw people into showrooms so that they could sell them minivans and station wagons and pickup trucks. You wanted to somehow be associated with the “bow tie,” in the case of Chevrolet.”
ALEX EFFGEN
BMW had a problem selling. And while measuring the results of your products and services can be tricky in a field like financial services, in racing…well, to quote Dom Toretto the first time he was Fast and Furious:
“...it don’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile; winning’s winning.”
So what did it take for BMW to win?
ROB McISAAC
“In the late 1960s, the motorcycle division almost failed. BMW as a company almost failed after World War II. The motorcycles that they built in the late ’40s and through the ’50s and ’60s were various derivatives of pre-war designs, but they were clearly not leap forward moments.
So you look at a BMW motorcycle from 1969 and it looks an awful lot like one from 1939. And BMW motorcycles of both eras, you could get any color you wanted, as long as it was black.
There were very small numbers that were other colors, but usually they were those other colors for a very specific purpose. The fleet colors were black.”
ALEX EFFGEN
So what changed?
ROB McISAAC
“In 1970, BMW had a major engineering update that was in part fueled by the West German government. The West German government wanted BMW to put their new factory in West Berlin to try and support the local economy and gave them incredible tax benefits to do that.
And two people became really important in that whole conversation. An American marketing executive wound up at BMW named Bob Lutz, and he helped to drive orientation towards performance in both the car and motorcycle divisions. And a gentleman named Hans Muth came along to do the design work on the motorcycles.
And for 1974, he came up with a color—we call it silver smoke—it’s a combination of black and silver, and then the shades of gray as those colors are morphed on top of each other. It’s a stunningly beautiful and incredibly expensive thing to do.
It turned out that it was a rousing success. It drew people into showrooms. In some cases, they were so expensive that people didn’t necessarily buy them, but they bought other stuff. They went to look at these silver smoke bikes, and then they bought something else. But they still sold a ton of them.”
ALEX EFFGEN
It took reinvestment, both in the performance of their product and the aesthetic of it, to turn the company around. Hans Muth gave Bob Lutz and BMW something to SELL. But to get the complete attention of the consumer, it took another engineer named Udo Giedel to take the R90S motorcycle and make it a superbike:
ROB McISAAC
“One way to think about it is, Hans designed a street bike and Udo designed a race bike based on the bones that Hans gave him.”
ALEX EFFGEN
And the rest is history…or is it?
ROB McISAAC
“Whether it’s in the insurance world, the motorsports world, our personal and professional lives, history has this unfortunate aspect of repeating itself for those who don’t pay attention.
For those who do learn from it, it’s possible to alter the arc of things. And I think it will be important for us to think about exactly where are we as we roll into 2026.
Are we in a recession or not? Are we going to be adversely impacted by tariffs or not? Are we going to be adversely impacted by changes in the H-1B rules or not? Are we headed back into a cold war? And maybe more frightening: Are we headed into a hot war?
We’re just unclear and uncertain what will happen as some of the norms that have defined how companies and countries have interacted for 80 years appear to be changing.
And I don’t mean to make it a political comment, I just mean it’s one of those things that is a reality that cannot be ignored. And I think that understanding some of those things and then thinking about how you would adjust and adapt to them is really important.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of The Future Indicative’s Motorsports episode. In Part 2, we’ll discuss how the racing world (and all of us, really) avoid repeating history as the world continues to head towards the future.
While opinions expressed are solely our own, it is neither a race nor competition to get them out there. Follow along if you like. You’re welcome to join the ride. To learn more about (and register for) the BMW 50th Anniversary Celebration at Daytona International Speedway (March 6th and 7th of 2026) please reach out to Indicate Marketing and we’ll send you the link.
I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.
