On The Pegs January 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 1 | Page 49

On The Pegs VOL. 5 ISSUE 1 - JANUARY 2020 49 holidays. It’s a struggle. It just is what it is. I think it’s the right thing to do, to work around the other series. I know on the west coast there’s a lot of fighting between series and they schedule on top of each other and it doesn’t do anybody any good to do that. So I do my best to fit in with all the local series, all the national series. I want everybody to be successful. I think that’s the best way to do it, but it’s not easy. Was there anything that surprised you about running the series? A couple things. I knew that there were a lot of political stuff that went on in rac- ing, but I didn’t realize the full effect of it and the impact that it could have. So it’s been a struggle. Kind of uphill the whole time. That definitely surprised me. I had all the best intentions when I started this series that I wanted to make our trophy team, club team more competitive on the international level, and I thought that was something that everybody could get behind, but I definitely was wrong on that. The other thing I think I underestimated was how devoted a lot of people are to their local series. That’s something that we’ve really learned. Like we were talk- ing about the scheduling. There are some local series that you just can’t schedule over. They might have 16 races and they get four drops, but those people are not taking their drops. We move around and we come someplace and I just figured we’re something different, something new, and everybody wants to do it, but they would pick their local over us. That was hard to understand. I didn’t really get it. You just got to be mindful of all that stuff. Did you get any personal satisfaction when Team USA won in Spain in 2016 and then again this year? Especially those guys mentioning the Full Gas series? Yeah. That was awesome. That was kind of the dream. I don’t want to take a whole bunch of credit for it, but I feel like we definitely had some sort of impact on that. Like you said, having those guys mention our series at press conferences and stuff at the Six Days is pretty surreal. This whole deal started at an ISDE for me, the idea, and then for it to come full circle like that is pretty awesome. Now we’re here at ISDE training camp at our series. Everybody gets it now. I think it’s cool. n