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/953622
CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE A fter a successful amateur ca- reer a promising young moto- cross racer named Davey Coombs was primed and ready to launch his pro career. At the 1985 Day- tona 125 East Supercross Coombs rode his best and when the race was over the results weren't quite what he'd hoped. "At that point I thought going to college sounded like a good idea," Coombs recalls with a chuckle in his voice. "I finished ninth. That turned out to be the high-water mark in my pro career." So, it was back to school for Coombs, but along the way he dis- covered he enjoyed writing about racing and the racing scene. One thing led to another and in March of 1998 Coombs launched the magazine Racer X Illustrated. As anyone with even a passing inter- est in motocross and supercross racing knows, Racer X went on to be wildly popular and estab- lished a entirely new category in the sport as a lifestyle magazine. Racer X didn't so much cover racing, instead focusing on the life- style the racers and people in the industry led. Sometimes it looked didn't," Coombs says. "As an example, there's not a single mention of an energy drink in that first issue and there's just one photo of a four-stroke." When he looks back on it now, Coombs said the trans- formative moment for him was when he realized he liked writing about and photographing racing as much as he did participating in the sport as a rider. "I really liked telling stories and going on road trips," he recalls. "So, I starting writing for Cycle News and Dirt Rider, I did a lot of ATV stuff because those were the only people who would publish me. I sort of had a run- ning feud with Motocross Action because Jody [Weisel] and my dad didn't get along then. Of course, Cycle News was always looking for race coverage, so I'd raise my hand and go cover races no one else would, like a GNCC, an amateur race or a national enduro—anything that I could make 75 bucks off of." At the same time the Coombs family business was putting on motocross events. Davey convinced his dad—the late great race promoter Dave Coombs—to let him sell programs. "I went from selling programs to producing them," Davey says. "Pretty soon I was in the program business. That was doing well and I thought that maybe I should start a newspaper. There really wasn't an outlet to write about road trips or forgotten heroes. I mean what publication could you find that would be interested in P104 RACER X TURNS 20 like a glamorized version of the off-track lifestyle of a Jeremy McGrath, Travis Pastrana or Jeff Emig, but Racer X established its chops by not shying away from the often-ignored part of racing, by also telling the sto- ries of the guys who didn't quite make it or who fell from grace and did it in an equally compel- ling manner. This month Racer X turns 20. "We didn't make a big deal of it," Coombs says. "We think we're still kids." Coombs mentioned a special 200th issue of Racer X (Feb. 2016 edition) where they looked back at the first issue in com- parison to today's magazine. It illustrated how quickly things can change in the rapidly moving world of motocross. "There were some things we saw coming and others we