82 http://www.racerxonline.com
ohn Ayers, the
circuit coordina-
tor for Lucas Oil
Pro Motocross,
was once a priva-
teer racer battling
for an AMA na-
tional number (and earning #29 in
1977) back in the seventies. He’s
spent decades in the trenches at
the Nationals, so he’s had a lot of
conversations with a lot of people.
One of them struck a chord.
“It started ten years ago,”
Ayers says. “A team manager
asked me if anyone that builds
the tracks has raced a modern- He said, ‘They throw in
these supercross obstacles,
but what they don’t realize is
supercross can groom the jump
faces before every race, and
they don’t have 40 riders on
450s digging trenches every lap.
They have them jumping into
these supercross-style jumps,
but they’re rutted pits, and it
gets really challenging. Do they
know how diffi cult that is?’ I told
him, ‘No, I don’t think they do.’”
Ayers then went to MX
Sports’ Carrie Russell with this in-
formation—and she promptly told
him to learn more, because Ayers
was now going to be in charge of
overseeing tracks for the series.
“I started the job by just talk-
ing to the riders,” Ayers explains.
“I had probably spent seven
years talking to riders consis-
tently every week—all of the top
guys, Chad Reed and Michael
Byrne a lot, Ricky Carmichael,
James Stewart, Davi Millsaps,
Ryan Villopoto.... What I
learned was that you could never
make it smooth enough for Mill-
saps and you could never make
it rough enough for Carmichael.
But I also learned there was a
common thread between all of
them: they just want good race
lines to make passes.”
The culmination of this
information is today’s track
prep, which generally means a
deep, wet track in the morn-
ing, designed to build lines and
bumps as quickly as possible.
“Over these ten years, we’ve
learned what they want,” Ayers
says. “Ninety-eight percent
of them want it really rough
because they feel like they’ve
done their work and that will give
them an advantage. All of them
feel like there will be more lines
the rougher it is. So we know
it needs to be rough, and from
there, you have to determine
what’s going to make it rough so
you can produce great racing onJ
You could
never make
the track
smooth
enough for
Davi Mill-
saps, and
you could
never make
it rough
enough
for Ricky
Carmichael.”JOHN AYERS