Special feature: The man who shaped modern motocross
By Sean Lawless on 2nd Dec 15
If you were to draw up a list of the people who've helped shape modern motocross and if you knew what you were on about then Bill Brown should be vying for the top spot. When it comes to naming the major influences on today's MX market the son of a Cumbrian farmer isn't a likely candidate but Bill has led a very unlikely life.
Agricultural student, professional pole-vaulter, miner, mechanic, road and off-road bike dealer, Maico importer, clothing entrepreneur - Bill's career path is even more colourful than the designs he's built his Wulfsport empire upon.
Now 69, Bill - a three-time Vets world champ - still strikes an imposing figure, regularly races his beloved Maicos (he claimed the #53 as his own long before it was fashionable to 'trademark' a number) and has a business brain so sharp you could shave your nuts with it.
Bill isn't an early bird and hasn't been for years. In fact, he actually laughs when I suggest meeting up at his Cockermouth HQ at 11am.
"I don't do mornings baby boy," he says, Cumbrian charm oozing out of the earpiece of my moby. "How about 2pm, that'd be better."
At this point I should add that I've known Bill since I was a kid and "baby boy" is his stock greeting for me. It could very well be his straight-from-the-crate hello to anyone else younger than him but I can live with that - after all, I was still riding C Class trials when my old man regaled me with my first ‘Browny' anecdote.
A few years later - when I was sweet(ish) 16 - Bill smuggled me into Stoke's Ritzy nightclub with his Trentham Gardens Dirt Bike Show team. AMCA loony Keith Ree was hanging by his ankles from a balcony, chaos was breaking out all around and Bill was leaning against the bar cool-as-you-like, a big smile on his face as he watched his crazy gang cut loose.
Dirt Bike Shows allowed Bill to combine two of the things that have dominated his life - motocross and business. The former is his passion and the latter was initially a necessity that he quickly discovered he was very, very good at. It's also clear that doing deals and making money is something he enjoys immensely.
"I've always felt business is like racing," says Bill. "It's how you finish. We've all seen people holeshot and lead for half the race before crashing or blowing their bike up. It's the result that counts. If you start late and conserve your energy, whoever you're doing business with if they've started early by the end of the day they're knackered and I'm ready to rock if there's any hard dealing to do.
"I've been in business 40-odd years but I've never opened up in my life. The first day I started full-time - when I was working out of a shed - I employed a guy who'd go in at 9am to light the fire, put the kettle on and get everything nice and warm for when I rolled in about 10.30. I'm not a morning person, never have been! For the last 20 years I probably haven't started before 3pm but I'm on the phone during the day to make sure I'm happy with everything and I'm always the last to leave. If I came in earlier I'd probably be retired by now."
Bill initially made an impact in the off-road world as a CZ dealer before becoming synonymous with Maico and launching his phenomenally successful Wulfsport clothing range. But even though he's stayed in his native Cumbria on the unglamorous west coast (there's no throngs of Japanese tourists visiting Whitehaven looking for Mrs Tiggy-Winkle) he's come a long way.
"I was born on a farm but I was never interested in farming. Everything took too long - you put potatoes in the ground and I wanted to sit and watch them grow - but I found mechanical things very satisfying. I had a conversation with Dave Bickers and he said the same thing. He was a farm lad who headed for the mechanical side of things.
"When I was about 14 a friend of my dad gave me a 500cc Ariel road bike. Where I lived there was a very hilly area which up until then I'd spent my life going up and down on a bicycle which was hard work. The first time I went up there on a motorcycle and found I could just twist the throttle absolutely changed my life. From that day onwards I was in love with motorcycling.
"The same bike I raced. The first ever race I did was local at Dean Moor. I was 15 and I came up this hill in a whole bunch of riders, hit a bump and shot right over the handlebars and hit the ground at the feet of my mum and dad. I'll always remember my dad's first words. ‘He'll be all right Dorrie, he landed on his head!'."
When he wasn't crashing his brains out on the Lakeland fells, Bill was also shaping up to be very accomplished athlete - much better, in fact, than he was ever destined to be on two wheels.
"I was heavily into pole-vaulting at school. I finished third in the all-England school championship and after that I turned professional. I vaulted for Blackburn Harriers but I didn't take to it - life was very serious and the AAA wasn't for me, everyone was up their own arse.
"At the time I think there were over 100 Highland games - many of which had pole-vault - and I could get a bit of start money and maybe do four Highland games a week. The Queen was always at Braemar and the pole-vault was right in front of her so I always had to give her a little bow.
"I could go up there in a car with the pole strapped to the roof and make enough money - if I did the high jump, long jump, triple jump and sometimes the wrestling as well - to come back with a pocket full of cash."
This wasn't the glamorous pole-vault you see on TV - this was hardcore stuff with no thick mat to cushion landings so any money Bill made was earned the hard way.
"You had to design your jump so you landed on your feet. The problem was the higher you got the more you had to curl over the bar which meant you tended to land on your side or your back - or your head! It got a bit hairy and I had some hard landings.
"I did my share of winning and broke the English and Scottish professional pole-vault record and I won North of England Sportsman of the Year in, I think, about 1978. But I was far happier racing motorbikes than I was pole-vaulting. I was a much better pole-vaulter than a motocrosser but my first love was motorbikes."
Bill being Bill, he soon worked out a way of combining his passion with his profession.
"I'd go up to Scotland with the pole on the car and two bikes on a trailer. I'd go and do a race meeting, then do a pole-vault. I'd probably come fifth in the motocross and win the pole-vault but I knew which one I enjoyed more. I didn't get the same money and I didn't get the same results but I loved the racing."
When he left school Bill looked destined to go into dairy farming but agricultural college convinced him it wasn't the life he wanted.
"When I qualified [from agricultural college] the one thing I knew for certain was that I wanted nothing to do with farming. Up to then I'd accepted all my life that I was going to be a farmer - but not a happy farmer - because I was born on one and knew my dad expected me to take over.
"After that I drove trucks for a bit and then worked at an iron ore pit. I got the sack for putting windows out with a catapult. Anyway, the pit went bankrupt and the pit offices came up for sale - by then I was doing a lot of repairing motorcycles and buying and selling them - so I put an offer in for them and it was successful."
The pit was called Old Florence and Bill took the name - although, of course, he wasn't on site when Old Florence Garage opened up for the first time.
"I built up a good car and motorcycle repair business but around 1972 or '73 I realised I wanted a franchise. I was racing motocross - I was on AJSs - with some success but all my effort was going into making a living. I contacted Dave Bickers and myself and one of the lads took a Pontiac with a trailer down and came back with six CZs and that was my first franchise."
It was the beginning of a life-long friendship with the racing legend - Bill was riding with him and another off-road icon, four-time world speedway champion Barry Briggs, in Scotland just weeks before Bickers' death earlier this year.
"I sold CZ for three years in the early '70s - they were a good, strong bike but they didn't move on and by then Maico, Husqvarna and the Japanese started making better bikes. So I talked to Brian Leask about Husqvarna, talked to Bryan Goss about Maico and ended up selling both of them but I found the Maico was a more forgiving ride and very user-friendly and Bryan Goss was easy to deal with.
"If they were being paid to ride top riders would race anything but if they had to buy their own bike they'd buy a Maico. That's the way it went."
In the north of England ‘Bill Brown Maico' became borderline iconic and it was the start of an association that would overlap the beginning of Wulfsport and help cement Bill's status as an off-road legend.
Throughout our conversation Bill returns to the analogy of his role in business being like a chef who has a stoveful of pans bubbling away and, just as with cooking, when it comes to selling bikes timing is crucial.
"Motocross is seasonal and there are four or five months a year where you're sat scratching your arse and if you've got staff and premises you've got to keep money coming in. I decided that I needed to do more with the same staff so I started a road bike business as well as a motocross business because road bikes were popular from April until around October and once sales started dying off for the year the new motocross bikes come out. When the road bike business was on its arse for those months I was on fire selling motocross bikes. At the time I had 15 or 16 staff which I could justify because we were busy for 12 months of the year.
"So although my heart was in motocross my head was in business and I had to be earning money 12 months of the year. In the late '70s and early '80s we were selling over 1,000 bikes a year and we were very busy with about a 50/50 split between road and motocross."
Business was booming but so were the headaches associated with success and, always a man looking to live life on his own terms, Bill had an eye for an escape route.
"I moved to premises in Whitehaven which I think was probably the biggest motorcycle shop in the country - at any one time we'd have 200-300 bikes - but our business was purely with the public and I did find it hard dealing with the public. The more bikes you sold the more chance someone would be complaining on Monday morning because they'd fallen off and it wasn't their fault. You don't get that with the trade - the trade know what they're talking about, you know what they're talking about, they know that you know what you're talking about.
"If you've got a problem with the trade then you know you've got a problem but with the public...you'd get someone complaining that their bike's too slow because they got passed up the straight - how do you say to a man ‘you're useless, you can't ride'? You can't and you spend half your life biting your lip.
"So at one stage when we were at Whitehaven and heavily into retail I came to the conclusion that I'd rather just deal with the trade side of things."
The solution was Wulfsport!
"I started Wulfsport in 1980 with a view to just selling locally because I was sick of trying to establish other people's brands - as soon as you got them going another dealer would step in and under-cut you. With my own brand I could dictate my own price policy and structure."
Around about this point it all gets very involved - Bill had so many pans on the stove that it's easy to get lost - so we'll come back to Wulfsport later on and instead dive back into the world of motocross bikes...
If you cut Bill open you'd find Maico engraved on his heart. He gave me a tour of his warehouse which is pretty much wall-to-wall Wulfsport but around every corner there's a more direct connection with motocross.
As well as all the framed pictures of some of the sport's great riders, there's row after row of Maicos, shelves bending under the weight of Maico spares, grasstrack bikes, crates of Russian motocross machines pre-dating even '70s world champion Gennady Moiseev, a white Rolls Royce from the early '80s and a ton of other stuff. Aladdin - if he was into motocross - would crap himself in here...
Bill's fortunes appear to be intrinsically linked with those of Maico and although a massive supporter there's no doubt that he's benefitted from the German marque's demise - but it's clear he'd have been happier if things had panned out differently.
In 1983 the Maico factory went tits-up. Bill bought a job lot of spares from the then UK importer Bryan ‘Badger' Goss and then negotiated the importership from the Maisch brothers.
"I knew when the Maico factory got back up on its feet it wouldn't have a lot of money so I contacted them and said I was interested in being their importer in the UK. I told them I could send them a bank manager's letter saying I could buy 100 bikes."
With the deal done Bill put his own twist on the machines and was driving sales in the UK but further afield things weren't quite as healthy...
"I got on great with the Maisch brothers and spent quite a lot of time over in Germany. I had a fair bit of input with the bikes - it was actually our idea for the blue Maico in '86. The official colour was red and when I went to the factory I could see they'd made a lot of changes to the bike but at first glance it still looked the same. I was very disappointed and they could see this.
"It had a new power valve, new disc brake on the rear, all new plastics but for the man who didn't have a Maico - the rider we needed to win over - it still looked like the old bike."
The factory didn't want to change so Bill had bikes delivered ‘naked' and ordered blue plastics and tanks for them. There was loads of interest in them at the Dirt Bike Show at Trentham Gardens at the end of '85 - the same year my future expectations of nightclubbing were ruined - and they sold a shedload of blue ones in 1986. But the writing was - unexpectedly - on the wall.
"They were very good to work with but the thing that let the factory down was when it went wrong in the USA. The USA historically - and probably even now - took more than half the world's production and if you get America wrong you're in trouble. Any firm. It doesn't matter what happens in England or if it's a bad year in France or Italy - they can weather that - but if it doesn't make it in the States then..."
At the end of '86 Maico - the red ones - went bust again and it was a bitter blow for Bill.
"That hit me hard because I put a lot of effort into it. We were getting good sales - we were selling about 350 bikes a year - and I didn't realise how bad things were in the USA. They'd geared up for half their production to go over to the USA and the guy over there just wasn't doing it. In the end we were selling more bikes in England and it really dropped them on their head.
"At the time I had hard and fast plans to move down to the Midlands - I was going to have an off-road trade centre with Maico as part of it. We were also doing UFO clothing as well as our own clothing and I was going to open up in the Stoke area just off the M6 so when Maico went bust it was a huge blow because at the time that was more than half my business. We had about 20 dealers and it broke their hearts too because they'd put a lot of effort in - I felt so bad, I felt like I'd let them down as well.
"I felt like I had a future with Maico - sales were good, the bike was good, everything about it worked well. I didn't realise it wasn't happening in other countries."
It was at this point Bill made the decision to redouble his efforts with Wulfsport...
"I decided against moving to the Midlands and I just thought if ever I put this sort of effort into something again I want total control so I put all my efforts into Wulfsport and it's just got bigger and better and more established.
"A lot of our opposition is American-based so the American market comes first and they know it. So whenever there's a new set of race kit or a new set of boots or a new helmet it's got to hit the American market. Once all the American dealers are all stocked up and have got a bit of fat on their back then they'll let it trickle out to the rest of the world but by then it's usually a month or two months later.
"That's always been the case but now, with the internet, a lad in England who doesn't want to wait can go to an American dealer and have it within three days. So that lad is out on the track looking like his hero, meanwhile the importer for the UK or France or Germany is not going to get it for weeks and weeks and weeks. So what the hell hope's he got?
"Luckily we're the other way on - we're UK-based - so first and foremost we make sure the UK dealer network which accounts for at least a third of our business is happy. When they're stocked up then we let the new range go overseas. We're the opposite to the USA-based products so the last few years have worked very well for us because our opposition - the importers for USA-based brands - are really up against it because they can't get the new product but his customer can."
Being prepared to diversify - to have lots of pans at the go at the same time - has served Bill well over the years and even at 68 he's still stood at the stove and riding the range...
"When I was in the motorcycle business I had so many pans on - it's part of the game and business is like a game. You start off because you need to eat and you've got to think on your feet and learn fast or you'll be on your arse. There's desperation in your early years in business but after a few years you get a bit of confidence in yourself and there's not that same sense of panic.
"It's all a game and I do enjoy the game side of it. I enjoy watching those little pans going and being ready for when some more ingredients go in and it needs a little stir and then all of a sudden it's come to the boil and you've got a product. Sadly, sometimes you find there's a game dying off. The likes of sidecars. At one time we used to sell 50 or 60 sidecar units a year - EML and Zabel - brand new but there won't be that number sold in Europe now, never mind the UK.
"We still have parts but it was another good pan that kept cooking for 10 years or so but it's run its course. So you've got to have another pan that's coming to the boil that you can replace it with."
With Wulfsport Bill's got all his gas burners on - plus a couple of ovens and the odd grill or two.
"Speedway's another pan on the fire. But our business in speedway isn't so much the rider's stuff - okay, they use the helmets, the boots, gloves, goggles, roll-offs, body armour - but it's the jackets, t-shirts, hoodies for the fans. It's a nice little business on its own.
"If you look through our brochure there's stock car racing, trials, motocross, enduro, speedway, a little bit of a crossover into mountain bike racing and BMX, leisure, grasstrack. It's a lot of pans but luckily in those pans are the same ingredients. If you're riding motocross, speedway, enduro, grasstrack, sidecar, stock car racing even, it's the same helmet. The only one that's different is the trials helmet and I've got a new trials helmet coming out that hopefully I can sell in the scooter market. "
During my tour of the warehouse it becomes very clear that while Wulfsport is obviously the product that puts food in his belly, it's racing that lights the fire in it. Rows of gloves, helmets, boots and kit are pointed out with a wave of his hand but it's the yellowing photos of the first ever ISDE - just up the road from his Egremont birthplace - and shots of Pete Mathia, Jorgen Nilsson and their contemporaries in lurid action along with WW2 bullet boxes filled with spares that ignite a spark in his eyes.
"I still love racing now. I try and ride at least every three weeks, even through the winter, because I find if I stop it hurts. I've got my own pace - I know I'm not going to win any world championships. Having said that I've won three - two Over 50s and one Over 60s. Two of them in America at Glen Helen and one in the UK.
"I haven't lost sight of what first got me into it and that's the love of racing a motorbike. I've never lost it and I hope I never do..."
Bill on... Wulfsport
"I put serious thought into the name. There were other brands about that were just initials which I didn't think meant much to anyone but I quite liked the name Fox and a wolf is like a big brother to a fox - the top dog. At that time British people didn't like British products - they didn't like British cars, they'd gone off British motorcycles - so I thought we'll have a wolf but we'll spell it with a ‘u' and people won't think it's British. It wasn't about patriotism, it was about feeding my family.
"Probably for the first 10 years everyone thought I was just the UK importer. I didn't give it a big push but if I was helping someone I was helping them with Wulf, if an advert went in TMX it would have a Wulf logo in the corner. I was gradually drip-feeding it in because brands don't establish overnight - you can throw as much money as you like at something but it'll take 10 years before the public believe in it.
"We've been very, very lucky over the years. We've had riders who are still family friends - the likes of Pete Mathia who's been with us since 1983. Pete still rides now and he's keener than I am. All he wants to do is race. Pete would race the truck home. He'd race a wheelbarrow around the warehouse. But he's a treat to deal with. It's the same with the likes of Jorgen Nilsson who was number two in the world. We're in regular contact with him.
"At one time we had three riders in the top 10 of the world 500cc championship and won it with Shayne King but nothing happened with the business. A lot of the boys in the trade were like ‘congratulations, you've won the world championship' and I thought ‘brilliant, business is going to take off now' but nothing happened.
"One year we had Georges Jobe's team - Georges himself rode in our stuff - but nothing happened, sales didn't go up and didn't go down. So I came to the conclusion the product's got to be right, the price has got to be right and, more importantly, you've got to have it in stock. The dealer wants it tomorrow. It all comes back to service. You've got the right product at the right price and you can supply the service then as long as the name's well enough established then on you go - and that's looked after me ever since.
"It's a nice feeling when people come up to you and say ‘my dad used to wear Wulfsport when he was racing' and I'm now getting people saying ‘my granddad used to wear Wulfsport' and you kind of think ‘bloody hell, am I that old?' so it's bittersweet - one half of you is chuffed to bits, the other is thinking ‘bloody hell, how old am I?'."
Bill on... His Maico monopoly
Around 1990 Bill bought 60 tons of Maico spares from the factory and turned the west coast of Cumbria into a worldwide hub for the iconic German brand.
"People buy Maico parts from different places but you can bet your life most of them started out here. They think they're buying from our opposition but they're not, we deal with most of the Maico people throughout the world. You'll get someone in England who'll buy a Maico part from a chap in America and he'll think he's made a clever move - my attitude is your can buy from who you want but if it's a Maico part the chances are that it's come from here."
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