Kawasaki bids Dale goodbye

Howard Dale, Kawasaki’s ‘one club player’, steps down after 45 years with Team Green. Alan Dowds reports

Howard Dale is leaving Kawasaki UK after spending his entire working life with Team Green.
The notion of a ‘one-club player’ used to be common in the world of football. Lads would sign as a schoolboy for their local team, live near home, and retire to open a pub up the road from the ground. Legends like Ryan Giggs for Manchester United, Pat Bonner at Celtic or Tony Adams for Arsenal all fit the bill – though it’s much less common today.

The bike trade also has its ‘one-club’ – men and women, who earn long-service awards at just one brand. Howard Dale is one: he started out as a mechanic, aged 16, at his local bike shop in 1980. It just happened to be a Kawasaki dealer, and from there, he progressed to the Japanese firm’s importer, where he’s worked ever since. And now, aged 61, he’s retiring from his general manager role after 45 years, to spend more time with his family – and his bicycle.

I’m sitting with Dale in his office at Kawasaki UK, a few weeks before his last day, discussing his biking history. Back when he was 16, his heart belonged to another brand. “I had been racing motocross since I was about 16, and ironically I raced a Suzuki! But when I started working, I quickly built a strong allegiance to Kawasaki. I liked the bikes, I liked the training courses, and I liked the company. They were doing really well in the 1980s, the GPZ era or red revolution as they called it.”

An opportunity to move on from the dealer came in 1991. “I worked at CBS in Twickenham, and Kawasaki was based at Slough. I saw an advert in Motor Cycle News for a ‘leisure products manager’, which was actually a technical service adviser. I was workshop manager at CBS but was looking to progress, so I sent in my CV and got the job, starting at Bourne End on 2 January 1991.”

Dale later moved up the ranks to look after warranties, then into legal work with product liability. “I worked on all the carburettor icing problems at the time, doing lots of testing in the middle of the night to work out what conditions caused the icing.

“By 2002, I was a technical service manager, and my opportunity to move into ‘proper’ management came when Kawasaki, formerly a KHI subsidiary, became a branch office of Kawasaki Motors Europe. That changed everything; the Japanese MD moved to Europe with two senior managers, Geoff Selvidge and Jack Ford. And they wanted a general manager here for the new branch structure. Howard Coombes was the first general manager in 2003, and I was his deputy for a year of training. Howard retired in 2003, and I took over in January.”

So what has he been doing over the last 21 years? Collecting a lot of air miles for a start. “I was travelling to Amsterdam probably every month in the early days. As time went on, it was more like once a quarter, up until Covid, anyway. However, one of the most interesting things for me were the trips to Japan. Akashi is the heart and soul of Kawasaki, and it’s always a nice feeling when you walk into the factory. This is where the history of Kawasaki started.”

Dale saw a lot of new bikes before they were released. “We get to work on products two or three years before they come to market – sketches, a clay model, then a pilot production bike. Being able to ride stuff like the first ZX-10R and the H2, giving feedback, is really quite something.”

What changes has Dale seen in the UK market? He believes things have turned full circle in 25 years. “When I first became general manager, the biggest complaint in the market was discounting; the Japanese brands were beating each other up trying to get more market share.”

That changed after the 2008 financial crisis and massive rises in the exchange rates for Japanese products. The trade just about recovered from that by the mid-2010s, when the uncertainty of Brexit hit hard. Dale has never hidden his dismay over the UK leaving the EU: “Brexit’s still a problem, though we’ve learned how to deal with it. But in terms of efficiency and cost, it’s a drag. I haven’t found a positive for Brexit, either in my business life or my personal life. I’m still looking.”

Then, just as the election of Boris Johnson settled some of the uncertainty of Brexit, came the massive impact of Covid-19. “Covid stopped everything,” said Dale. “But bikes were an essential service: you could still sell motorcycles, with remote selling and delivery. 2020 was a difficult year, with three months pretty much cancelled, but 2021 was the most profitable year for any manufacturer in history, I’d say. Supply was down 20%, but people had disposable income to spare.”

Of course, it didn’t last, and over the past couple of years, the trade has ended up back in the same situation as when Dale became general manager more than 20 years ago – oversupply and discounting. “We moved from famine to feast. We had a flood of product coming in, and at the same time, there was a cost-of-living crisis, Russia invaded Ukraine, inflation rose, interest rates went up, and demand became lukewarm.”

How does he see the future for the industry? “I think the biggest threat the industry faces are overzealous ‘net-zero’ politicians, who have these ambitious targets, and no real idea, in my opinion, of how they’re going to achieve them. I am optimistic for the future, but that is a blot on the landscape that makes it unpredictable.”

There is an alternative to buying a pub for the one-club footballer: They can get kicked upstairs with the suits. And that’s what Howard Dale is planning. He’s going to a part-time consultancy role with Kawasaki Europe three days a week and will use his free time to catch up with some personal goals. “I really enjoy cycling, and I want to do some big events in France, in the Alps. I also have an old Suzuki RM500 motocross bike, which I’m restoring. I raced one of those at 16, and I picked another one up a few years ago. It’s quite rare, and I’ve been rebuilding it in my spare time, it’s probably about two-thirds finished.”

Hiroshi Suzuki replaced Howard Dale as Kawasaki UK general manager on 1 April.