Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 41 OCTOBER 13, 2015 P75 ahead through the whoops, but this time he kept it together through the track's final bunch of obstacles to take the win and tie the score at one win each. Then Stewart did it again, knocking Dungey into the bronze-medal race against Brayton. Dungey ended up beating Brayton for third overall. Once the semi-finals were over with, the pressure of the Dungey covered until Stewart clipped the top of an on/off jump and lost momentum, forc- ing him to jump much higher than he would've liked over the track's next obstacle in order to clear it. Dungey stayed low and fast and went back by Stewart to take the race-one win. "I made a mistake," Stewart said. "It was a little bit slippery on that side. They had just watered the track. I saw one of the Lites guys do it. I spun a little bit and I clipped the jump and just went to the moon on that tabletop. It was the only way to get over it. And those bikes are fast. He got on there and he manhandled that thing. Once you get jumping, there was noth- ing I could do. I felt like I beat him through the most part of the track. I had that one in there; he got me. But it kind of pissed me off a little bit. We went back and Malcolm gave me a little talk." "I walked over and said, 'You better not let Dungey beat you again,'" Malcolm said. "'You can't let Dungey just go 1-1 like that and knock you out, so you better pull something out of your ass.'" And he did. The one thing James Stewart has always had a unique ability to do is manu- facture speed. Most racers have to methodically work at going faster and faster, but throughout his career, Stewart has often just found speed seemingly out of nowhere to match, or beat, whoever's fastest. In his second race against Dungey, Stewart again pulled his way to facing Dungey in the semi-final. In each round Stewart raced, it seemed he was pick- ing up speed as necessary to compete with whomever it was he was facing off against. Paired up against defending AMA Su- percross and Motocross champ Dungey, it was easy to consider Stewart an underdog. In their first race, Stewart was just a touch behind Dungey heading into the track's whoops section, but Stewart flew by in the whoops and seemed to have Briefly... positives. The only negative is that I couldn't go racing." When James Stewart was being forced to stay home, it took a while for him to sort out how to live life without racing. He'd watch the races incessantly and almost torture him- self because he wanted to be out there so much. But he eventually fig- ured out how to keep his head under the circumstances. "In December we didn't know we were going to get suspended," Stewart said. "So, I was riding and training and doing ev- erything like normal. And then April we were appealing it, so we thought there was a chance to race. So I got that, 'All right, we're going to race.' I'm training, doing all that stuff. But the other times, man, I actually did a pretty good job of blocking it out. Really learning how to live without being at a track. I ain't going to lie, it was tough. Especially when you're practicing and training and expecting to race and then all of a sudden, two weeks forward, they say you can't race. That's pretty hard. So I got used to it. I played some golf. I rode with Malcolm a little bit. But I really had to stay away from it." Ryan Dungey (5) scored an exciting win over James Stewart in their first head-to-head meeting.

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