Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 50 DECEMBER 15, 2015 P91 IDOLS To understand where Dungey has ended up, it's usually good to start out with who he looked up to when he was starting out as a racer. "In the beginning, it was obvi- ously Jeremy McGrath," Dungey said. "When I first watched Supercross, he was the guy winning everything. And it wasn't only that he was winning, but I think as a young kid he was a big name and they talked a lot about him, so I learned a lot about him. I was probably seven or eight. And then gradually came Ricky [Carmichael]. As funny as it is, I looked up to guys like Ricky. I never raced Ricky. And Stewart; James Stewart—you've got to remember, when he turned pro I was probably 12. So I was pretty young, I never really thought I'd race against a guy like him." Even cooler than that, though, is that when Dungey was a kid racing in the KTM Junior Su- percross Challenge, he got to watch Kevin Windham win the main event. Then, seemingly a lifetime later, he got to race Windham. "Kevin Windham!" Dungey said. "I was in the KTM Junior Supercross Challenge on a 50 in 1997. I remember watching chassis, but then they were testing suspension, linkages, chassis setups, engines. They really did their home- work and brought to the table a better bike, which was really cool." Now, to be clear, when racers are racing for factory teams, the entire point of paying a guy like Ryan Dungey millions of dollars to race their motorcycle is to sell motorcycles. There's something lost in translation in this area, because on one hand you can't have factory racers disparaging their motorcycle, as that would be an- tithetical to selling them. On the other hand, if the racer is struggling with finding comfortable settings, at that level, that literally has absolutely noth- ing to do with what the average rider would feel on one of these bikes. "What I believe is that there's no bad bike; it's the team of personnel around you," Dungey said. "Even though at times my bike, whether it was 2012 to now, anytime my bike wasn't working for me, there was never a point I ever thought, 'This bike's a piece of junk, it's never going to be good.' There was never a point I thought that. I always had hope that we were going to find it. That's what keeps you going on the grind. That's where a lot of riders get messed up, and then they get a bad attitude. 'The bike's a piece of junk.' Once you think that, then you don't care anymore. You can't keep grinding away if you think you can't win on the bike you have anyway. You've already mentally lost on the track. Everybody's better than you because you say your bike sucks. And you got to be careful be- cause you can't let that mentality creep up on you. It'll steal your confidence. So for me there was always hope." Bottom line? In the end, the strug- gle left him a better racer, a better test rider, and a better person. "But through all those hard times I can literally say it made me a better rider, it made me a better tester, it made me more grateful to be where I am at today and to have a good bike that I do," Dungey said. "Everything goes into the learning. Everything is a learning experience. You got to take the positives from everything and leave the rest." Dungey celebrates the 450 outdoor title with his new trainer Aldon Baker.

• Cover