On The Pegs February 2019 - Volume 4 - Issue 2 | Page 52

On The Pegs
How did you go from supercross to Dakar in the
first place?
My last job with Honda, I did all kinds of stuff. My
main priority was testing and helping Kenny and
the supercross team, with Cole (Seely), and doing all
that. Meanwhile, I did some production testing with
Johnny Campbell and the rally testing up in the des-
ert. So we had a weekend to kill and they were doing
reliability testing. So I went up and rode the rally bike,
and from that moment I was hooked. I’m like, ‘This is
super cool.’ Everything about it. Then I built an en-
duro bike with the navigation tower on it so I could
learn how to navigate. Once I learned how to do that,
then I was really hooked. I signed up for a race, which
was kind of frowned upon at the time because I had
to miss a weekend from my real job. Then from there,
once I raced I was hooked. I was fully addicted. I was
really lucky that I was able to get on a team at the
time, especially with the group that I’m with. They’ve
been so successful. They’ve won the last 18 Dakars, so
that group has been really successful. For me to be a
part of that and hop right in was a huge opportunity.
The guy I actually replaced, he got hurt really bad and
so that’s why I was able to join in. My teammate is
really good, Pablo Quintanilla. He’s a multi-time world
champion. He came close to winning Dakar this year
until a big crash took him out.... I’m lucky that I was
able to make that transition. I also underestimated
how big rally is worldwide and how big this race is. In
the US it’s tiny and not very many people pay atten-
tion to it, and there’s not much coverage from the
mainstream media. But worldwide in Spain and some
of these countries, it’s huge. Here in South America
there are so many people that follow it. It’s really cool
to see what it’s all about, just besides the actual race,
how cool it is.
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On The Pegs
Vol. 4 Issue 2 - February 2019
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