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My award winning opinionated column is here this week to celebrate the career of a man who will be racing his final full-time race tomorrow night in Las Vegas.
Phil Nicoletti.
There goes that man.
We like to joke around about a lot of things here at Vurb, some people say a little too much, some say we aren’t even funny, but today we are saluting Filthy on an incredible career. So, no joking will come of this.
If you haven’t already listened to it, I had Phil on my podcast to go over his amateur career. He was just a kid from a small New York town that looked up to all of the fast local riders in the Northeast. He actually had his first ride on his PW50 in the basement of his house! Eventually he got better and better earning help from American Honda as well as Red Bull in the final year of his amateur career.
By the time he turned pro he was one of those guys that had to do two years of Pro Sport before fully moving onto the pro side full-time. This was fairly common a decade or so ago and still happens today. At the end of the 2007 season he caught the eye of Canidae Kawasaki and they took him onboard for his first pro deal.
Those first few years as a pro weren’t exactly a fairy tale ending for young Phillip. He had to grind and earn his place, and god forbid we bring up the horrendous crash video from the Kawi test track…
Nicoletti’s best result of his rookie season was an eighth overall at the season finale at Steel City. In 2009 he raced for Team Solitaire, in 2010 he was KTM mounted with help from KTM Factory Services and the Alessi family of all people. In 2011 he didn’t race any races in America and headed to Australia to race the motocross championship there.
Then in 2012 a real game changer occured. Nicoletti secured a ride with the infamous Eleven10 Mods Honda program. His teammate was Alex Martin and the team pitted out of an all blacked out box van. Both Martin and Nicoletti ran up front all year long, putting in some great rides against the factory teams…when their bikes didn’t have issues.
The 2012 season put Filthy on the map, as well as A-Mart. In 2013 Nicoletti got a ride with the N-Fab Yamaha team and with that he put in the best rides to his career to that point. He finished 17th overall in the Monster Energy Supercross 450SX Championship and then 14th in the 450MX standings. His best results were a 10th in Seattle and a seventh overall at Southwick.
At the end of the 2013 season, Nicoletti caught the eye of Coy Gibbs over at JGR and the team hired him as their Phil-in. Basically if a rider on the team got injured Phil woulf get the call to fill-in. It was an interesting concept and forward thinking for the late Mr. Gibbs.
Nicoletti went on to have five great seasons with the JGR team, following them to their Suzuki years, until 2018 when he got a fill-in ride for the Rockstar Energy Husqvarna team for the last eight Pro Motocross rounds. Technically still a “fill-in” for the team, Nicoletti got out of his JGR contract for the ride with Husky.
That summer Nicoletti went on to finish sixth in the 450MX Championship, one spot off of his career high fifth from 2016, but he was able to snag his first and only 450MX overall podium along the way. This was actually one of my favorite moments from Filthy’s career because he had been through a lot in his career and he went 3-5 for third overall at his home race Unadilla.
Nicoletti has gone on to race in Canada before coming home to race for ClubMX the last four years or so. He’s been a fan favorite along the way and he gets to have the ultimate prize at the end, which is of course retiring on his own terms.
Today we salute you Phil Nicoletti on an incredible career. You’ve accomplished a lot in this sport and far more than you even thought possible when you were just an amateur coming through the ranks. I hope that you get your moment this weekend in some form to have ‘the final shot’ as Michael Jordan did in what was supposed to be his final game in the 1998 NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz.
We will see you around and we can’t wait for you to curse at us and give us a big middle finger every time that we see you.
God Bless.
Main Image: Octopi Media
