He did it again. Just when you think it’s safe to think Chad Reed is out of it, he comes back with another win. It’s the same thing we saw last year, or in 2011—heck, he’s been winning supercross races since 2003! Here’s what the Discount Tire/TwoTwo Motorsports rider said after the race.
Racer X: You took off in that one.
Chad Reed: It’s nice to get a good start like that and get out front and actually ride to your potential. For whatever reason I’ve been really struggling at the beginning of the races—even when I do get a good start, just haven’t been able to do anything with it. Tonight it was nice. Would have been kind of sucky to ruin a good holeshot like that. That first turn was tough to control. It was way tighter than you could ever imagine. I rolled out of it way before you even think you should, trying to get to the inside and pulled it off. It felt good. Wire to wire.
Was there any point there where you were going, man, this is a really long main?
Yeah. I looked at the board a few laps in; I think it was like only lap five. I’m like, okay, don’t look at that for a while! We’ve got fifteen to go. But they started clicking off. I actually found a bit of a groove there in the middle. I was just watching lap times. That’s the first time I’ve actually seen my lap time on the pit board all year. I was kind of trading off with [Ryan] Dungey. I would drop into the low forty-nines. I had a fifty. He had a mid-forty-nine and then the next lap he had a fifty and I had a low forty-nine. So we were kind of trading back and forth. I think it all depended on a good run through the whoops and the dragon back. Five laps to go, you know, you get the realization that this is real—I could pull this thing off. I kind of tightened up a little bit and started holding my breath and started to run into lappers. He kind of made up a bit of time, but I just tried to play that time as best I could and the last two laps just made a big push and held him at bay.
Last week I saw on Instagram you kind of apologized to the crew for making them run around a little bit. I think I saw some of the same in the pits today. What are you hunting for? Did you hit a magic spot today?
I wish it was as easy as…[pause] Honestly, today we ended up on pre-season bike. I felt awesome this pre-season. Honestly this season has probably been my worst season ever, just in the fact of how good I felt coming in. I felt that I was going to challenge for race wins and for the championship and it just hasn’t gone that way at all. So it’s been a bummer. It’s been hard to swallow; the comments start to creep back in. “He’s done, he’s washed up, he’s old.” It’s been tough to ignore those and stay on the grind. At a certain point you start going, “Man, is it real? Is this my time?” Sticking to the schedule, it’s not that fun. You’re eating healthy. I hate eating healthy. I enjoy a drink every once in a while and eating what I want. When you’re sticking to that program and you’re getting the results that I was, you start questioning whether it’s all worth it. But you try to stick it out and you hope for nights like this.
How many years can you keep doing this?
It’s easy to stand here when I’ve just won a race and say that I feel like I can still win, but honestly it was one of the best off-seasons of my career. I just felt like we dotted the I’s, crossed the T’s, and got it all done. And for whatever reason between Christmas and the first race, something went sideways. We need to look back at the end of the year and see what that was. Maybe I got a little greedy and started pushing a little too hard and showed up at the first few flat. But it’s not like I’ve backed out of it either, so that doesn’t make sense. It’s been a weird season. The black flag has been draining. I’m still not happy with it, still not convinced that it was a great choice. There’s still legal action going on. It’s been taxing. It’s been a hard year.
Split lane: fan or not a fan?
We didn’t even use the left side. They tried to take a bale out; that didn’t help. And then I took a look at it before the main event and they rolled the first double down, but it’s like they rolled it down to… I don’t even think that I would have been able to make the double. They should have taken the double out. I just think that that’s the guys with the machines that are getting told from somebody upstairs that just doesn’t really understand maybe racing at a level that a rider does. But it’s hard. Those guys have got three minutes, sometimes two minutes, maybe six minutes, to make a decision and try to make the race track a little better during the night show. Tonight I wasn’t a fan because we didn’t go there, but it is what it is.
Talk about that quad at the end of the whoops, the one that bit Ken Roczen in practice. You did bust it out at one point in the main.
I was doing it a bunch at the beginning and then kind of like a few laps I missed it and then started doing it towards the middle, maybe lap twelve or something like that. If you got a run at it, it was easy. Every lap I hit it I was seat bouncing it actually, and that’s what Kenny did when he went over the bars, or almost went over the bars. It kind of flashes through your head a little bit. You’ve got to make sure you’ve got it lined up. It was weird. I thought they were going to take it down so that we couldn’t do it, but they actually made it bigger. It actually became easier. So seat bouncing it was actually better than when Kenny crashed.
The track looked like it was hard to have absolute perfect laps every lap. The 250 race was all over the map and you said that dragon back was tough. What was it? Was it soil or just the way the whoops were set up or what?
I think it was a combination of all that. Dirt was really hard. This was probably one of the harder, slicker Atlantas that I’ve rode. The next one’s going to be really tight. I have the next one built at home and it’s pretty tight. It will be interesting to see how that one turns out. But overall it felt like a more normal supercross to me. More what I’ve been riding at home, so I felt pretty comfortable from the get-go. I was on the board in the untimed practice, and then wasn’t far off in the others. For the most part I think it was a pretty solid night for us.
