Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/875372
P118 CN III EMPIRE OF DIRT BY STEVE COX I first met Chad Reed at Anaheim I in 2002, the year he came to the USA to race full-time for Yamaha of Troy. I was starting my third year working at Cycle News and had just begun writing some things for the magazine in a step up from my role as a proofreader alone. I started actually working with Reed as a reporter in 2003, when he took on Ricky Carmi- chael for the 250cc Supercross Championship. It was a fantastic battle. Reedy gave RC everything he could handle and then some. Over the years since, I've worked with Reed quite a bit, including shooting his poster photos in the past couple years since he returned to Yamaha. I think I know Chad Reed pretty well. We aren't "friends" per se— he's never invited me to dinner or anything—but I like him. I always did. Even when he's a total pain in the ass. And that does happen on occasion. Chad Reed is a human being just like me, you and everybody else. He has his ups and his downs, but I think he's often misunderstood. In some ways, maybe this is part of why I like Chad Reed so much. I also really like Monster Ener- gy/Yamalube/Chaparral Yamaha team manager, Jimmy Perry. Perry has been around at least as long as me in this industry, and he's smart, honest and I trust his take on just about anything. But he's a very different person from Chad Reed. Perry got understandably upset early in the 2017 Supercross Series when Reed got his first podium of the season in Arizona, because Reed expressed frustra- tion with his performance to that point, and seemed to blame the team for it. "In May, I knew what needed changing, and we just sat on our hands the whole off-season," Reed said after the race. "You work way too hard," Reed also said. "My performance is there, my fitness is there. You're only as good as what you've got to work with. Glad that we're in the window now. I'd like to thank everybody at Monster and Ya- maha for helping that." I know Perry, and probably a lot of other people at Yamaha, took offense to this type of rhetoric coming from their legendary racer, and I think it has a lot to do with why Reed has had a tough time coming up with a team to ride for in 2018. I think Perry and Yamaha were more than justified to take offense to it as well. Racers have to believe that they are capable of beating every- one else on the starting line. It's a prerequisite without which they probably shouldn't even be lining LET REED RACE Chad Reed still has the fire burning inside of him. It'd be a shame to let that go to waste. Let Reed race!