Stoppin’ In

Chad Reed post A1

Stoppin’ In
Chad Reed Post A1
Typos and photos: Scott Hoffman

Chad Reed has been known for saying how it is and this year is no different. The man speaks his mind. With a dedicated Factory Honda CRF450R under the Two Two Motorsports banner for the entire season, he left the 2012 Monster Energy Supercross series opener with a solid runner-up position, despite going down during the main event. Chad was not jumping for joy nor was he bummed out with his performance at A1. He was however, a little frustrated with the track at Anaheim. There is a lot to say about Reed after “the crash” last year that could have easily ended his career as well as changed his life forever. While some riders would lament on the past, Reed rode through his beaten up body at the time and soldiered on for the rest of the season. Reed upped his team efforts by adding new staff to the crew, including Mike Gosselaar, his former wrench from his Suzuki days. He is hungry and wants his SX title back. Still suited up in his Two Two Motorsports Shift gear right after walking down from the podium, this is what he had to say.

Motocross.com: Congratulations on a good ride. You got 2nd place. A better start this year than last time. How do you feel about the whole night?
Chad Reed: I feel good. I thought it was a great night as far as coming out and getting a good start in both races, winning a heat race then coming back and getting another good start, and then being a distant second. I’ll take that with a crash and a few mistakes here and there. I’ll take it. It was a rough day for me. Not that I was struggling with myself or anything like that but I just really fought this track all day long. It was a difficult track for me to find motivation on and I was happy to have results on starts like that.

You had a pretty good dice there with Ryan and I saw you guys talking about it. Was it a good race, was it a good clean race?
Yeah, we kept it clean. Both Ryans and I seem to keep it pretty clean and try to keep it hard and aggressive. You do what you would expect from them. It was a shame that I lost the front over here. I was trying to pick it up a little bit and be faster in some of the turns and there was a limit and my limit was not high enough today.

Did any riders surprise you today?
A few riders surprise me but you live and learn. Honestly I really don’t think you can take anything away from this race. I think it was such an oddball race. I will say that some of the things that I saw on TV when I watched the tapes from the Vegas cup and some of the things that I’ve seen and felt tonight are pretty relevant so we will go back and put the guys to work and this week they’ll earn their pay.


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Dungey said it was kind of an atypical track. You train on one thing and then you come out here and it’s something completely different from what you train on.
Yeah, that’s the hardest thing. I’m always the guy that busts up on these guys about the racetrack but I feel the need. As a business guy and as a team owner you work so hard not only as an athlete but you hire all the personnel and staff to make the bike and everything the best that you can and then you come out here and I truly believe it’s sub-par. It’s not acceptable how pathetic this racetrack is and it’s a shame. Like Ryan said, we spend four months working our asses off and going in a direction that a supercross track should kind of challenge you with the racebike and then suddenly we’re thrown a curveball. The one side of it is that Ryan was more prepared. He was comfortable in these conditions, rode really, really strong and got the holeshot when he needed to and we’ve seen him do that time and time again. It’s going to be a tough year and being on the podium is important. I’ll take a 2nd at this point.

Did you feel like you caught a second wind in there? At one point it got really tight between the three of you. You could have been in 2nd, you could have been in 4th.
I certainly didn’t want to go back to 4th. I wanted to be on that podium. I wouldn’t say I had a second wind because I wasn’t feeling winded or anything like that. I was just trying to ride the track and trying to find the limits in where you could push in the little areas that you could push. Villopoto was really strong in all the tight sections and was just being super smooth. It seemed like he had more traction front and rear than anybody that I was around all night. It was consistent with what I saw at the Monster Cup. So we’ll put the guys to work this week and see what we can come up with. In Phoenix, whether the racetrack is the same design or not, it’s Phoenix and we are going to struggle with traction there as well. It’s always desert dry at night and it gets kind of broken down so we’ll be faced with conditions like this next week.

Was the biggest problem the track just being so tight?
Yeah, it’s like one big single track. I guess it’s lucky that I’ve been mountain biking. I felt like we needed to add some trees and some logs and we could have just called this thing an Endurocross. You joke about it, but there are millions and millions of dollars going into this effort and we have such a talented group of riders and great bikes, great manufacturers, and great sponsors. I just feel that we’re all stepping up and these guys are not and it’s a shame.

Do you feel like you have all your confidence back? You look comfortable on the bike. You look like you can push it even further if you need to.
I wouldn’t say my confidence has ever been low. I would imagine your comment is from my Millville crash?

Yeah, after that it seemed like you lost a little bit of your flow but here you look like your old self and you seem to have a little bit more of your aggressiveness back in your pace.
Yeah, you have some time to reflect and probably more than anything you have some time to heal up. I was pretty banged up and pretty beat up and we raced the next two weekends and then we had a couple weekends off. I made some mistakes last year with that crash. I had a game plan all planned out because at that point I had like a 20+ point lead and you had a game plan of how things would go and I stayed true to that plan where I should have taken off my owner’s hat and just stayed as an athlete and been selfish and pushed all that shit aside and just do what I needed to do to get better as an athlete and not go and deal with the race team stuff that I had to deal with. That’s just one of the things that I learned in my first year. It wasn’t really a confidence thing or anything like that. I was just pretty beat up and didn’t take the necessary time to heal and heal appropriately.

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Comments

Michael
January 13, 2012 2:18 pm

And…where’d the rest of the article go? Is that it? Kind if an abrupt end to the story.

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