

But for you it was actually sketchy? It didn’t look sketchy on your runs. It didn’t look it for you, but other guys were getting sideways.

They were gnarly because we come in with a lot of speed, then they get edgy, slippery, and you miss some or whatever. Then I just held it wide open in the whoops. I probably scraped my side panel on the freaking dirt. It might not look spectacular, but I was leaning the bike over at the very bottom of the takeoff. I’m like, “There’s no way I’m going to catch him again.” So then I just started scrubbing the shit out of the walls. So I tried to put as much gap as possible. My biggest fear was Hanny because he didn’t do that section. Once we got all that dialed, I was like okay. I wasn’t bottoming anymore and everything so we did good. You come in here from those sections and it’s a 90-degree wall, bang, you go metal to metal. Our test track is kind of tight and slow. Then I had to go so much stiffer on my suspension. I don’t really know! So we were trying to get rid of that.

But I never really raced a two-stroke, so it might be kind of normal to have a little sputter or something like that. They weren’t big, but I’m like, it’s doing this there, this there, this there. I probably should have taken this more as a fun race, but we had some problems with the bike. Racer X: So how do you look at this? Were you super focused on this, taking it super seriously? What did you even expect coming in? Was this fun, or were you like, I want to win? We talked to Kenny in his motorhome after the race. Roczen then defeated fastest qualifier Brandon Hartranft in the 250 final. In the race, Roczen wasn’t the fastest in qualifying, but he stepped up come game time, first holding off a super-fast Josh Hansen, in a run where they turned in the two fastest laps of the event.
