Cycle News

VOL. 50 ISSUE 28 JULY 16, 2013 Steve Rapp has been a winning machine in the Vance & Hines Harley-Davidson Series in 2013. BY ANDREA WILSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN J. NELSON AND WILSON I t's not a news flash to say times are tough in motorcycle racing. Not only are there few paid rides, now you're lucky if you don't have to pay for a ride. So what are motorcycle racers to do? Especially if you're a journeyman racer like Steve Rapp – the guy you call if you want an experienced rider who can throw his leg over just about any bike and get some results. What did Rapp do? He got a day job. And not just any job… Rapp became a commercial airline pilot. Rapp has been flying for fun since 2006 and when he saw the writing on the wall with the direction racing was going, he looked to flying as the next way to make a living. "Yeah, I'm flying as a pilot because basically, you know, with the way things have gone over the last few years with racing, it [motorcycle racing] wasn't really able to sustain a living anymore," Rapp said about his altered career path. "I had already been a pilot flying on my own and then, after 2008, I could kind of see that the future as far as racing goes that 2009 wasn't looking good. Instead of counting on that, I decided to be proactive and start looking at other ways to make money. I finished up some ratings that I needed and started P97 applying for jobs. One of my first interviews I went to, I got hired and that was for GoJet out of St. Louis." GoJet is a commuter airline that works with United Express and Delta Connection flying Bombardier CRJ700s (in layman's terms they are the smaller jets where everyone has to gatecheck their suitcase). Rapp worked there for a year or so before taking a new job with a company that would bring him back to California, a company called Surf Air that is an on-demand service that operates between Los Angeles and the Bay area. "It's kind of a new concept," Rapp explained. "What it is is a membership airline. So you pay basically $1300 a month and you can fly anywhere that the company flies as much as you want for the monthly membership. So if you fly every day a week it's still the same amount." But just because Rapp has a full time gig flying the friendly skies, it hasn't stopped him from racing. In fact he's had to juggle racing and flying for awhile now because - fortunately - they don't just hand over the keys - so to speak - to commercial pilots. A lot of time is spent on getting trained and putting in the hours required to get the ratings needed to get a job. It hasn't been easy, but since 2009 he's raced in three different classes in the AMA for five dif-

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