Cycle News

INTERVIEW 2016 GNC2 CHAMPION RYAN WELLS P94 Wells is quite at home in Michigan. And he'd like to stay. After all, it doesn't take someone long in the flat track world to realize that Michigan is the place to be if you have aspirations of being a grand national champion. It's sort of like if you want to be a grand prix world champion someday, perhaps it's best to move to Spain. Now that's not to say that the location is mandatory (in both cases), but for sure in American flat track racing there's definitely a pipeline of champions coming out of the Michigan Mafia. "If I've learned as much as I've learned since April, if I've learned that much in that amount of time I can only imagine what I could learn over a couple years' time," he said. "You see all the people that come out of Michigan. The top two guys in the GNC1 class [Smith and Jared Mees] are 20 minutes apart from each other. It's not a coincidence. I don't think the year would have went quite as well as it would have if I didn't move down here." That right chemistry with your team is invalu- able, but also is having someone push you constantly. Having a mentor and training partner in Smith has also helped a lot. It also didn't hurt that Smith is "Mr. Mile." Wells went into the year without a mile win and left with three in '16. "Anything I can feed off of that guy, you know I take it," he said. "Also, Bryan's been huge as far as training. I never really trained that much when I lived in New York so it's definitely helped me." Ultimately the way through Michigan not only secured his first GNC2 championship, it led him back home for his crowning achievement. Wells was able to secure the championship two rounds early at his home race at the Central New York Half Mile at My dad asked me if I wanted to play football, baseball, he tried to get me to play slow pitch and it was, 'nope, I want to race dirt bikes.' Wells attributes his move to Michigan as a big part of his success in 2016 and hopes to stay there and build on it. Rolling Wheels Raceway Park in front of his family and friends. "A lot of my family never even knew what I raced," he said. "They saw a local track but they didn't know what professional flat track was. So a lot of my fam- ily was there and that was cool for them to see it. A lot of my friends from high school, they were there. I haven't seen my friends from high school since 10th grade, because I got homeschooled after for racing. So for them to see what I've been doing is pretty awesome. Then to hold a number-one plate up in front of them was even cooler." Even though Wells never quit on racing, his confidence had taken a beating last year when he was out there on his own. So while he knew he was capable of the results and knew he had a team behind him that would make it possible to achieve those results, dominating the GNC2 class this season exceeded his expectations. "Winning five races, that was pretty hard to believe that I would be able to do that, but to say I would win a championship two races early in a season, that wasn't even a thought," he said. "So to do that, that was awesome. I was pretty stinking excited. After the finish I walked into the crowd just to hear everybody. It was awesome. It was like a dream come true right there." CN

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