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INTERVIEW 2015 AMA HARE & HOUND NATIONAL, SCORE AND BITD CHAMPION RICKY BRABEC P224 Probably the closest battle for championship supremacy took place in SCORE between Colton Udall (left) and his WFOx Motorsports Honda trio, and Brabec's (right) THR Motorsports Kawasaki team. THR recorded a 1-2-1-2 tally while WFOx went 2-1-2-1 through the first four rounds. The season- ending Baja 1000 decided the title with Brabec's squad coming through in the end. nitely the worst because they hold race-car events, off-road truck events out there, so Lucerne's definite- ly the worst with those, but the adrenaline rush on the bomb run and going across the valleys is just so fun! I look forward to the bomb! That's like the funnest part. If you get a good start, that's awesome. If you get a bad start, you're kind of stuck in the dust, but then again, if you get a bad start, at the end of the bomb you kind of know how hard to push yourself to work your way up to the front before the finish line. But if you get a good start and you're in the front, it's hard to judge the speed because there's no one in front of you so you can't really push. What does it take to be a good desert rac- er? Is experience more important than all-out speed? I would say to be a good desert racer, experi- ence is definitely key. Skill is key. More experi- ence is better just because you're not going to get someone who's never raced desert before and they just go out there and pin it and win. You've got to adapt to the desert. Do you think desert racing suffers from an image problem, like the only people who race in the desert are those who can only hold the throttle wide open in a straight line and can't turn and ride beat-up rat bikes? Some people think that's what desert racing's all about—is just going straight roads, really fast. In re- ality, those guys that say that—somehow, for some reason—they're scared to even go and see what it's about. Yeah, there's valleys, of course, that you go straight and fast across, but you can't ride 100 miles of straight, technical stuff because you have to make a desert race good for people that are be- ginners and novices as well as the pros. That's why there's two to three different loops, and as the loops go on, they get harder and harder. People say des- ert racing's easy and we can't ride motocross tracks or whatnot, but in reality desert racing is, I think, way funner than motocross racing just because you don't get the crazy moto dads. Desert racing's more family-oriented. Shoot, I go to the motocross track, I race grands prix, I can turn a little bit! [Brabec also won a round of the AMA District 37/GPR Stabilizer Big 6 Grand Prix Series this year, his first-ever tri- umph in that series as well.] That said, is that perception the root cause of big sponsors almost ignoring desert rac- ing and instead giving lots of their budgets to GNCC and enduro?

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