In , the freestyle motocross movement was born with Carey leading the way. He is the inventor of the Hart Attack, and at the Gravity Games Carey etched his name in the record books as the first rider ever to complete a back flip on a cc motorcycle.
The back flip catapulted Carey, and Freestyle Motocross as a whole, to an entirely new level. Carey has traveled the globe on a quest to put freestyle motocross on the map. His popularity has helped increase exposure for the sport of Freestyle Motocross. In addition to these business ventures, he still dedicates significant time to one of his biggest passions, his Supercross team. Carey along with co team owner Ricky Carmichael are leading the way of motocross team sponsorship with their RCH team landing cooperate sponsors like Dodge and Jimmy John.
This past year RCH signed Ken Roczen how took the team to its first ever Supercross win and their first win in the motocross series. That's really all that needs to be said about Carmichael. He accumulated a total of 67 amateur motocross national championships. He got his first taste of professional motocross in , showing signs of his upcoming greatness, and earned the AMA Motocross Rookie of the Year award. He didn't slow down in , earning a few Eastern Region cc Supercross race wins, as well as dominating the cc National Motocross Championship Series aboard his Pro Circuit Kawasaki, capturing his first professional championship.
The following year saw much of the same from Carmichael. He won every round of the cc Eastern Region Supercross championship and won the cc Mazda Truck Motocross National championship with eight overall wins. Carmichael entered the AMA cc Supercross Series for the first time in his career in , but had a tough time getting acclimated to the bigger bike and tougher competition.
He returned to the cc bike for the AMA Motocross Nationals and won his third consecutive championship in the class, his final championship for Mitch Payton's Pro Circuit Kawasaki team. Carmichael rode a cc machine for the entirety of the season. He earned his first cc Supercross win at Daytona and had an additional five podium finishes. Motocross Championship, winning nine overalls and easily winning the series championship.
He was a key part of the Motocross des Nations team, bringing the title back to the U. Carmichael only added to his stellar career in In , Carmichael switched to Team Honda before dominating the AMA Supercross Championship, and set a record that can never be broken in AMA cc National Motocross racing: he won every moto he entered that season, going 24 for 24, and earning the first perfect season in U. Carmichael made the switch to the Factory Makita Suzuki team for the season.
He once again controlled every series that season, winning both the AMA Supercross and Motocross championships, along with the U. Open of Supercross and the Motocross des Nations. The season marked Carmichael's last full year of motocross racing before stepping into semi, and then full, retirement.
Carmichael went into semi-retirement in , but was arguably still the fastest rider on the track in the races he entered, including winning all six overalls in the six AMA Motocross Championship races he entered.
He bid farewell to professional motocross racing by leading Team USA to another Motocross des Nations victory in Budds Creek, Maryland and winning the final race he entered. Carmichael, who had achieved all there was to accomplish on two wheels, looked to four wheels for his newest challenge. I was a couple of years younger than his older brother and around the same age as Clint.
We went to a race a long time ago and ended up parking next to them and became friends. I just watched him work his way up through the ranks. By the end of the month, Carmichael signed on with Schrader Racing and got Monster Energy Drink to sponsor his efforts for a full campaign in the development series.
In Ricky contended for the NCWTS Rookie of the year and although he only competed in 18 of the 25 races he was able to finish 4th in the rookie standings and 22nd in the drivers' standings with 2 top ten finishes.
For the last 2 races of the season Ricky made the switch to Turner Motorsports, signing a multiyear deal with the new team owned by Steve Turner. In addition to his strong showing in the Truck series Ricky has been able to show his talents in the car by competing in four Nationwide series and 3 ARCA series races.
At the conclusion of the season Carmichael ended up 13th in the Truck standings with 3 top 5's and 9 top 10 finishes. Ricky and Carey ultimately reached their goal of becoming a Championship winning team by winning the Motocross Championship with Ken Roczen.
Moving forward, Ricky has been investing his time and energy in to giving back to the sport of motocross. He now works closely with his sponsors, partners and riders, some of those project include:.
Lorenzo Lamas is the owner and operator of Lorenzo Cycles. Lorenzo holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, is a member of the Martial Arts Hall Of Fame and is a commercially rated pilot of fixed wing and rotary aircraft. He has chaired the Ride For Life, benefiting the World Children's Transplant Fund, and has been a generous supporter of Operation Homefront and other charities that benefit active duty and veterans.
Arlen Ness bought his first Harley in with money he won as a semi-professional bowler. Armed with no more than a spray gun and a dream, Ness stripped down his Harley Knucklehead in his own garage and gave it a paint job of his own creation. After many an appraising eye set sight on his work, Ness entered the bike into a custom show where it received first place.
While still working at his full time job, Ness worked the store in evenings. With his wife Bev doing the books, and his two kids Sherri and Cory in tow, he took a big step out onto thin air when he left his job and went out on his own full time.
This 68, sq. Arlen Ness has been a strong supporter of the Legends Ride and regular face at the event since its inception. He passed away March 22, John Shope lives and breathes motorcycles. As owner of Dirty Bird Concepts, his inspiring original creations have been compared to sculptures seen in a museum.
Before beginning a project, Shope mentally starts with an aerial view of all of the possible components to be considered. He does not draw his work, but rather sees it before he creates it.
Since the s, Shope has had a passion for modifying, building and fabricating and started out customizing various models of motorcycles. He has a strong background in sculpture, and many of his pieces have circulated various art museums across the United States. His works of art have graced the covers of many magazines, and he has won many build off competitions.
Cory Ness is both the business and key design arm of Arlen Ness Motorcycles. Raised in steel and chrome, he has a unique perspective of the motorcycle industry. Only one person rivals his success in custom-designed motorcycles: his father Arlen. Born with the Ness innovation gene, Cory Ness is the chief designer behind all that is the Arlen Ness Motorcycles today.
He runs the day-to-day business and designs new parts and accessories, yet he still finds time to design his own style of motorcycle.
His award-winning innovations can be seen on covers and spreads in national and international motorcycle magazines, and have made appearances at all major international custom bike shows. His keen business sense has seen Arlen Ness Motorcycles open two stores in Miami and Daytona and form a partnership with Victory Motorcycles.
Cory also creates a directory of these innovations in a nearly page catalog filled with thousands of custom Arlen Ness creations for Harleys and a Cruiser catalog that will soon rival the Original.
As the third generation of Ness builders, Zach has the opportunity to learn from the best of the best. But several Ness accessories do always find a way to identify his work as a Ness motorcycle. His style comes through. His father greatly influenced Billy's interest in cars and hot rods early on; so Billy had already acquired quite a bit of mechanical knowledge, even before attending college. Then in the late '80's Billy bought his first bike But he quickly figured out how to put it together; and with the advice and help of a few old-timers, he learned a lot —and fast.
After graduating, Billy got a job working on bikes with his brother Warren, then later went on his own. He began making custom parts as gifts for his friends, but the demand quickly grew for his now-famous 6-gun parts, leading to the formation of Choppers Inc.
Billy credits much of his success to good timing --getting into the chopper scene ahead of the curve, well before choppers were considered relevant by the motorcycle industry. Billy's work has been featured on such notable magazine covers as The Horse, Easyriders, Street Chopper, Hot Bike, as well as several international publications. Later, his support of the U. Paul's dad had Enduros and Triumph choppers that Paul would ride when his dad was away.
Paul is a self-taught bike builder who is still learning every day. He hung around local shops growing up or anywhere something cool was being created. He is fascinated by anything custom. In , he moved to Phoenix to attend the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute to gain knowledge in all things motorcycle. He got a ground-level education in 2 and 4-Stroke Engine Theory, Electrical Theory and current and early model HD Service, an education he uses every day.
The neighborhood hoodlums were Paul's heroes in the early days. The first bike Paul customized was a Sportster. The first ground-up bike he built with Jack Gould, Paul's service manager to this day, was a rigid frame shovelhead.
Paul sold it soon after it was done. It financed his first shop which opened in Phoenix in Along with their incredible popularity came a booming aftermarket. This flood of choppers basically destroyed the trend in the industry. Paul had tried to introduce a line of custom Bagger parts in and "failed miserably! It seemed like the moto world was ready for the winds of change.
Paul published the first Bagger Nation catalog, filled with the parts he tried to introduce 10 years prior. Rick Fairless was born in Dallas, Texas and was raised and still live in the Dallas suburb of Irving.
At the ripe young age of 19, Rick went to work for his great uncle who owned a chain of paint stores called Roach Paint Company, which later became Glidden Paint Co. After 20 years in the paint business, and never missing a day of work, Rick retired as the 1 Sales Rep in the country for the Glidden Paint Company! His passion in life was, and still is, custom motorcycles. He kept hoping that someone would open a big time custom motorcycle shop in Dallas so he could buy cool, custom parts from guys like Arlen Ness and Pat Kennedy.
So, in Rick opened Strokers Dallas. On any normal Saturday or Sunday, to bikes pass through his doors! The live music is playing, the girls are selling ice-cold beer, and the bikes are roaring in and out His property is 2.
He can truly say that he is the luckiest boy in the world, living his dream everyday, 8 days a week! Now, since no one apologized to them until it was way too late, those who were seriously inconvenienced don't want to hear empty promises of how things will be different next year. They want someone to blame and take all of the anger and frustration they can dish out. Bruton Smith would have you believe it's the Commonwealth of Kentucky to blame since "I is a horrible, terrible highway.
Not likely. So the fans will continue to vent their anger at SMI. The ticket exchange program announced on Monday may help deflect some of that anger, but the likelihood that it makes it all go away is very slim. Will fans once again risk sitting in traffic for six hours or more to go to Kentucky Speedway?
I hope they do because it's a great place to watch a race. But realistically, there's a significant portion of that audience that won't be back. Are there enough people who didn't go this year but are willing to take the chance in the future to do so?
It seems the answer will be no, based on what we've seen and heard in the past four days. Monday, July 4, On the two-car draft and what's "real" racing. The question is continually raised after each of NASCAR's new-era restrictor plate races: is the two-car tandem draft "real racing"? Racing is all about doing whatever it takes to get to the finish line first. In some cases, it's about having the fastest car.
In others, it's about the fastest pit crew. Some races play out so that the winner is the one with the best fuel mileage. And in four races a year, it's about who gets the best push from their partner on the final lap. The two-car draft isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Go back and watch Kevin Harvick move to the front down the backstretch on the final lap of the Daytona It's just that now it's each driver, each green flag lap all race long.
There are questions by long-time, award-winning writers asking if the lead changes which have come in record numbers with this style of racing actually mean anything. The answer to that one is simple: does any lead change other than the last one ever mean anything?
When Dale Earnhardt won at Talladega in , did any of the first 73 lead changes that day mean anything? No, only the final one in which Earnhardt took the lead did. But here's the rub: any lead change could be the last one, even one on lap 2 at Daytona.
For too long, we've heard how the number of lead changes and also the number of cars on the lead lap are benchmarks of competitiveness.
The more lead changes the more competitive the race, and by extension, the more exciting the show for the fans. While that's generally true, it's not always the case. Conversely, some of the most tedious races I've watched were some plate races with the big packs and plenty of artificial lead changes.
Does today's plate racing offer edge-of-your-seat excitement from green to checkered? I think so. It's not because the drivers are in one big pack and one mistake could take out two-thirds of the field at any time. But instead it's because of the skill and timing it takes to successfully make a two-car draft work.
You can go from first to sixteenth in one lap or sixteenth to first just as easily now as you could then, but the danger of wiping out half the field or more is dramatically lessened. And the bonus, at least to me, is the speed which often approaches or even exceeds mph. Sure, pack racing was exciting. The big wrecks were highlight reel material.
As the pavement at Talladega and Daytona slowly loses grip it could be we'll see yet another evolution in plate racing. Until then, I'm going to continue to enjoy the new-era plate races and enjoy the unpredictability they offer. Posted by Charles Krall at AM 2 comments:. There's always something special when open wheel cars race on a paved short track.
The speeds are high, the racing is close, and the fans flock to watch the show. My home track, Toledo Speedway, has hosted two high profile short track open wheel shows in recent weeks. Anticipation always runs high for both shows. The winged cars can run around the high-banked half-mile wide open with lap times coming close to the second bracket. The flat-out speed is matched with a lot of close wheel-to-wheel racing, and that was no exception this year. The USAC cars run without wings, and although they are around two seconds per lap slower the speed is still impressive and the drivers come into the equation as they're running miles per hour with virtually no downforce.
The only thing missing from these shows this season was a full field of cars. For many years, both weekends would jam the pits as much as the grandstand. The MSA Supermodifieds had 16 cars, enough for a good feature but not enough for any meaningful preliminaries. USAC's car counts were way off from the past, with only 12 sprint cars and 17 midgets on hand. In years past, USAC had sprint car heat races with 12 cars trying to race into the feature.
Friday's USAC racing was close and exciting and hotly contested at the front, but the lack of a full field meant there wasn't any lapped traffic to race through, eliminating a major opportunity for the drivers behind the leader to make a move or force a mistake. Maybe USAC needs to look at recombining the Pavement Championship back into the overall series championship points to draw a full contingent of drivers and teams to the asphalt tracks.
The costs of pavement racing have grown, so it's understandable that they've spun that part of the schedule off on its own, but in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't help because now the dirt specialists don't have to run the paved tracks at all to stay in the hunt for the title. Why not find a way to run a balanced schedule, split evenly between paved and dirt tracks and crown the champion as the driver that masters both?
Television played a major role in bringing USAC sprint car and midget racing from obscurity in the early s to their peak well into the s and s. TV has gone away, and much of the sponsorship money has left too. But the racing is just as good if not better than it once was. It's going to take sponsors and people with a strong vision to make it happen, and unfortunately those are sorely lacking in the short track world right now.
In the meantime, if you have a chance to visit your local short track please, by any means possible, do it. The drivers aren't multi-millionaire superstars that you read about on Jayski or even on TMZ. They're regular people, just like you and your neighbors. They spend money they often don't have to be there and chase their dreams and the checkered flag.
They run hard, and most times, are happy to sign a checkered flag, a photo, or a T-shirt and then actually thank you for asking for an autograph.
It truly is racing as it should be. Friday, June 3, On a great weekend of racing, sleeping good at night, and mean ol' Mother Nature. There's no question about it. Between Monaco, Indianapolis, and Charlotte the three Memorial Day Sunday races combined to give race fans the best full day of racing we've ever witnessed. There may have been better Monaco Grands Prix, there may have been better Indianapolis s, and there may have been better Coca Cola s, but never have each of them been so intense and enthralling on the same day, back to back.
I wonder if J. Hildebrand has found a way to go to sleep at night since last Sunday? We saw Dale Earnhardt, Jr. But I wonder of Steve Letarte has found a way to go to sleep at night since last Sunday? That defeat seemed to sting him the most. How many times did the Ganassi teams miscalculate fuel throughout the Month of May at Indianapolis? Both Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon had issues on their pole qualifying runs and in the latter stages of the Indy It does eliminate that one, which is helpful.
Don't you have a lathe now? Then again in the same position I'd probably be building a tool after failing to loosen it with some sort of improvised strap wrench and an impact gun. Do you have a welder? A couple pieces of flat stock and some round rod would make quick work of that it seems. I've read this four times today and I'm in awe of what you did. My playing with cars doesn't come close. I'm here with a disassembled van completely by choice.
I've got other cars to drive and other options for the van. What you did is borderline heroic. You dove into the abyss and took care of your family and I want to give you a hug and buy you a beer.
If I ever start writing for real, not just playing with words on build threads, I'm going to try and find you and stand in your garage and talk to you and tell your story. Thanks for writing what you wrote and reading along. I like Mazdeuce's R-Class very much, but i don't get the Pacifica being a bad association.
Put them next to each other and my eyes say the Pacifica looks better. I have some thoughts on collecting stories on One Lap this year. The people that you spend the week with are fascinating. I think the difference is in design language through time. The R is probably the worst example of a rather elegant design language from the mid 's until almost now that has evolved and aged quite well. Side by side with a CLS of the same era the R class looks like the chubby unathletic brother of a supermodel.
The Pacifica is probably the best example of a Chrysler design language that graced some mediocre to horrible cars. You can't look at it without seeing sadness and broken dreams. OK, Muggyweld looks cool. I admit I'm tempted. I need to read a bit more and watch some videos. How hard can it be? Taking the R63 on One Lap has always been a thought.
The more I do One Lap the less it's about the car and the more it is about the experience. Drive to South Bend, have Tire Rack swap pads, rotors, brake fluid and tires and do the event. When done give it back. Prove that their checks are that good. Or maybe buy it from the and sell it back after so the risk is mine? Lots of ideas.
Good stories. I feel your pain. MB is obviously using the same talk track because your experience is almost word for word what mine was. Basically told to kick rocks I am currently looking for a new engine online but being very particular and looking for lower miles than I currently have. Will also swap to the updated head bolts prior to install. My kids are younger so not sure to swap it myself and will likely have a shop do the work.
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