First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, filled with great times with family and friends. As we enter a new year, I believe everyone sets new goals, finds a new way to achieve them, or simply takes the time to reflect on where they are in life. I feel that this is a healthy thing to do, as we all have different goals and different ways of achieving happiness in life. This being said, sometimes it may be small, and sometimes it may be big changes or big aspirations. For me, I do this same exercise every year. I assess the goals that I have in place for everyday life, as well as my goals for my racing career. I try to reflect on what went well over the last year, what maybe needs to change, and how I can improve things in my life. I won’t bore you all with my more personal goals in life, but rather dive into the racing side of things.
As we look back on last year as a whole. It obviously didn’t go the way I would have liked, or the team would have liked it. Taking that into consideration, there were still some positives that we can pull from it. One of them being that the new CRF450R platform is a great one to start with. Right away, heading into the season, we were very confident with the base model bike that Honda had provided us with. I was feeling really good on the bike after a great off-season down south. I got to ride the factory HRC Honda for about 6 weeks, which was really cool and it made me learn a lot about what we can improve on our race bikes. The beginning of the spring went great after racing a couple of events. Coming into the season, I thought we were sitting right where we wanted to be.
Then the season starts! Right away, in Calgary, something was a little off with the bike setup. That’s okay, it happens. We made it through Round 1 with the points lead. Then comes an injury at the practice track during a mid-week training session. Then we suffered a DNF the following weekend at Round 2 after fighting through some nasty pain. No riding at all between the West Coast and the East Coast rounds! Onto St. Julie, another tough weekend of fighting with bike setup issues as well as an injury. My elbow injury was causing insane arm pump because of the affected muscles and nerves. Then to Round 4 at Gopher Dunes, where we would have another DNF and pit stop from hell! The season in my eyes was slowly falling apart, not long after it started. You can see the snowball effect that was going on here. The following weekend was not much better, with two big crashes that led to more injuries. Nothing was going right. And to end the year with three more DNFs was just the icing on the cake.
When you look back at it, you guys may say, “We failed on every aspect of the racing season”. I would tend to agree with you; we failed on a lot of points. Starting with the bike, we can’t allow any DNFs, let alone the amount we did last year, if we want to win. Also, I can’t be making these big mistakes mid-moto as I did at SDL. Those mistakes came from a place of desperation and just wanting to win so dang bad, and pushing the limit a little bit too far. Now, this is where the team and I are ready to do anything it takes to win. Prior to even the final round, I was testing and trying different set ups. This is where Mike from MP1 Suspension comes in. The team and I were looking for some more comfort and what we could do to make the bike better for me. Mike was instantly ready to do whatever it takes to have me feeling confident enough to crush the competition at Walton. Honestly, we would have crushed it if it weren’t for the bike running out of fuel. Two days after the final round, we were testing and finding solutions with the bike to see where we screwed it up. This being mechanically and chassis. Everyone on the team was asking themselves, why the hell are we running out of fuel!! This isn’t something we had dealt with in the past, so why now?
After a couple of weeks, we were certain we had found a solution, and I was ready to showcase that at the USA National at Budds Creek. Unfortunately, only a few laps into qualifying, disaster struck when my necklace got caught on my clutch lever going down a hill, and I crashed and broke my back. Now again, shit luck, but live and learn. No more necklaces to be worn while riding! I was pissed, but the bright side of this is that we were confident that we had a solution to the problems that had haunted us all season.
Now heading into this year, we know what we need to change, and I can tell you there will be a lot of changes. I am going to change the winter training schedule, dividing my time now between Mesquite and the Dogpound in Florida. I am changing where we are getting our engines built and the amount of testing on race engines and chassis prior to the season. We also changed fully over to MP1 Suspension, which we are confident will make a big difference! This year, I have been quite a bit more hands-on about my program, making sure it is done the way I want it. I have hand-picked some people that I want to work with, and I believe this tight group of people will achieve greatness this season. Prior to the winter, we were testing until the snow fell. That alone has already jump-started us on the 2026 season. We have a solid game plan on how things will go, and I am going to hold the boys and girls accountable as the year kicks off!
I am super excited for 2026 and can’t wait to show you guys our Honda Canada GDR Fox Racing Team’s full potential!!
