If George Bryce wanted to be mean to his longtime rivals Vance & Hines Screamin' Eagle Harley-Davidson and rub it in that he's benefiting from the new rules that set them back for months, he could channel unfiltered comedienne Joan Rivers. He could tauntingly and unsympathetically tell them, "Oh, boo hoo hoo."
 
But the Sovereign-Star Racing co-owner isn't strutting or bragging or behaving imperiously because the rules he lobbied for so vigorously are playing out in his favor. They're playing out in favor of the three-man Arana team, the Matt Smith Racing trio, and Steve Johnson, as well.
 

If George Bryce wanted to be mean to his longtime rivals Vance & Hines Screamin' Eagle Harley-Davidson and rub it in that he's benefiting from the new rules that set them back for months, he could channel unfiltered comedienne Joan Rivers. He could tauntingly and unsympathetically tell them, "Oh, boo hoo hoo."
 
But the Sovereign-Star Racing co-owner isn't strutting or bragging or behaving imperiously because the rules he lobbied for so vigorously are playing out in his favor. They're playing out in favor of the three-man Arana team, the Matt Smith Racing trio, and Steve Johnson, as well.
 
Bryce used a golfing expression to describe what National Hot Rod Association bike-class fans are seeing this season: "Everybody's hitting from the men's tees now!"
 
The bottom line for Bryce is that he's back in the swing. He simply is enjoying the resurgence, feeling that confidence from harnessing what he called "a great combination of horsepower, ability and opportunity."
 
The success that once seemed to come so effortlessly has startled him a bit this year.
 
"After struggling last year to get the Sovereign-Star Racing combination established, it's almost a weird feeling being able to win just by putting a good tune-up in the bikes and eliminating the little mistakes," he said.
 
However it arrived, the mojo is back, with Michael Ray and Scotty Pollacheck aboard the V-Twin Buells bringing the performance.
 
"It's been awhile," he said. "I would say it's been since the Winston days."
 
That era of strong funding -- for Bryce's Star Racing and for NHRA drag racing alike -- was a decade ago. That's how long Bryce has spent trying to climb back to prominence, to the level he enjoyed when he won NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle series championships with John Myers (1990, '92, '95) and three straight with Angelle Sampey (2000-02).
 
So while he isn't arrogant about his re-emergence while Vance & Hines is struggling, neither is he apologetic about leading the debate for equality. That's a significant factor in the resurfacing of what's known today as Sovereign-Star Racing, a venture that stretches to Europe with Bryce's business partnership with Hungarian sugar distributor Jenõ Rujp.
 
As leader of the revolution, Bryce had the perfect perspective to evaluate whether the result is true parity or just a punishment for Harley-Davidson. It's a fine line, that debate, and perhaps parity comes with the given of hampering the Harley-Davidson. Bryce sees it as nothing more than a level playing field.
 
"The rules are the same for them as for us. They have unlimited resources. They have unlimited brainpower over there. They're obviously the smartest people and the smartest team. They've been highly touted over the world for decades as the go-to guys," he said.
 
"It's a deal where they had an unfair advantage as the only team that could run four-valve cylinder heads, and they won every race. If they didn't win one, it was because somebody made a mistake or somebody was doing a better job than they were on race day. But as far as all-out performance, nobody outperformed them as long as they had their four-valve heads," he said.
 
"So we all fought to get the rules evened out, get them level again.  Now there's no reason whatsoever they shouldn't run as good as us," Bryce said. "We should all be right in the same E.T.s, the same mile an hour, because we all have the same rules.
 
"I think they may be in a year like we were last year, a development year, where they're cutting new parts and going through a research-and-development phase to where they can step up the program  and do better at the end of this year and next year."
 
He expressed some skepticism about how long the Vance & Hines team has taken to rebuild after the rules -- in his words -- "devalued their combination."
 
Said Bryce of the long Harley-Davidson recovery, "It's supposed to be that way, but usually Vance & Hines doesn't operate [in a] normal [way] -- they're usually above normal. And they have been since I've been in competition with them for 30 years. I am a little bit surprised. You wonder about those guys, how much they're holding back and how much they have left.  The Countdown to the Championship will show us what they really have."
 
He said eventually Vance & Hines will get Andrew Hines' and Eddie Krawiec's bikes in competitive form. "And when they do," he said, "they'll be stronger than ever. If Vance & Hines has all the money and all the smart people, they should be able to make 'em go as fast as Matt Smith or Hector Arana."
 
Will that trigger more calls for restrictions on the Harley-Davidsons? Bryce said no, as long as the NHRA maintains the freshly instituted specs.
 
"If they keep the rules like they are right now, they're the same for all the V-Twins. We all have the same cubic-inch limit, the same push rod limit, two-valves-per-cylinder limit, same weight -- everything's the same. So it should be fair from now on, as long as they keep the rules the same," Bryce said. "If they slow down the V-Twins, that means they'll have to slow down the Harleys, too, because we're all under the same configuration."
 
He said unapologetically, "I'm glad they changed the rules to where we can be competitive again. It's a much better show."
 
Bryce, who said, "I consider myself an advisor for the rules, because my company always spoke for the best of the category, for the whole," said the feedback he receives proves it.
 
"I get kudos every day from fans and interested parties who had just about given up on us," he said. "And they're like, 'Wow! It's fun to watch again. We're enjoying it. We're coming out. We're reading. We're watching. TV show's fun again. New personalities are fun.' It was really old hat. You didn't have any Vegas odds. The only odds were who was going to come in third, fourth, and fifth."
 
The new rules haven't solved all the problems with parity in the Pro Stock Motorcycle class and the exclusive Harley-Davidson program, Bryce noted.  
 
"They [the NHRA] made the rules the same, and that devalued their combination, because they're just like everybody else now. But a Harley-Davidson dealer or a guy who spends his whole life and all his money in a multimillion-dollar mega deal can't race a Harley because of the rules. It's kind of crazy," he said, "but that's the way it is. That's the corporate way."
 
So Bryce has accepted the victories and the NHRA's status-quo in other matters and has parlayed Ray's and Pollacheck's performances into top-six berths in the standings. Ray, with victories at Englishtown and Joliet, is second to early-season dominator Hector Arana Jr. by just 69 points as the tour shifts to Norwalk, Ohio, this weekend. Pollacheck, runner-up at Houston, is sixth, only seven points outside the top five.
 
"The Sovereign-Star Racing team is a little bit of a mixed bag of how it all came together," Bryce said. "We were on our way up. We were running slower than Matt Smith and the Hectors last year, and then we continued our march forward with our research-and-development horsepower performance."
 
The new rules, he said, "made us look a little better and them [the Vance & Hines tandem] look a little worse, but it was natural progression because of the effort that we put into our program."
 
Bryce said, "We invested in a whole year of development. We looked pretty poor last year. We weren't running well. A lot of people made fun of us. We were actually developing an engine program and a routine. We hadn't been able to race at this level in a long time. The last time we were fully funded was in the Team Winston days."
 
He had some success in that first decade of the new millennium but realized why that didn't materialize into something better.
 
"We had a really good deal going in 2007 and 2008 with S&S and Drag Specialties. But we got a little bit of divided focus," he said, taking his share of the responsibility for that. "I was helping a team -- I was helping a customer's team as a crew chief and an engine supplier, plus I co-owned the team that Chip Ellis rode for in '07 and Chris Rivas rode for in '08. So it was a divided focus. Even though we were successful and we were funded well, we just didn't have our feet pointed in the same direction. "
 
This year, everybody at Sovereign-Star Racing is headed in the same direction: to the Countdown to the Championship and a strong battle, George Bryce-style.

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