On The Pegs December 2019 - Volume 4 - Issue 12 | Page 92

On The Pegs
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tunity to kind of grow with a brand and remain with a brand through the future.
Honestly, I’m really excited about it. The carb bike is good. We’re still trying to
figure out and tinker with the TPI a lot. If you have an issue with it, you can’t really
fix it yourself. Same with fuel-injected on the four-stroke. No one knows how to
map one of those things. So honestly, I had an opportunity to do something dif-
ferent, a new motivation. There’s a lot of things. It’s not just one thing that made
me decide to change. But at the end of the day, I had to think about what I want
to do now, coming back from an injury and also my future down the road. So,
there’s no set job description on what I have, but the owner of the team wants
basically to work with me now and use me in the future whatever way that is,
whether it’s R&D or a manager type role or something along those lines.
Who is the team manager?
That is Wayne Dickert. He’s the actual team manager. The team owner was the
one that wanted to line up something for the long road. Ron Sallman is the team
owner. Wayne was the one that approached me and was like, hey, we got this.
Are you going to ride two-stroke?
Yeah. I’ll be primarily two-stroke, and since I’m not riding right now and not re-
ally too stressed about the EnduroCross series, I’m just putting a lot of effort into
those hard enduros. I will figure out when the time comes if I’ll stay on the two-
stroke or potentially ride that 300 four-stroke.
Tell me a little bit your thoughts on the EnduroCross season. It looked
like it was going away and then Eric Peronnard and Tod Hammock saved it.
Where do you see it going?
I think it was definitely good that they saved it, but they need to do something
about the tracks. I only went to one round. I watched some of the other rounds.
The Joker Lane looked pretty tough in Denver. It was culvert pipes super close to
each other. But it looked like I was just riding the arenacross series. It just didn’t
excite me. The stupid wood pit they always have in Boise, that’s the only thing
anyone even put their foot down in the whole race. It just didn’t feel like the
normal EnduroCross, and it hasn’t the last couple years. I feel like everyone keeps
telling them to make it harder, make more things happen, and they just keep go-
ing, making them easier. Obviously, the riders have gotten better, but for sure the
tracks back 2012 and stuff were a lot gnarlier than they are now.