MUSTANG (Aug. 23) – This week’s Lucas Oil Off Road event at the Wild West Motorsport Park has two former Supercross champions racing trucks.
Seven-time SX champion Jeremy McGrath stands with his Pro 2 truck he’s racing at the Lucas Oil Off Road event.
Jeremy McGrath flies his truck over the Ski Jump at the Wild West Motorsports Park.
Ricky Johnson, five-time Outdoor National and two-times Supercross champion stands one by one of the Red Bull team’s truck.
Ricky Johnson heads for a landing after flying his Group 4 truck over a jump.
One of them is seven-time champion Jeremy McGrath, now racing with his own team in the Pro 2 division.
I retired from full time in ’02 then I raced some races then I races some in ’05 and ’06 for fun in some west coast Supercross and stuff like that,” he said.
Later he would be introduced into off road racing.
“I’ve always been a fan of off road and I have a publicist and she was doing publicity for CORE back in day for Jim Baldwin and working for me,” he said “They had a guest, celebrity type of truck so I got invited to drive that and that’s how it all sort of got started.”
He added that led to more invites then he turned this into a full time ride with Baldwin.
“Then CORE went away and I got a ride with Johnny Greaves on the Toyota Monster Energy Team and I drove for Johnny for a couple of years,” he said.
About that time he wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and McGrath was traveling as he raced in the mid-west. Needing to be he began working on transitioning to the Lucas Oil series.
He added that his wife is doing fine now.
“I got a ride with Stronghold Motor Sports for a couple of seasons. I was with them for the first few races last year then I quit to sort of try and build my own team up,” he said. “I needed the time to do all that.”
Asked about his thoughts when he first saw Wild West Motorsports Park he said, “This is a really awesome place to have a race, I’ve ridden my dirt bike that are in places like this and you can’t really have a race track in the city so you’ve got to have it out in the hills. This track’s unusual as you hit speeds of 80 to 90 miles an hour and if you’ve ever driven a car at speed with no windshield it’s pretty impressive.”
He added the inclines and declines as well as the jumps makes the facility great.
“Variety is good and this track’s not like all the rest of the ones race on although I haven’t had that much success here yet,” he said.
The other former Supercross start is Ricky Johnson racing for the Red Bull backed team.
“I’m a seven time AMA national champion, two time Supercross and five time Outdoor Nationals,” he said. “Unfortunately I had an accident in 1989 and eventually I had to retire from motocross and supercross as they had to fuse my right wrist. At that time I was still young, aggressive and wanted to keep racing.
At that time there was the Mickey Thompson Grand Prix so with the help from friends, Carolyn Williams, now Carolyn Landrum and John Waraniak helped him get involved with Chevrolet. From there he drove for John Nelson on his team.
“I did a little bit of racing with them also with the McPhearson team, I loved it and just kept pursuing it all the way till today,” he said.
And like the rest of the drivers he was at the first event at Wild West last year.
Asked about the facility he said, “It’s awesome, the facility is great, the location of the track, everything. For a driver it’s not real challenging, it’s fast and it’s like a super speedway. It’s the super speedway for us, you’re wide open a lot, a lot of long flyer jumps but not really technical jumps but it’s a great track non the less.”
Johnson added he’d like to see a couple more jumps and bumps in the layout.
Asked about the big jumps, he said, “There are a couple of places that all you see is sky and at night, with all the lights, all you see is lights and in the afternoon all you see is sun,” he said. “It’s a little tricky but that’s part of off road truck racing as you have to deal with the environment.”
While he’s up in the points, Johnson would like to do better now that the season has reached it halfway point.
“Kyle LeDuc is the class of the field (Pro 4) and he’s been kicking out ass, week in and week out,” he said. “He broke one week and we won that day but right now he’s got something figured out so he’s driving really fast but we’ve been racing back and forth for second, third and fourth. We’re not liking it so we’re trying some different stuff and we’re going to give it heck today.”
Both McGrath and Johnson will race again Saturday evening, starting at 7:30 p.m. at the Wild West Motorsport Park.
