Cycle News

INTERVIEW WAYNE RAINEY P46 you're at the top of the leader- board whether it's a practice ses- sion or a qualifying session or a race – it's going to matter. It's al- ways going to mean something. And that's going to push them more than maybe they've been pushed in the past and with more manufacturer involvement, it will give more riders a chance to do that. It's about the competition and pushing each other. Have you had conversations with any of the riders? The teams? The riders know me and even though this is our first foray into running a racing series, they know that me and the KRAVE Group… well, we are racers. That's what we do. This is where we came from. That's our background. They understand that we're committed to this. We are trying to align our- selves in a way that makes us le- gitimate and important. If they [the teams and riders] see us trying to get more races and working on the TV stuff, the outside media… I think when they see that they will understand that we are in this for the long haul. We want this to suc- ceed and we want MotoAmerica to go on forever. It's going to take a lot of work from where we are starting. We know that. But we are all in on this and I think we have their support. Is there any one part of this that has been more difficult than the others? Or was it just getting the deal done? For sure getting the deal done was… since it wasn't something we set out to do to begin with and it just evolved into this. Once I started down that road, I could feel the competitive juices inside myself and I really thought we needed to make this happen. I thought with the team we had, we could make this happen. And our relationships with the pow- ers that be overseas could really help us. We had a chance with the KRAVE Group, Dorna and the want to race and be competitive and they want it to mean some- thing. They want the chance to know that when they are racing in their home championship that they have a chance to move on and meet the rest of the goals in their career. That's all I'm trying to do – make sure that's legit. And that those goals can become a reality. We will see what happens down the road. You are obviously very in- volved. Are we going to see you at the races? How up front are you going to be on this deal? One of the reasons why I stopped with the team was that I was done with the travel. And it's been 15 years. So now I will have to get back on airplanes to do what we need to do to make this work. But I'm committed to that. I understand that and it's part of the job. Everybody in life has to go and do this and this is what I'm doing. This is my job now and I plan on being at most of the races. I want to be there. I want to see this thing work. I want to be a part of it. We know this is not going to be easy. This is go- ing to take a big effort from every- body involved – from our group to all the teams, the riders, all the partners who are involved in the championships and the fans. The fans are the main thing and we need to make sure that they are satisfied. If they are satisfied, we are doing our jobs. The bottom line is we just need to make this mean something again. CN FIM and back through the AMA… I thought if we could get this thing done we could make it happen. But all that took so long to get done. So now, the frustrating part is that I wish I had a bit more time. Everything is happening re- ally fast… I knew there would be some hiccups, but I know from working with racers, the Ameri- can ones especially, they just " When I raced, the Grand Prix teams were looking for talent coming out of America. Whether that was because of our background or because we were Americans and we were competitive. For whatever reason, Americans dominated that landscape. "

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