eighth place from Rockstar
Energy Husqvarna's Christophe
Pourcel, then grabbing seventh
place when BTOSports KTM's
Davi Millsaps went down with a
couple of laps to go.
Grant showed up at Daytona
and went 20 laps with the best
in the business. He finished two
spots behind the top Suzuki
racer in the main (Roczen), and
beat the rest. After one race, he
now leads Yoshimura Suzuki's
Blake Baggett and James Stew-
art in the 2016 points standings.
VOL. 53 ISSUE 9 MARCH 8, 2016 P57
GRANT'S GREAT RIDE
Josh Grant has both positive and
negative parts of his reputation.
On the positive side, he's one of
very few guys who, on any given
weekend, indoors or outdoors,
can absolutely wax the competi-
tion. All of them. On the negative
side, probably because of his
amazing riding and racing ability,
he has a reputation for not being
a very hard worker. It's hard to say
whether or not the negatives are
really true, but he put the competi-
tion on notice at his first race back
since last year's U.S. GP.
Left without a ride after a lack-
luster year racing alongside Chad
Reed at TwoTwo Motorsports
in 2015, late in the off-season,
Grant bought a Suzuki RM-Z450.
Why did he choose a Suzuki?
It's hard to say. The Suzuki is a
really good bike, but the reason
he picked it might have been that
he had already raced for Yamaha
(JGR), Honda (GEICO and the
factory team), and Kawasaki
(TwoTwo Motorsports), and with
James Stewart, Blake Baggett,
Broc Tickle and Ken Roczen
racing Suzukis, he figured there
were reasonable odds that they'd
need a fill-in racer at some point
during the season.
This became a reality prior to
the Oakland Supercross, when
RCH Suzuki's Broc Tickle was
forced out of the series with
a broken arm, but instead of
picking up Grant to fill in, they
snatched Jake Weimer away
from Team Tedder Kawasaki.
So what did Grant do? He just
kept riding, putting in work, and
getting his bike sorted out. He
could've returned to racing at
just about any round, but the
man with a reputation for not
training enough picked the gnar-
liest race of the series to line
back up against the best in the
world on his privateer Suzuki.
The result? Well, so much for
reputations.
Grant started at the tail end
of the top 10 and then went to
work, eventually snatching away
Josh Grant made his
first appearance of
2016 and turned a
lot of heads with his
seventh-place finish
on a private Suzuki.
Maybe we'll see more
of him this season.
