Bike Week: When Half a Million Motorcycles Come to Town
Near Daytona, Florida
Every March, Daytona Beach population roughly doubles, and the sound of the city changes completely. Bike Week is one of the largest motorcycle rallies in the world, drawing several hundred thousand riders and spectators across a ten-day span. But its roots go back to a single race on a cold January morning in nineteen thirty-seven.
The American Motorcyclist Association sanctioned the first Daytona two hundred race on January twenty-fourth of that year. The course was a three-point-two mile circuit using the beach itself and a paved return lane, and the winner was Ed Kretz of California, riding an Indian motorcycle at an average speed of seventy-three miles per hour. The race drew a few thousand spectators. They came back the next year, and the year after that.
World War Two canceled the official event from nineteen forty-two through nineteen forty-six. The war did not stop the riders. They showed up anyway in nineteen forty-two for what organizers had called off, and what they started that year became the unofficial tradition that kept Bike Week alive even without a race to anchor it.
The Daytona two hundred eventually moved to the International Speedway in nineteen sixty-one, where it still runs as one of the premier motorcycle races in North America. But Main Street and the surrounding blocks became the real center of gravity for the rally, a week of vendor stalls, custom bike shows, live music, and the kind of spontaneous fellowship that forms when several hundred thousand people who all love the same thing arrive in the same small city at the same time.
A second rally, Biketoberfest, was added in the early nineteen nineties and now draws another hundred thousand or so every October. Between the Daytona five hundred in February and the two bike rallies, there are some weeks in this city when the roads in and out carry more vehicles than the roads themselves were designed to hold.
