R450: Were you happy with the Motocross season this year?
Tim: I was pretty happy with the end of the season. It took us a while to get going. Even at the end we were still learning some things. We just got a rough start. We didn’t have the bike long before Glen Helen.

R450: How much time did you get?
Tim: Almost nothing. The only thing that we did was sort of like a cross between motocross and TT setup for the stadium series. Even that we came into pretty blind because we had the bike about a week and a half before the first stadium race. So we threw it together and drove to California. We were way off on that too.

R450: Was there anything that happened after we talked to you at Red Bud that you really liked or disliked?
Tim: We got better suspension settings. We worked really hard on the suspension. We tried a lot of different motor set ups. For a while we made it a lot faster, but it was too hard to ride, so we went back down a little bit. We got it set to a happy medium where we had something that got good starts but was still ride-able. For a while we had it set up where it got great starts and was almost a TT motor. It was really fast, but it wasn’t ride-able. We backed it down and then it was too weak to get a start on it. So we went back and bumped it up somewhere in the middle. It worked better and things went decent. I got a few moto wins here and there, but I never got an overall, which would have been nice. We just kept working at it. Southwick wasn’t very good. I had a bad start in moto 1. I ended up behind a bunch of guys and got the radiator full of sand. It overheated and finally just blew up. I DNF’d (did not finish) that moto and got third in moto 2. I went in there hoping to make up some ground on Natalie, but that got shot down.

R450: What are your plans for next season?
Tim: We’re going to do a lot of testing here in the next two months. We are going to play with some different linkages so that we will have some more ideas on front suspension settings.

R450: Are you keeping all of the same sponsors for next year?
Tim: Mostly, I believe. At this point anything can happen. Hopefully, we can keep everybody.

This article provided in part by: