Troy Dog
We’re gearing up for our annual Vurbmoto Classic at NXT LVL 101 in South Carolina on September 13-15. It’s our biggest race of the year. If you don’t believe us, just ask riders like Jo Shimoda, Haiden Deegan, Adam Cianciarulo, Justin Barcia, Justin Cooper, Cooper Webb, among others what this race meant to them. They will tell you that it completely changed the trajectory of their careers. We took them to the top baby! Now we will take you to the top. Sign up for your classes today and see if you can become King or Queen of the Classic.
On Tuesday we released our newest series called “State of Racing” where we sat down with some heavy hitters of the sport to discuss the importance of amateur racing.
In EPISODE 1 (of many), we kicked it off with the likes of Trevor Reis, Matt Walker, Daniel Blair, plus more. We wanted to hear from them if they thought that local racing was in fact important in the grand scheme of shaping a professional racer.
Today the focus of this column will be on Matt Walker, former professional racer, who created, owned, and operated Moto X Compound. Walker of course had a great career with many podiums and a 125cc West Region win and is mostly remembered during his time with the Monster Energy Pro Circuit Kawasaki team in the early to mid 2000s.
Walker has helped riders like Aaron Plessinger, Drew Adams, and Casey Cochran along their way through the amateur ranks.
“The state of racing, if you look at it as a whole from a Loretta’s prospective, it’s amazing,” Walker said. “It’s the best its ever been and the numbers show that.”
However Walker, who now owns Echeconnee MX in Lizella, Georgia has noticed a decline of racers on the local level.
“When I first started doing races 11 years ago, the numbers were almost double on a local level than what they are now,” Walker said.
When you look at all that Walker has accomplished in his professional and business career, you’ll notice that a better source of information on this subject may not exist. He’s lived this lifestyle from every side of the fence as a racer, trainer, and now track owner.
“What we kept running into was that people wanted to become professional training facility riders,” Walker said. “Now everybody is at a facility and everybody is sharpening their skillsets there, but their not actually racing the person who might be a little bit better because their not training at that facility.”
The land that Moto X Compound once sat on is still owned by Walker, it’s just being leased by Triumph Factory Racing at the moment, which means that for the time being the training facility is out of commission.
Regardless of who rides there, that land has been used over the course of the last decade to simulate racing. Has it been successful or do these riders need more?
“You can try to simulate racing,” Walker said. “We did it the best at Moto X (Compound). We had the riders, the gate drops, the simulation and you can get close, but nothing quite simulates a local race. Everybody needs to learn fundamentals and everybody needs to learn to sharpen that skillset, but there has got to be a balance between training and racing.”
According to Walker, if you just stay at a training facility and ride with the same group day in and day out, you’re going to eventually max out on your abilities. Racing the toughest competition and getting gate drops will take you to the next level.
“You get complacent when you get confident,” Walker said. “I try not to ever let myself get in that mindset. You’ve got to stay hungry and have that dog in you.”
