SERIES
VOL. 52 ISSUE 2 JANUARY 13, 2015 P83
Briefly...
The Red Rock race wasn't on the
original series schedule, but when
the original opening round went
away, Shawn Strong of Epic Moto
proposed Page, Arizona, as the
substitute venue. GXE's Erek Kudla
agreed, and the pair collaborated
to put the event together in about a
month and a half. Strong had pro-
moted races before in Page, with the
city on board and offering city prop-
erty for the Red Rock event.
Despite the short run-up to the race,
a surprising number of Pros and Pro
250s rolled up to the start line: 28
combined. For Destry Abbott and
Jimmy Jarrett, they only made the
decision to race on Wednesday after
seeing weather reports, which prom-
ised for excellent racing conditions.
Taylor Stevens won the Open A
class, finishing 19th overall, which
also made him the first A overall.
Though he got a great jump off the
line, Alex Dorsey crashed going into
the second turn where he was un-
avoidably run over by Nick Burson.
After crawling off the course, he laid
there for a while before remounting
and putting in two laps at consider-
ably reduced speed, but he then
called it a day. He was credited with
19th Pro and 80th overall.
Asked how he dealt with three hours
of deep sand whoops, Destry Ab-
bott confided, "I tried to finesse it,
tried to be smooth around the cor-
ners, tried to make everything more
round so it's not so abrupt from turn-
ing. Literally, just getting the front
wheel to [the top of] every whoop
and manualing it—it's work! My back
is sore right now, so I'm sure there's
continued on next page
Ian Blythe fires the first
shot in the West Hare
Scrambles Championship
THROUGH
STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK KARIYA
Blythe shot to the front off the start on his
STK Suspension/Motorex/Klim-backed 250 SX,
Graffunder and DA8 Training Kawasaki-mounted
Destry Abbott right behind.
That trio immediately began to separate from
the rest of the rather sizable Pro pack, but none
could break away from each other.
"Cory, Destry and I were all going back and
forth on the first couple laps," Blythe said. "It
was tight. I wasn't pulling away the first hour. I
was going as fast as I could and they were, like,
