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How was the transition from racer to organizer and promoter?
Well, I was still a racer at heart and it was always
a challenge because I sometimes kind of have to half-prepare to race and hope I might be able to.
I did race but I became less competitive ‘cause I wasn’t competing at all the rounds or in some cases I wouldn’t know that I was going to race until twenty minutes before the race. So, it started to gradually become a lot less racing, but because we were one of just a couple places in the country doing it at the time -- really, if I wanted to race I was almost forced into racing at my own events. Out of ten races, I probably raced three of four of them so I raced a lot less; it turned out to be as I could do it, effectively.
How has the track construction and design changed throughout the years?
It’s almost back to kind of where we started nowa- days. We’re seeing a lot more of what I call “parking lot races”; now that doesn’t mean that we’re always in a parking lot per se, but we’re utilizing something other than a racetrack. Back in the beginning when the sport was new and we hadn’t been accepted to the race tracks, because it was sort of an unknown element -- we really had to approach a lot of these kart tracks and I tell people we ended up bribing them; we had to pay a little more than they might rent to a go-kart club to put on a race in order to get them to let us run a Supermoto race. After three or
four years of doing it in parking lots, when we finally arrived at these go-kart tracks, it changed things immensely. We were going to these facilities that were more turnkey and all we had to do was con- struct a small dirt section -- in most cases it was less dirt, because we didn’t have the ability to produce these more glorious dirt sections, but we had a real asphalt racetrack. For the bulk of the middle years of SupermotoUSA as well as the national series, everything was happening on these go-kart tracks and it became the norm. My position is that we kind of gave up some of these opportunities by renting these tracks instead of going to these fairgrounds or these city streets to produce these events -- another thing is that it wasn’t unique, it was a track that a lot of people had already ridden on or rode last year. We’re back to doing more of these unique, one-off events and it allows us in most cases to have more dirt and we’re trying to pull more of the dirt disci- pline athletes over. It’s rare that you get someone to try Supermoto for the first time and they don’t say “Wow, that’s pretty cool,” no matter what they come from. There’s always that balance and if the track has a whole bunch of dirt then some of the road rac- ers are out of their element and if it’s eighty percent pavement, then some of them might have a leg up
-- but that’s the nature of the sport and my focus on running a series was always to have a variety of tracks that wouldn’t necessarily suit one type of racer.
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