Cycle News

F or Team Honda HRC's Trey Canard, 2015 might just be a perfect storm—in a good way. He's healthy, he's got the comfort of the same team that's always been behind him and that team now has the technical support from racing power- house, HRC. Honda's racing arm is all about winning and is dead set on winning the Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship. Of course winning always feels good, especially since it's been a while (four years) since you've won more than one race in a season. But with HRC Vice President Shuhei Na- kamoto on hand for his first Super- cross race, did that make Canard's win even better? "I don't even care that I did good," Canard said. "I want to do good for them, but I'm just so happy that they're here. I'm just happy about what's going on right now with Honda. And it shows with Cole [Seely] and Eli [Tomac] and our bikes." Nakamoto-San himself said earlier that day that in Supercross racing it is 80 percent rider, 20 percent machine. In a class that is so stacked with competi- tion every bit counts. Canard says he notices the difference HRC has made this season. "There's a lot," Canard said. "There's so many engineering things that are happening with Honda and they're really smart people. It really helps to have people that built the motorcycle here trying to help us tune it. I'm looking forward to the next few years to where hopefully we can get just better and better with the motorcycle." Despite a big scare in practice—a crash similar to Cooper Webb's that injured the 250 winner's shoulder—Canard felt good about the day and his shot at the main. "I did almost the same thing [as Webb] except for I got away with it," he said. "I really got away from it really lucky. It could have been really ugly. "I was pumped for the heat race, I thought I was riding good. I felt good every race. The weak point has been the starts. Luckily I just hung tight inside and managed to hold out a good one." Canard took what he learned in his heat race and used it to his advantage to take the lead from RCH Racing's Ken Roczen on lap four. "I felt really good in the whoops in the heat," he said. "I felt like I had a good line to the inside. I saw a line that Tomac used in the previous heat and tried to use it in the main and just get underneath him when he wasn't expecting it." He then built a pretty decent gap between himself and Roczen, but that gap was reduced to a few bike lengths around the halfway mark, and Dungey was not far behind either. "Yeah, about 10-15 [lap mark] I was struggling," Canard said. "I pulled it together I think, once Ken got on me, I had to pick it up. I tried to step it up and step it up, some mistakes were involved there." The pressure of being stalked can make or break a racer. "Anytime you've got the past outdoor champion BACK ON TRACK VOL. 52 ISSUE 6 FEBRUARY 10, 2015 P59 W E C H A T W I T H T R E Y C A N A R D A F T E R H I S S A N D I E G O S U P E R C R O S S W I N . STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREA WILSON

• Cover