The new-year is just around the corner and I must say I miss racing and riding my bike. Lucky for me I have been on the west coast in Pemberton BC where if you put on some thick gloves you can get in some decent mountain biking to get some sort of adrenaline rush that still involves two wheels. Still it  doesn’t replace the feeling of a motor-bike. It won't be much longer for me until I’m back racing, though. I’m in the process of trying to get things ready to race the Chillwack Arena-cross then off to the Lethbridge Arena-cross, before finally heading down to California to start my national preparation and possiblly some Supercross preparation. That is if I can get enough support.

Every year I see people in our industry asking “Why aren’t more of our Canadian riders doing AMA supercross or motocross events?” And I guess I want to give everyone my opinion on the topic.

First off for Supercross you need to have a proper bike set up. Meaning you need a much different suspension set up and a different motor set up. Second, you're going to need a practice track to ride on and a proper built one not a back yard supercross track built with your garden tractor. To ride a supercross track in California can cost over 300 dollars a month! Third, you need to be training and preparing for these races at least a month or two in advance which requires a lot of time and commitment. Sure some of you might say just load up the truck and go, but that’s not the way I do things; I’m not going to a race just to say I went to it. If I’m going to do a supercross I want to have the proper set up, the proper amount of practice, and the proper amount of fitness to do it right. What’s the point of going to a race (at my level) if you know your not going to be competitive? I want to know when I do race that I did everything I could to prepare.

My point is that it’s very costly and very hard to race a supercross properly if you don’t have the right support behind you.

Now for the AMA motocross events, I believe more Canadians should be giving it a shot. I know I’m getting my AMA outdoors license this year and am going to give it a try. We race outdoors all summer and our bikes are all set up for it. The only thing stopping most of us is the cost. For the racers that live on the west coast we don’t have a lot of AMA outdoor events close to us that we could quickly drive down to. I think the East coast guys have a bit of an advantage with being a bit closer to the races like Southwick. In the end it all comes down to how much we as riders want to see how far we can go. If you don’t have the drive and determination then the cost of going to these races really doesn’t matter much.

So if you want to see more of us Canadian riders on the line in the AMA events remember most of us have real jobs just so we can go racing in the summertime in Canada and most of us want to race the AMA events but need a bit of help to make that dream possible. That’s it from me.

Thanks for reading.

Shawn Maffenbeier