Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

involvement. We do what we can, but Kurt is the man for our company. Without Kurt, the show would not be going on. no one would have even cared. We are one of the first teams of our kind to win a 125cc main event. How did you get into the port? For me - and I think for Erik also - I just loved motocross since I was a kid. My parents actually never let me have a motorcycle. When I was like 20 or 21, I bought my first motorcycle, which was an XL350. I still have it. A little while later I got a CR125, and within my first two or three weeks of riding motocross I ended up in the hospital with a busted knee. bittersweet in a way? I don't put any bitter to it, I think it was sweet all the way. As far as the win, we were not given the attention that another team would have gotten for pulling that win, and I don't know why. We're this underground team; our story should be much more widely spread. Q A Q A AS far as riders. you've had Brian Deegan. Brian Swink. Phil Lawrence. Paul Currie. Travis Preston. Mike Metzger. and Michael Brandes. Yeah, those guys were pretty into riding for us, all of them were because it's a low-pressure kind of team. That's why I think Phil (Lawrence) was so into it. We're stoked that he made almost all the main events. He didn't have any top-five finishes or nothing, but he was a Iways out A Who were your favorite otocrossers when you were growing up? Bob Hannah, Rick Johnson of course, Jean-Michel Bayle, David Bailey and Ron Lechien. A HOW about music? Who were your musical inHuences when you were growing up? l've always played punk-rock music while playing the drums, but a lot of my drumming influences were metal-oriented, like .Tommy Lee and Neil Perk from Rush. I liked a wide variety of music back then and still do. There's so many different bands that I like. That's always a popular question in band interviews that I get asked, and most of the time I'm just always stumped. There's so many. I have endless influences. So would you say that the win was kind of Q A Q A What was it like starting the team? When we started the team, officials like the AMA and promoters took us like a joke. They thought we were just in it for a little bit and we'd be gone. I think they ac;tually hoped that we'd be gone. They thought that we were like the misfit team because we were like these three guys from totally outside the motocross industry that came in to do this team, and I think we got dubbed as the hoodlum team. We were doing things totally different. We brought in our different sponsors. We had all the record labels with Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph and Nitro. They weren't used to what we were doing at all and they were constantly trying to shut us down and throw us in the back of the pits where no one could see us. People just found us anyway because of all the stuff that we would give away for free. CDs and all kinds of cool stuff that all the kids would like. We've had a lot of ups and downs to deal with. It's just cool that we have so much support from the fans. And the fan support is getting even bigger. I think that for any kind of big sponsor we have more to offer than just your regular team. Other teams just have the team to offer. We have the videos, the supercross/motocross team, we have the freestyle team (Mike Cinqmars, Tommy Clowers and Carey Hart), we have the CD soundtracks, we have the whole music side of things covered. We plugged into to so many different kinds of avenues, it's not just a regular team, so I think for a big sponsor we have so many different things to offer. There's no other team out there that's like us. We're an original team, we're doing it our own way and we haven't failed. There's been so many other companies that come and try to do a team, but they flail, they go bankrupt, they're here for six months and then they're gone. There's numerous teams that are like that - Great Western Bank, PJ1, the Stiffie Team. There's so many of them. I think that the industry should look at us and commend us for what we've done, not shun us or give us the cold shoulder. We originally thought that we would be so accepted and people would be stoked on us in the industry for what we're doing. Like when we won that 125cc supercross, I think Deegan doing that ghost ride was actually the best thing that could have happened to us because we got so much press from that, but if he hadn't done that there, he made the events, he got the press. I think it was really good for us. He's been riding a lot of different European races, Australia and doing stuff like that. He wasn't planning on really doing the Nationals, and we were fine with that. It would have been better to have a 250cc guy out there, but we got Travis Preston out there and he did really well. He won top privateer honors in the Nationals for us. Most of the time he was beating a lot of the Primal Impulse guys. He was frustrated because he'd try to get help from Suzuki, and they'd just not give him any attention or any help, and I don't understand why. They should look at him and look at his results and what he's doing and help him out. Travis is a really nice kid and he's a good rider. I don't know why Suzuki wouldn't want to help him out with all the support that they could give him. If we rolled in with a semi next year, I think the industry would really shit in their pants and go, "Oh my God. Wow, they've really come a long way." I think we'd start to get more heavy-duty respect, that we're not just a joke. We're just three guys that love motocross. If we didn't like it, we would have given up by now because we haven't made a red cent. From everything that we've done, the videos, we have not made anything. It all went back into the sport. It's getting to the point where it's frustrating c u e ' ... n e _ S • JANUARY 19, 2000 19

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