OffRoad Scott Myers Wins Vegas To Reno For Team Green

[Scotty Breauxman]

TEAM GREEN WINS THE OVERALL AT BITD VEGAS TO RENO

Thumpertalk's Exclusive Interview With V2R Champion Scott Myers

Reported By Scotty Breauxman

Thumpertalk regular and multi time SCORE champion Scott Myers (Cracker1) just took the overall win in Vegas to Reno yesterday and was nice enough to spend 20 minutes with me over the phone to give a race report on this important BITD win for Team Green Kawasaki as they prepare to make a bid for the Class 30 SCORE Championship at this years Baja 1000.

“We’re really stoked. It’s a really big win, one of my biggest ever. Its pretty awesome.”

A first for Myers, who turned 40 just last week, and now becomes the oldest rider to ever win the overall Vegas to Reno championship.

Myers and team mate Shane Esposito (who took the class 30 win in the Baja 500) shared the riding assignment with Shane taking the first leg to pit 1 where Myers got on the KLX450 with the physical and time adjusted lead where he stayed on top all the way to Reno. The plan was to have Scott and Shane take “warm up” sections for the first part of the race. After that, they’d leap-frog their way up the desert with at least two sections at a time.

That was until they had their only real problem: An inside flat tire on Shane’s chase vehicle (a dually). Myers then had to pull double duty while Shane changed the flat and was nowhere to be found.

“I actually didn’t know there’s no one around”, Myers explained that he had to back track through the pits while he looked around for Shane before he found Brent Harden who told him about Shane’s flat.

“Childress’ team gave us gas and I took off.. We knew we had gas options but I couldn’t wait around for Shane. So I ended up taking two more sections (4 straight) until we got to Pit Luni, then Shane had caught up and took the bike for his two, plus another two of mine.”

From the point Myers got on the bike, he lead the entire duration. “There was no dust all day long and, other than a couple of close calls with some cows and a heavy G-Out before on of the pits, it was pretty lonesome out there.”

“I was coming out of the hills and down into a low valley. The guys in the last pit told me there’d be some cattle coming up, but I knew I was coming up on some cows because of the tell tale signs of low-lying water and, of course, the standard cow patties we’ve learned to look for in Mexico. Sure enough they were in the green high brush. As the first racer through the course, I rousted em, and as they scattered, I brushed up against a little baby one and saw some other steers, big ones with 4 foot wide horns”

The weather was not as extreme as Al Gore would’ve led us to believe and Myers claimed it was pretty decent for the day but the course was very silty and rocky with some rougher, tougher sections than in Baja. “Don’t get me wrong, Baja is tough with some gnarley silt sections, but out there in the V2R there were sections of never ending silt….Miles and miles of silt, stacked onto some super fast road sections.

At the end of the day Myers average speed topped out at well over 55MPH, which is faster than most all Baja races for the bike classes.

With a strong lead over Childress/Harden, Myers and Esposito changed up their strategy for the last few sections.

“We knew we were keeping a 10-15 minute lead on them the entire day until they had a brake problem” Harden had a high speed dismount and come into a pit with a missing brake lever and had also lost one of the handgrips (GNARLEY)”

“So when Shane got back onto the bike, we decided to back off a little to save the bike and kept that 10-15 minute window. Coming into the last section, Brent got off and that cost them another 15 minutes.” It was an awesome race for us and the KLX450 ran flawlessly without a single sputter.

Finally Myers took the requisite time to thank Shane and the entire team:

Kawasaki Team Green

Jeff Sheets at JMS Electric

My wife (who changed the flat on his motor home assisted by Team Pleuger)

Temecula Motorsports

Kal Guard

FMF

GPR

ZLT

Precision Concepts

Dirt Tracks

IMS

Maxxis

ONeal

Seal Savers

DVS

Zip Ty

And Last but not least:

New team manager Tim Gomez, the some guy who took care of Steve Hengeveld for the better part of the past decade. Gomez joins Myers as Henge makes the shift into the TT class.

BTW: Brent is going to be okay and no doubt will be in place to give JCR some pressure in Baja this November with Childress and rider of record Ryan Penhall. ***Prayer request for Anthony Modica and family***

Congrats to TT regular Scott (Cracker1) Myers and his team. See you in Ensenada this November.

[STECKNINE]

Espo is the man!?

[KWJams]

Awesome report! ?

[wetto107]

yes mr gomez knows a thing or 2 bout winnin