On The Pegs January 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 1 | Page 47

On The Pegs
VOL. 5 ISSUE 1 - JANUARY 2020
47
Do you think the fact that you’re not racing bar to bar with someone else,
like with motocross or GNCC, is a factor for some to ride the series?
I think it matters to the dude that has a mortgage. He’s less concerned about
getting cleaned out by somebody or a big first-turn pileup. I think that definitely
matters. There’s a lot of these things that are happy accidents. I didn’t plan it.
That’s not why I wanted to do it, but you talk to some of the youth riders that are
just getting started. They start at the end of the pack. They’ve got their own little
window that they to ride in. You put your first-year kid on a 65 out a hare scram-
ble, he’s getting lapped five times by a dude on a supermini that’s going A class
speed. It’s pretty intimidating stuff. It can turn some kids away from the sport. So
it’s worked out. I’m not that smart. A lot of the things that have made it awesome
are things that I wasn’t really thinking of. It’s kind of worked out that way.
You can still compare yourself with everybody because it’s all timed.
Yeah, that’s the other super cool thing. You went and rode the same grass track
that Kailub Russell rode. It gives you a real appreciation for how fast they are. It
gives you some motivation. Maybe you had a really good test and you were only
40 seconds off or something. That’s cool.
Did you underestimate the amount of work that goes into putting on a
race?
A hundred percent. I’ll never forget the first year we went to Big Buck and the
red clay down here in South Carolina is hard as a rock. I went to hammer in the
very first stake. I’ll never forget. It was way harder just to get that one stake into
the ground. I was like, man, what did I get myself into here? We started out with
a skeleton crew. I didn’t have any money, so it was my dad and my brother and
my uncle and my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. That was our crew. People
were taking off work. We were doing it with just a couple guys. Then everybody
would bail because they’d have to go back to work on Monday and it would be
me and Krista and Macy cleaning up. Those first few years were a freaking grind,
man. A lot of times wondering what the heck I got myself into. You have a bad
race where you don’t make any money and you’re still there until Thursday clean-
ing up the mess and it doesn’t matter. So we’re to the point now where it’s still
not easy. It’s a massive undertaking. You look around there and a couple thou-
sand stakes don’t put themselves into the ground. It’s all manual labor. Tearing
everything back down, you still got to walk through the woods. We’re to the point