Bob Buchanan is a name many in the motocross paddock will know well. From running the GL12 Racing team — a two-stroke powerhouse that left its mark on the EMX scene — to launching GoggleTek, now one of the most trusted names in goggle preparation in the GP paddock, Buchanan has lived and breathed the sport for decades. We caught up with Buchanan to reflect on his time running GL12 KTM, the motivation behind GoggleTek’s rise, and to get his brutally honest take on the current state of the sport — from the struggles facing MXGP teams to what needs to change if Britain wants to produce world-class riders again.
GateDrop: Bob, let’s start with the GL12 KTM team that you used to run from I believe 2010 to 2017. You must have great memories running the team – you loved the two strokes!
Buchanan: I have great memories for sure of both the GL12 Yamaha and the GL12KTM, standing on podiums at GPs as a winning team owner with your riders is a special thing. Matterley Basin in 2016 with both riders up there, Brad Anderson and Lewis Gregory. Mike Kras won a bunch as well. The best one must be Jimmy Dunn in Villars in 2017.
The year before Wolfgang Serb, who is sadly missed, and I worked on getting 250 two strokes allowed in EMX250 which was previously only 4 strokes, to try to make it more affordable for kids to progress out of the EMX125 class into the EMX250 class. As its way cheaper to be competitive on a 250 two-stroke. So, the first year they were allowed was 2017, Jimmy won the overall in Villars and Wolfgang presented me the trophy on the podium, and I still love 2 strokes.
A lot of the riders we help now don’t know about the team but without the team there would be no GoggleTek.
GateDrop: The team ended up stopping at the end of 2017, what was the main reasons for this?
Buchanan: Mainly financial. Help and sponsorship was way more abundant in the early days, and it got less and less as the years went by, so I was spending more and more of my own and a few good friends’ money than the sponsors were putting in, so it wound me up we were paying to advertise their brands. Also, a bit of disillusionment, because the bigger bikes were my main focus, but I always took a 125 rider to give a kid experience of the GP paddock but never any interest or help ever came from the ACU and unfortunately that remains true today.
GateDrop: I would say probably no – but would you consider running a team again in the future?
Buchanan: Wrong, in a heartbeat but it would need to be an EMX team along the lines of the RFME team, the goal of every governing body has to be grow your national riders through European competition. I’ve always tried to help kids and encourage them to challenge themselves in the EMX, you don’t know how good you are, or everyone else is, if you don’t go, and go early enough! If you’re planning on a career in MX no one apart from immediate family cares who wins on a 65 or an 85, the aim at the end of the season if your 13 is to go on a 125 and work back from there.
GateDrop: I think you had a goggle shop when you had the team as well but assume it wasn’t to the level you have now with GoggleTek?
Buchanan: It was different but there was a crossover, we were using the goggles we were selling on the team riders to promote them, and it became apparent to me that standard production roll offs of most brands weren’t up to the job. I had riders throwing goggles and loosing 4 or 5 seconds a lap in races after it cost thousands of pounds to get them in. So, I thought it can’t be that hard to make roll offs that work and last a race, and as it turned out it wasn’t.
Other riders started noticing that our goggles were working where theirs weren’t and Glenn (Coldenhoff) was the first GP rider to adopt our roll offs, Toddy K (Kellett) was also wearing them on the beach as well.
GateDrop: I think you started GoggleTek at the end of the 2017 season, what exactly is it that you do at Goggletek – design, build and prepare race goggles I believe?
Buchanan: Yes, it came about when UK goggle distributors had a game of musical chairs, and we swapped our main focus from one brand to another which had a notoriously poor roll off systems and we set about building new systems for those. I have a set of basic principles that are applicable to every goggle no matter what brand, most riders can spot a roll off I’ve built no matter what goggle its on.
Preparation is a large part of it once its built correctly and I’ve done numerous videos to show people how to do it themselves, because it’s no fun trying to ride a dirt bike in bad weather when you can’t see where you’re going and too dangerous to ride with no goggles on.
GateDrop: At the beginning – for the 2018 season, was it hard to get riders on-board?
Buchanan: No, we already had most of the British paddock on one brand, I just swapped them over that winter, the general response was I don’t care what goggle I wear as long as you do them The EMX riders had grown by then as well, but the GP riders grew more gradually. Until Jeffrey that is, then that took off as well.
GateDrop: I think you’re into your seventh season and I assume you do goggles for a lot more riders now than you did in 2018. What riders wear GoggleTek in the paddock?
Buchanan: I do a lot more GP riders now for sure than in 2018, there’s no more than a handful of riders in the top 20 of both classes I haven’t worked with and it’s been a great experience and an eye opening one into the psyche of GP riders and teams. It has allowed me to work with some of the best riders of modern times, if not the best.
Herlings, Roczen, Gajser, Prado, Renaux, Seewer, Fernandez, Glenn, Bona, Guada, Isak, de Wolf, Everts, Adamo, both Coenen brothers, Simon, Brent and Ben. There’s more but that’s a sense of it.
GateDrop: What way does it work when it comes to getting riders, do you approach the riders, or do they approach you or does it vary? You’ve got so many riders now you might be happy with the amount that you have at the moment – you are also the happiest man in the paddock when it rains (laughs)…
Buchanan: I don’t approach the riders, they come to me because they find out as I found out myself years ago no production roll off is good enough no matter how well you prep them. Goggles are designed as tear off goggles and roll offs fitted as an afterthought.
The problem I have is getting rid of riders once they use my goggles, they don’t want someone else to do them and as teams and riders change brands you contractually pick up more riders, so the workload grows. I have three boys in the workshop I couldn’t do it without
Lewis who’s been with me from the start of GL12 and was the first to win me an overall, Rob who was doing EMX125 in the beginning and grew up with us as we all travelled together, he’s stayed for the duration and Marky Smith who’s been around us all the time and I’ve worked with on and off for 15 years. If someone was to put a GoPro in the workshop when we’re all in there working, we would all be institutionalised, it’s not a normal work place environment, but we all know everything about each other and its, to use a word I don’t really like, ‘nice’.
GateDrop: What is an MXGP weekend like for you? I assume it is busy!
Buchanan: Yes, its busy. About 200 odd goggles but a lot of the prep is done before I go, a few changes get made at the track and a few riders who don’t have enough goggles to leave them with me, bring me goggles on Fridays, so they need doing Friday night when I get there, if I told you the names of some of the riders that don’t get enough product from their brand it would blow your mind.
But Monday is the worst day. No matter what time I get home from wherever I have travelled from, how tired I am, I have to strip and wash all the goggles before I go to bed, the fabric parts have to be dry Tuesday morning when the boys get in. That’s a red line, or we miss the next GP.
GateDrop: I believe you mainly only do the European rounds and not all of the fly away rounds? Do you enjoy all the travelling getting to see bits of the world?
Buchanan: I’ve travelled with this circus for nearly 20 years, mostly the same tracks, which isn’t a bad thing as the new ones tend to be poorer. So, travel mostly the same roads every year, lost count of the number of trips along the A16 from Calais and round the Antwerp ring road, times I’ve been up and down the Fern pass, to work with the same people I worked with the week before a thousand odd miles away. I don’t need a SatNav to drive around Europe. The exploring days are over, but I still enjoy the driving it’s when I do my thinking, it’s the only time I haven’t got a goggle in my hand or a phone ringing its head off.
GateDrop: How would you describe the industry at the moment; it seems a lot of the teams tend to be struggling financially…
Buchanan: What’s a polite word for f**ked? Well, that. When my boys or Rob were trying to qualify for EMX125 there were three groups,120 riders, the fastest 36 qualified directly, 40 odd went straight home, no race, 40 went into an LCQ, 36 of whom went home. So about 80 odd riders didn’t make the race, now you don’t get 80 riders enter in the first place.
I got given everything in the beginning, bikes, spares, oil and tyres. Everything we got paid to wear gear paid to use oils. None of my riders paid a penny and some got paid wages and that was just EMX.
GP teams don’t get that now, they have to take paying riders to help balance the books and paying riders are never the best riders, so the field is weakened. So, the MXGP brand is weaker… the sport needs outside investment to grow but how do you make it more attractive to outside investment with smaller fields and small one lined carpark tracks? The industry is too small, too niche to support itself in the modern financial climate. You can’t go back to the 90’s however much we may want to the worlds turned a few too many times its still an awesome sport with some amazing athletes… It just needs a complete make over, not the halfway house were drifting along in.
Moto brands have been bought out by big leisure brands or investment companies and are run by corporate people who have no idea what our sport is… I’ve sat in meetings with them, they have no idea what I’m talking about and Motocross makes no financial sense to them, so they don’t get involved enough to grow it. And these massive financial mega corporations take an eternity to pay any one even if they eventually decide to.
I’m lucky enough to have finally been invested in by a company that is still a moto company at heart with people that get me, just give me the product materials and the means to do the work and I’ll deliver. As Rob said to me the other day we’ve never missed one yet, which is just as well because they don’t take any goggles themselves for if I didn’t get there.
GateDrop: There aren’t too many amazing Brits emerging at the moment – just a few that have a chance of making it. I was at Canada Heights for the last British round, and I’ve got to say the gap from British to MXGP is even bigger than I imagined. What do you think needs to happen in the UK to help develop the talent for the future?
Buchanan: I could write a book on this; it’s been a lot of my life trying to help British kids. The easiest thing to do is go listen to an interview, one of Jeffs Man in a van I did five years ago, it’s on YouTube (see below), what I said nobody did, so what I said would happen, happened.
Forget the top two classes in the British Championship, don’t spend another penny on it. It doesn’t matter how you dress it up we’ve got no riders, the British public aren’t stupid… they won’t go and watch the same old riders they’ve been watching for 15 years, you went to the Heights, Ando was top ten at 43, that’s not impressive, that’s catastrophic and I love Brad to bits.
There is a timely validation of the systematic failure of the governing body to support and grow British MX, if it were needed, in the entry lists for the British GP this weekend. There are no British entries in MX2,
none. So no foreign travel required, no ATA Carnet, no additional time off work for teams or parents, all the usual excuses, just plain old no one good enough.
If you’ve got any money to spend, give it to 65,85,125 riders to go and do EMX and then in five to ten years time you might just have a British championship worth going to watch with some actual MX2 GP riders in it instead of none. That is of course if there is such a thing as a GP in five to ten years’ time.
