Monday Gate Drop

We’re happy to announce that this week’s Gate Drop is brought to you by Parts Canada.

With the Toronto Supercross just three weeks away, Parts Canada and MXP have teamed up to give away five sets of tickets to this incredible event. After compiling the results over the next two weeks, we will announce the five winners on the March 17th edition of our Monday Gate Drop. The tickets will be left at the Roger Centre Will Call window for the winners to pick up. At the end of this column I will give the trivia question and my email. Good luck and thank you to Parts Canada for this wonderful opportunity.

I’m not sure about everyone else but after the winter we’ve had I’ve been waiting for the month of March to arrive like it’s Christmas. So far, though, I’m a little disappointed in what type of weather March has brought with it. To be honest, it doesn’t look much different than the last three months. With the official arrival of Spring only a few short weeks away, one would have to think that we’re due for some nice weather very soon. You know, it’s been a tough winter when people who usually love winter are sick of it! I’m very envious of all the people who are loading up their bikes and are headed south this week. Especially with social media, it’s easy to read about all the lucky riders who are escaping this freezer. I hope everyone has a safe time riding wherever you go.

Another group of Canadian motocrossers who are very lucky are the ones who don’t count on Rogers to provide them with their television signal. As you all know by now, Rogers dropped Speed Channel from their available channels. For 2014, Speed has been carrying the Monster Energy SX that we all love and look forward to watching every Saturday night. Last Saturday night, my family was forced to rely of Twitter for race updates. However, on Sunday I got to watch the 450 main event on Youtube, and boy did that track look tough. It reminded me of some of the tracks in the 1990s when the dirt at most eastern supercrosses was always rutted. I remember, in particular, the Pontiac SX was always in very rough shape as the dirt was really soft and very sticky. Last night was obviously a real test for all the riders; they just couldn’t race like they normally do. Instead of moving a few inches to find new lines, they had to go from one side of the track to the other trying to avoid the deep ruts. The riders who made the main event on Saturday definitely earned their pay cheques. Indianapolis has had a colder than normal winter. I hope this really soft dirt isn’t a sign of things to come with Detroit and Toronto coming up on the schedule.

Dean Wilson navigates the deep ruts at Indy on Saturday night. Dean rode his TwoTwo Motorsports Kawasaki to tenth in the main event.

Cole Thompson once again rode hard to finish in the top ten for the third week in a row. I have been speaking each week with his Team Manager, Dave Gowland, and he believes Cole is on the verge of having his breakthrough ride soon. The East Lites Class is stacked with factory supported riders and very hungry privateers so it’s not like Cole isn’t racing with fast company. I haven’t been there to watch Cole ride in person but by all accounts, Cole is not far off the top three guys. Each week his riding has been getting better and better, and as I’ve said before, how cool would it be if Cole saved his best ride for his hometown race in Toronto!

From the good news, which is the riding by Cole Thompson, we go to the bad news that is the announcement of one less team this summer at the 2014 Rockstar Energy Drink MX Nationals. On Friday, Kourtney Lloyd, owner of the Cycle North Honda Team, sent out a press release stating that her team was pulling out of the 2014 Pro Nationals. Now, before I go into details as to why she pulled her national program from the series, let me tell you a little about Kourtney.

Just over two years Brett Lee mentioned that I should call up this girl from a dealership in Prince George, BC and do an interview with her. I said okay, no problem, but who is she?  Well, little did I know back then, Kourtney was responsible for running the top amateur program in the country out of her family’s Cycle North dealership with some 30 kids riding on the team. So we did the interview and in the process developed a friendship. This connection would lead to Ryan Lockhart and I travelling to beautiful Prince George in September of 2012 to teach a motocross school to all the local riders. Kourtney put the school together, and when Ryan and I arrived we were treated to not just 30 excited kids but all the hospitality Prince George had to offer. As we spoke to all the families about what it meant to be a part of the Cycle North Team, we got the impression the being a part of the team meant that you were part of a big family. The program Kourtney had put together was amazing and every rider on her team was very lucky. This is exactly what Kourtney brought to the Nationals last season with her Pro team; she made Ross Johnson and Brad Nauditt feel like they were part of a family and in the end they were very successful.

If you travel to Prince George, BC, this is the place to be.

While the gate is going to drop at Nanaimo this summer with or without the Cycle North Team in attendance, the pits are going to be just a little bit less classy without them as Kourtney made sure her team was always professional. In speaking to her yesterday, she had this to day about the decision to pull the plug on the Cycle North Pro Team. “The plan all winter was to put a team together to contest the 2014 Rockstar Enegy Drink MX Nationals, but in the end we realized that it just didn’t make sense financially. While I loved being a part of the National series last year with Ross and Brad and all of our great sponsors, right now it doesn’t make sense for Cycle North to do it in 2014. Having us racing in Moncton, NB doesn’t do much for our business in Prince George. That is just the reality of it. I will attend most of the western rounds and I’m going to take some of my amateur riders to Walton in August, so I will still be at a lot of races, just not as a big team. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that made last year possible. We had a great time and hopefully we‘ll be back in the future.”

We’re all going to miss the Cycle North Team at the Nationals this summer and we wish her amateur team the best. While any time you have a team pull out of a series is a sad deal, the reasons Kourtney gave for her departure make perfect sense. Hopefully she’ll be back in 2015 as her ideas and passion are such a welcomed site in Canadian motocross.

So that is it for this week’s Gate Drop. I hope everyone enjoyed reading it. I will leave you with the trivia question to win this week’s Parts Canada Toronto Supercross Ticket Giveaway. This week’s question is: name the hometown of long time Monster Energy Leading Edge Kawasaki rider Teddy Maier, and also, what have his national numbers been as part of the Leading Edge Team.? Please email your answer to chris@mxpmag.com. I hope everyone has a great week. For those of us in Ontario, this looks like the final week of the really cold temperatures. Spring is just around the corner

Something tells me that the 2014 Nationals aren’t going to be the same without the Cycle North Team.