Not only was this the inaugural Kenda AMA Extreme Championship race , but it was also the inaugural West Coast enduro for Quinn and Rieju . Quinn had a few mechanical issues crop up during the race that ended up costing him a few spots on the leaderboard . We caught up with him after the event to find out what happened .
QUINN : Starting off , I was feeling good ; the track looked like it was pretty much right up my alley with some trials-like obstacles but it didn ' t turn out to be that difficult for me so I think that gave me kind of a little bit of a disadvantage . We started on a really deep sandbar ; I got off to a bad jump kind of just buried in the sand . A bunch of guys fell right in front of me off the start , and I had to stop , so I got stuck again in the sand . It was pretty much a “ back of the pack ” start . lap got harder as we went so I rode some pretty sketchy obstacles like that with a bad handlebar . i was still pushing really hard I made my way up to probably like 13th or so and i made the decision to come into the pits after lap one and change the bars because i didn ' t want to race the rest of the four-hour race with bent handlebars like that ; i figured it would just hinder me too bad
I changed my bars and that set me back about an extra 25 minutes or so . I started to catch back up and feel pretty good and then I just tipped over again , bars hit a rock and my throttle jammed completely
A little less than halfway i made a mistake i was still trying to get used to the rocks and my tire was still really fresh which is actually a bad thing out west ; you want it to be broke-in a little bit . So my tire was real slick the first lap . I made a mistake and high-sided and tipped over ; my bike went down a little rock bank thing not too not nothing crazy but I must have just caught an edge and I bent my left handle bar down about an inch and a half ; I rode the rest of the lap like that which was a good eight miles . The
ON THE PEGS // PAGE 100