Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127760
INTERVIEW Hare Scrambles National Champion Scott Summers You and Scott Plessinger go way back - you're from the same area, you're about the same age and you both came up through the ranks at about the same time. Do you still consider him a close friend or has your rivalry been hard on the friendship? Oh no, not at all. We get along real well. If J can't win I'd just as soon see Scott win. At that last race Plessinger said he just had one of those days where nothing went right. Do you ever have days like that? Yeah, I had that day at the final round of the Grand National Cross Country Series. I'm in tune with what he's talking about. What happens is you make one mistake and it has a snowball By Davey Coombs Photos by Jim Talkington and Coombs t just 28 years of age, Petersburg, Kentucky's Scott Summers has already had a prolific career. Since 1990 he's won more titan a halfdozen AMA National off-road championships, all 011 a four-stroke motorcycle while competillg against two-strokes. In 1995 Summers had one of those good/bad years. He WOIl the AMA National Hare Scrambles Championship by a narrow margin but lost the AMA Grand National Cross Country title by an even slimmer margin. A How many titles do you have now? . Seven. I've won four hare scrambles championships and three cross country titles. Was the battle for the 1995 AMA National Hare Scrambles title with Scott Plessinger and Rodney Smith your closest one ever? No, I don't think so. There's been several times when a championship has come to the last race for me. It happened in '91, and in '93 it was between Jan Hrehor and Scott Plessinger and me. But I think this was the only time that I did not control my own destiny going into th.e last race. It was always a case where if I won, then I would win the title. This time I not only had to win, but I had to rely on sOlp.eone else beating Scott Plessinger. Were you comfortable with the fact that the person in the Washington finale would likely be Rodney Smith? Sure. I knew he wouLd be tough for either of us to beat. It was ironic that it would be Rodney, because he and Scott have had some pretty fierce battles. At the second-to-Iast event of the series Scott kind of stuffed Rodney and ended up taking the win. It was.a risk because he almost blew his chances for the title right there. But it worked out to my benefit because those two kind of had their own little battle going on there, and Rodney really wanted to beat Scott at the final round. I'm sure that Rodney wanted to beat me also, but it kind of all fell into place for me. ea~ effect. Pretty soon you make another mistake and then you start trying extra hard to make it up but you end up just making another mistake, and another, and another. You're trying harder and harder, but what you end up doing is riding over the level of your ability. A bad day like that cost you the ·GNCC title, didn't it? Yes, it did. You and Scott Plessinger ended up tied in that series, but he had more race wins, so he won on the tie breaker. Was there a kind of symbolic victory in coming as close as you possibly could to winning such a competitive series without actually winning? No, not really. The closeness of that series is kind of deceiving because (Above) Not only Is Scott Summers a seven-time off-road National Champion, but he Is considered by many as the number-one ambassador of the sport of off-road racing. Hera, he Is being Interviewed by John Ayers. (left) Summers credits his mechanic Fred Bramblett as a major contributor to his success. (left) Summers welcomes the recent Influx of big-name motocrossers to the sport of offroad racing. Here, he and Ty Davis (147) trade paint at a GNCC race last year.