If you look closely enough, some privateer riders don’t even race in the same way that the factory boys do. Factory riders assume they’ll make the main event and focus their entire life around those twenty laps in the main. For privateers, who basically make their money by qualifying for the main, the real focus is on semis and last chance qualifiers—sprint races. Many don’t even train for the twenty-lap format, because being better in a six-lap sprint is really the key to their existence. Once they make the main, they go into cruise control and stay safe so they can make it to the next race.
This year, Rocky Mountain ATV/MC’s veteran rider Kyle Partridge has figured out the main event thing, to the tune of ten mains in thirteen races. Now that making the main has become nearly automatic, it’s time for Kyle to start working on his twenty-lap game. And he is. He’s scored a thirteenth this year, but he wants the top-ten. We talked to him after the main event in St. Louis.
Racer X: It was a little stressful tonight. You kept coming up just short every time.
Kyle Partridge: Yeah. My heat race, I started really good actually. I was fourth there for a minute and I think I kind of was like deer in the headlights. I rode really tight. I just made a lot of mistakes. Then I went into the semi. My semi was stacked. I had everyone in that thing. I was right with [Blake] Baggett there for a while. I felt like I could do it; I made a push there towards the end. I just made a mistake like halfway through or something, and he gapped me so big. I’m not going to kill myself to catch back up and end up on my head and screw myself with the LCQ. LCQ went good. I got a good start, got out front, and just started cranking my laps off. Then the main event was terrible. I started dead last. I was way outside. Everyone pushed me off the track. I just started cranking laps. The first two laps I worked my way up to thirteenth and I hit that wall jump. I thought my back wheel was off the ground and it wasn’t. I went to get on the gas and I got on the gas and the bike just shot out from underneath me. I looped out and landed right on my back. Rung my bell pretty good. Pretty much was the end of the night. Super frustrating. Last weekend at Indy I rode really good. I was eighth for a long time behind [Andrew] Short and fell back to tenth with seven or eight laps to go and was running tenth for a while, and then like five laps to go I jumped off the track and made a little bit of a mistake. Three guys got by me. I almost got away for twelfth on the last lap. I just want to be top-ten, man. That’s my goal. I think I have some pretty realistic goals for myself. Lately I’ve been putting in a lot of work in the gym and it’s starting to pay off. I’ve never trained off the bike ever in my whole life until this year. All I’ve ever done is just ride.
Why is that?
I just never had the motivation I guess. There’s no other excuse for it. I rely a lot on my natural talent. This year I’ve been working really hard with Charles Dao in California. He’s turned me around. I’m probably good right now for like seventeen laps; those last three are pretty brutal right now, but at the beginning of the year I could only do like four! We’re making improvements and I just want to keep getting better. I’ve made all the main events. I think that kind of says a lot for a guy in my position with no salary and I pay my trainer out of my own pocket. I have some serious motivation when I go home and I get to hang out with my son. We’ll see. Hopefully these next four rounds I can break into that top ten and I guess better late than never.
You’ve kind of become the master of getting into the main. It’s like almost no matter what happens you figure out a way to get in, but now it looks like you’ve gone beyond just wanting to make mains. Now you want to do some damage when you’re in it.
Last year I got hurt four races in and kind of was on a good streak then too. This year I went into the season knowing that I could be in there. I think I proved that the first two rounds. I made it in no problem, even with everyone healthy. Like I said, I just want that top-ten. A top-ten for me would be a win. After last weekend running up with those guys for so long it kind of was an eye-opener for me that I could do it. I can have everybody in the industry, my mechanic, my team owner, and my mom, everyone telling me, “You can do it!” but until you physically put yourself in that position and you’re there, then you start to realize that you can do it and things start clicking. My bike is awesome. These guys have invested a lot of money in my bike. Although I don’t get a good salary I have an awesome bike behind me. There’s no excuses when somebody spends $12,000 on your dirt bike engine—just the engine!
As you keep getting main events under your belt, is that actually training right there? Each time you do one, does it get you stronger the next time?
That’s kind of how it’s worked out for me. At the end of the day I think that’s the best form of training for me. Riding those twenty laps for as long as I can go until I can’t go any longer to where I’m like on the ragged edge, for me seems to work out pretty good. Like I said, I’ve never trained off the bike. This is my first year really working my butt off. I’ve never realized how out of shape I really was until I went into the gym. It was pretty bad. The first two months I was puking every time. Every day for three months I puked my brains out. I pushed myself really hard. It’s a mental thing, too. When you go to the gym and you push yourself through that stuff, and then you come to the races and you get tired and you start fatiguing; you remember those days in the gym when you were puking and you pushed through it. In the race, I literally will tell myself, “Come on, pull it together, keep pushing, keep going!” I literally will talk to myself while I’m riding. I’ll be in the air like, “Don’t quit, don’t quit!” I see the light at the tunnel. I don’t have a deal for next year yet. I want one of these teams to see that I may have paid my way onto teams, I guess you can say, with Hart and Huntington, and I’ve gotten on some good deals and eventually had sponsors taken from me. Now I want to earn it. I want to earn my spot somewhere. That for me would be a huge confidence boost.
You’ve been around awhile. Do you regret not training this hard like five years ago?
One hundred percent. When I look back to when I rode for Hart and Huntington and some other good teams, I had all the tools that I needed to be a good top-ten guy then. I look back on it and I definitely regret it. I beat myself up over it. It’s tough to go from having a factory Yamaha 450 underneath you and watching all the guys on your team that you were riding for win races or top-five every weekend and you’re going out and barely getting top twenty. It’s a hard pill to swallow. I look back and at the end of the day I’ve never had any guidance. I’ve done all of this on my own since I was 18 years old. No help from my parents, no help from anybody…
And your brother raced so people think, “He knows the ropes.”
My brother was in a bad place for a long time. He ended up getting himself into some trouble and had to go away for a little bit and came back. This year, especially, my brother has motivated me to work my butt off. I can truly say that if it wasn’t for Jason—who I watched put a hurting on [Ricky] Carmichael many times in the amateurs—if it wasn’t for my brother still believing in me I wouldn’t be racing.
It also sounds like when you have these bad seasons like you said and you saw teammates doing better than you, it takes a long time to rebuild confidence. Those bad years still register.
For me right now it’s pretty vital for me. I’m 28. I’m getting to that point where it’s starting to get old age. I have a 5-year-old son and I’m a dad. I have no help from anybody when it comes to my son during the week when I have him. It’s tough, man. I take him to school at 7:00, drop him off. He gets out at 11:00. I get down at school at 11:00 with him to go ride for a couple hours, go to the gym, do his homework, make us dinner, go to bed, and start all over the next day. It’s tough. A lot of people don’t realize the stuff that’s on my plate. I think that for me to keep persevering though everything…a few years ago at this very race I broke my neck and didn’t think I was going to race anymore. It’s been a long road back from that injury. Big, long road. I just want that top-ten. I want to get there. I want that bad.
Finally, I like asking privateers about the money. Can you live off of making these mains and making the night show and all that? Is it profitable at your level? Some guys say yes.
For me, the team takes care of everything for me. Flights, hotels, bikes, entries…the expensive stuff. My travel and everything’s covered, which I’m super grateful for. They spend a lot of money on me. They invest probably on me alone $50,000.
Right. Riding for free is not free. It still costs a team a lot of money.
Yeah, it costs a lot of money, especially to do it right. As far as making the money, every main event, I want to say I made like $3,000. So you do that seventeen weeks in a row you end up making close to $30–40,000 a year. And for me, I’m a penny pincher. I save my money. I do all right. I have a guy from back east that gives me a little bit of money and then a dude from Vegas that helps me out a little bit financially, but other than that, it’s hard. Especially after supercross is over it’s hard to make it through the summer until the next season starts. But I do little local races to make money. I’m not the type of guy that’s just going to sit at home and not go race. I’ll race at, let’s say Perris Raceway in California for $500. It’s $500, that’s a lot of money. That’ll pay my rent. So overall, I would say I think I make an okay amount of money doing this.