Forrest Butler of the BTOSports.com-KTM-WPS team has been down the supercross road for a while now—first as a racer and now a team owner. The teams that he has been a part of come up from humble roots. What started simply as a vehicle for Forrest and his brothers to race then turned into a privateer team fighting the factories, and is now a team that gets factory equipment and has up to three riders in the top ten in 450SX.
A guy that thinks outside the box over the years and has grown his team, I thought I’d catch up to Butler to talk a little bit about his season as well as how far this little team from Florida has come.
Racer X: You’ve got some injuries with Andrew Short and Davi Millsaps here lately but generally speaking, Brayton’s much better than he was last year. Davi has been great, winning heat races, some good main event finishes. It’s been a tough season for you but yet in the same way it’s been pretty rewarding. Ten races down. How would you assess your 2016 season?
Forrest Butler: I feel that we’re following the trend in the pattern that my team has for twelve years. Over those twelve years there was only one year that we really struggled. Every year aside from that we have steadily stepped up another level. Behind the scenes I think it’s going great. More success just comes with more stress and harder work, but you’ve got to take a step back and you’ve got to say, “Okay, I haven’t won this year, and realize that there’s fourteen past supercross champions racing in that 450 class.” So this year we’re hitting fourths and fifths. I joke that we’ve got a podium curse going on because I’m pretty sure the last two years we’ve had more heat race wins and holeshot awards than anybody without a real win.
With Davi there was obviously a lot of people thinking we were crazy in that move, but Davi and I have known each other for a long time and there was plenty of years where I wasn’t ready to work with him. It was the right time and place, sponsor or not. I feel like he just matured. He’s always been a great guy, he’s always been a big kid, but he was also one of the biggest names and gifted kids and there’s baggage that comes with that. I think Davi’s one of the few that has matured. He’s become an incredible adult, family man, husband, father. We talked all summer. We didn’t start talking for a week and then decide do this. We talked for months. I let him know what was important to me and just asked him not to back out of those commitments that I wanted. He has just been perfect on those, and really that again falls back to that other thing we were talking about—he’s working as a team. He’s out there to race for himself, for sure, like every racer, but he is working with the team. With every one of our sponsors he is helping develop, make the product better, make the bike better, make it better for his teammates. He’s got a lot to prove and he still has the talent to do it, for sure.
And now healthy, Justin Brayton’s been better.
Last year was very, very hard to measure on Brayton. There are always the rumors of some guys ebbing [the first year of a two-year deal] second year contract guys and this and that. But in all reality if you back up to last year, Brayton got on the bike at Straight Rhythm and he got second. He went overseas. He did his normal thing. He actually beat [Justin] Barcia and Eli [Tomac] on the first night of Bercy, and then he broke his thumb on the second night. He went into the first few races, he struggled a little and then he got hurt. The guy was hurt for almost the whole supercross season. And he’s not an outdoors specialist, but I think it’s like anybody. You get out there and there are high expectations. Tenth place isn’t good enough. So he had a good, strong off-season. I’ve been starting to see Justin get more comfortable overall, getting his confidence back. Really from what I’ve learned working with Justin he is a confidence rider for sure. He builds off his confidence. Right now I think he’s had one race outside of the top ten that was an eleventh, ten rounds in. So I really do see him landing on the podium. He just got his first heat race win. It’s been good.
The rough part on Andrew [Short] is it’s so hard to out-do what Andrew did last year. I want to see him go out on his retirement on his terms. It sucks because that’s the vicious side of motocross, like we all know. Whenever you want to make a plan, the dirt jumps up and grabs you and hurts your body. So right now he’s just healing up. Seeing specialists, making sure he makes the right decisions. As everybody knows, Andrew Short is a very smart man.
Do you think we see him before outdoors?
Right now, honestly it’s his business, and we still need to get through seeing some specialists. The decision right now is up to him completely. Andrew’s just had such a heck of a career. Just like everybody knows, Andrew’s a very shy and humble man, and sometimes I think he doesn’t realize that he is one of the most successful guys ever to come through this sport. He’s a Kevin Windham. So whether he comes back and kills it or just comes back to retire, all I really want for him is I just want him to be happy inside. I want him to be happy with his career. But it is one of those things, I don’t think he’ll realize everything he accomplished until he’s done and he sees that nobody’s going to forget him. He always will be one of the most popular names. He’s been a pleasure to work with for four years. I hope he gets healed up and has a strong outdoor season to finish off his career.
You and your brothers started the team for yourselves really as a way to go racing a long time ago. You’ve all transitioned into different things. Are you the principle owner?
Actually I always have been and only have been, so nothing’s really changed there. But my other brothers have ventured into their own careers. I love my brothers, and I would just say that for everybody who’s ever known us to look at the long-term history of racing your whole life as an amateur and building it and doing what we did, it’s a mean, vicious, nasty business. And for them I would just go ahead and take the defense that… I would love to have them all with me still. I think about what we could do with me times four and I think we’d be doing even better than I can do by myself. But it’s just a business. On the business side when you’re providing for your family, it’s one of those businesses that when it’s good, life is great. When it’s bad, life is bad. It’s just not built for everybody. It’s a stress ride, roller coaster. I’m very proud of them for picking some of their roots and having stable careers. All of them but one is married and he’ll soon be married. That’s really all it is. We’re all best friends and brothers, but it’s just not meant for everybody.
Do you sometimes take a look around at what you’ve accomplished? You guys are officially a KTM factory team. You’ve got high dollar, high profile riders. It’s been quite a ride, huh?
I always say this when someone asks me that question: I can give you a fluff answer, but honest to God, no I don’t. I have not achieved what I feel is my accomplishment. Yes, I’m not stupid, but at the same time I don’t feel I’m being arrogant. I’m very appreciative. I’m happy and I know what we’ve accomplished, but at the same time I guess the best way to put it is, we win a heat race and there’s no emotion on my face because, “Okay, we won the heat race.” That’s good, but now we need to get up on that box in the main event! When you sit down and you negotiate with your sponsors whether they have been with you for ten years or one year everybody wants to be on that box.
What’s difficult on the team side is just to be in the top five it’s a lot harder and it’s about half a million dollars more expensive every year to be just in the top five, let alone the top ten. So we grow. The team’s getting better. We have great sponsors and supporters, but as far as being happy or content, no. I feel like as soon as you get happy and content and relax, two more guys are going to pass you up. I just keep my head down and I just want to win just like anybody. We’re just in that spot where there are only three more spots to really get to.
One of the things I think that you should be applauded for is you’re a private businessman coming into a sport where it’s tough to make a profit, and that’s ultimately what the private teams want to do and through some outside the box thinking, you’ve generated some revenue with some different, unique programs.
Yeah, again I’m definitely not a cocky person so I don’t like to talk about it, but I know that’s one of my strong points. Yes, that is what we do. At the same time there’s kind of good versus evil. We started shopping title sponsorship a little bit last year and one thing I learned was the majority of the people, and even some of my other closest sponsors, didn’t even know that I owned the team still. They thought someone else did. So on one side there I’ve done such a good job that I have a lot of people thinking that the title sponsor owns the team. At the same time it’s kind of like, okay, well that’s why no one else is ever knocking on my door.
You’re doing too good of a job!
Yeah, but that’s not enough. Obviously I love our title sponsor and all that, but just like a rider, it’s a business. The sport is growing. It’s getting more expensive every year. The best answer I have is I sit down with Feld all the time and my thing is I think we all should be very blessed with the money and the living we’re making. I’d really like to see a lot of those “Behind the Dream” TV shows get the heck away from the “woe is me, poor me” rider complaints of being a privateer and making a struggle and all this kind of crap. There are a lot of us that make a good living, but we work very, very hard for it. More importantly, behind that there are a lot of great companies, like BTO Sports and Western Powersports. They have put millions behind our programs over the years and these guys deserve credit for what they do. They don’t deserve someone getting out there and saying, “I can barely make a living” and everything. The last privateer who qualifies for the night show gets I think $1200 these days to be the 40th guy. When I was racing you got $200 to make a night show. I don’t want to hear about you eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches if you’re making $1200 a week just to ride around in last place and not even qualify for a main event. That’s not a bad living.
There are programs like the TPJ program that I think is a great thing for a lot of those guys. My whole vision, to answer your question, is I wish we’d start doing more stories on teams like mine, teams like JGR, and start talking more about the accomplishments and the money that is being made, because there’s a lot of attraction then for larger money and bigger corporations to come and be a part of it. What people don’t understand is when they hear people complaining or whining they don’t want to touch it. They don’t want to come in and invest the money into something that someone’s going to turn around and talk crap on. I think that just comes down to what’s the average salary for the average American, thirty something grand? Our guys do really good, and a lot of guys do really, really good. I think it’s a great sport. I think we’ve got good promoters. If we all worked a little more together as a team, as a whole, I think there’d be a lot more successful teams.
What’s the plan for 2017 and 2018? How many riders are you going to go with? Anything that you can tell us?
Really nothing yet. We’re up on our KTM contract so it’s OEM renewal time for us. I hope we’re staying. It’s kind of that time when everybody’s just getting to talking about all that stuff. Between our dealership and our program I would like to continue and believe that’s what we’ll be doing there. As far as riders go, we made the decision a long time ago to be a focused 450 two-man team. Bringing Millsaps on this year there was just a sudden opportunity. I do feel a bit like JGR and some other teams in that you really need a two-man team but your odds of a guy getting injured are high. That’s pretty much how this year worked out for us. We’ve been a two-man team for every race minus two races. Now we’re about to be a one-man team for a race or two. So it will definitely be two guys. Andrew’s retiring and there are a lot of other guys that are up and I really think it’s like everyone out there is waiting for Roczen to get placed and see where that’s going to go, and everything will start falling into place here shortly.
