I think you said on the Staging Area show that you train with the Star guys week in and week out. You do those 30’s at The GOAT Farm, but it’s always a little bit different in race conditions. So, how did it feel doing two 30’s in a moto, versus maybe just doing it with those guys at the farm?
At the farm, we’re doing motos with Levi [Kitchen], Justin [Cooper]. They’re all super-fast riders. So, the whole moto, we’re just going at it super hard the whole time. It’s very tiring. But compared to the combine, I raced that moto, and I had some good starts. I was able to hold the lead off the bat. I didn’t feel like I got that tired. I had more in me. I felt like if I were in a little bit more of a situation where I was battling the whole time, it would have been a lot harder. But it was very hard keeping that pace, running up front like that. I had to stay in a good mental game, too, and not crack at all because there was a lot of pressure.

It’s a national track, which is something you guys don’t get the chance to race all the time as amateurs. Sometimes the track is a little bit more condensed, or something like that. What was the challenge, or the experience like of racing a full-fledged national track in front of fans and everything like that?
It was very cool racing that with all the fans and everything like that because we raced the day before so there were a lot of fans there. The way I do it, I really feed off the fans. If I hear fans yelling and stuff, that just gets me hyped up. The first lap when I came around, I heard all the air horns and the fans yelling and I was like, "This is sick. I can’t wait to do this when I turn pro more often." So, it was really fun.

In terms of the coaching aspect of it, they have you doing a lot during the day. You’re on a factory program already to a degree, but were there things you felt like, from working with different coaches who you don’t normally work with, that you actually did learn and get some valuable experience from with it?
Yeah. I learned some definitely different things that I’ve never used before. We were doing segments, like to show where you’re faster. There’s three seconds on the track that you're faster in segment one, slower in segment two. My coach was Michael Byrne. It was really cool how we could look at the segments and be able to be like, "You’re off here by a good amount, but you gain a lot here." We looked at that part of the track and found ways to make speed there. It was just really cool showing all that.

How much different was the feedback you got from Byrner versus what you would normally train with? Is it kind of eye-opening to see it from a different perspective even?
Yeah, definitely. I train with Swanny [Gareth Swanepoel], so he definitely is a great trainer. He knows a ton. Training with Michael [Byrne], it’s different to see it. Everyone has a little bit different perspective. I know Michael is a great coach, so it was cool to get his perspective on it. They were fairly close, Swanny and Michael. They were pretty close with coaching.

We now have Combines, there’s Supercross Futures and a lot of this stuff kind of fits into the amateur mold a little bit differently. What do you think of the combine as an event compared to some of the amateur stuff that you already have done? Did you like it more? Did you wish some things were different with it?
I enjoyed it a lot. I like racing Loretta’s and all these amateur nationals, but the combine really opened my eyes to longer motos. No races really do that. Spring-A-Ding actually was the first one to really give us a longer moto. I think it was like 25 minutes, and that was awesome that they could do that for us. But, these amateur nationals, most of them, you’re just running really short races. It doesn’t really set you up well to go pro. If you were to go straight from amateurs to pro just racing normal amateur races, it really doesn’t set you up well. That’s why I think these combines take it to the next level before you turn pro doing these long motos and getting used to it.