Weekly Updates (Chelsea Taylor)

With the fall breeze in the air, we’re zooming down the highway to the Ironman GNCC. While some of us are just now making the trip to Indiana, many other GNCC employees, like the track crew, have been on-site all week getting everything ready for a great week.

The GNCC Nation received some unfortunate news yesterday from the two-time ATV champion Walker Fowler. When it comes time to line-up this Saturday the number one machine will be missing from the line-up. Walker has chosen to sit-out this weekend while he heals up from some lingering issues that resulted from a crash this past weekend. Walker will return in 2017 to defend his titles. Heal up quick, Walker!

The weekend begins on Friday with the On-Track School Program. We are always excited to bring GNCC Racing to local communities and one way we do that is through the school program. However, we are especially excited for our next visit because we will be going to Poston Road Elementary School in Martinsville, Indiana. Bob “Ironman” Sloan’s two children attended this school and ATV Micro racer Dalen Lane is currently a student at Poston Road. 

We will also be attending Sugar Creek Elementary in Crawfordsville this Friday. With Dalen’s help along with Ricky Russell, Cody Collier, Mike Witkowski and Mikey Nickels we will be spreading the positive influence of racing to 693 new children! With that being said the On-Track School Program visited 11 different schools and spoke with over 3700 students just this year!

Team UXC is bringing back their team t-shirt giveaway. Just stop by the team’s pit area located on 4x4 Pro Row on Friday or Saturday to claim your shirt. If the 4x4 Pro and WXC classes aren’t enough to get your attention for the 10 a.m. ATV race, don’t forget about the special vintage 2-stroke class being offered this weekend too.

If you weren’t able to purchase your specialty pink graphics from Stuk MX there are still plenty of opportunities to take part in the breast cancer fundraiser efforts. Stuk MX will have special 2016 Ironman stickers available at their set-up on vendor row. Zakowski Motorsports will also be selling t-shirts, pink gear and more! Many auctions will also be taking place including Jarrod McClure’s tire and wheel set, Zawkowski Motorsports autographed 4x4 Pro jerseys and of course the special edition pink podium backdrop signed by each podium finisher this weekend!

Trick-or-treating will kick off the fun on Saturday night from 5-6 pm. After the GNCC trick-or-treat will be the costume contest at Team Faith and the Parts Unlimited hospitality dinner. Stone Senate will be taking the stage at 7pm with the Davisson Bothers following.

We are particularly excited to announce our newest activity. Please join us after Stone Senate is done playing at approximately 8pm for the ISDE World Trophy presentation. We will have not only the three GNCC stars (Kailub Russell, Thad Duvall and Layne Michael), but also Taylor Robert! This is one event you don’t want to miss this weekend!

The brand-new GNCC snapchat will be in full effect during the celebration so make sure you are friends with us. Our username is GNCCLIVE! In addition to our new account, there will also be a special snapchat filter for this weekend!

Congratulations to @paigeandtyler259 for winning the #GNCCTenSeconds contest! Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest, stay on the lookout… we will be offering more opportunities like this in the future!

The Aaron Plessinger Race Scholarship recently announced some big news! Thanks to Aaron’s grandmother and aunt there is an additional $1,000 up for grabs, making the full amount $2,000. For more information and details on how to apply please click HERE.

In case you missed it, check out this awesome championship video on Kailub Russell!

With the season coming to a close don’t forget to register for the banquet if you finished in the top ten in your class. ATV and UTV’s will be recognized on Friday, November 25, and bike competitors will take to the final podium of the 2016 season on Saturday, November 26. Tickets are $40 for adults, $20 for children ages 6-11, and five and under are free. The deadline to reserve your hotel room at the Waterfront Place Hotel is

That concludes all the updates you need to know for this weekend. Now it’s time to make some last minute adjustments to your quads and bikes and get on the road. Safe travels and we’ll see you at Ironman!

Participants Needed for the Kurt Caselli Foundation Study at Ironman (Nick Koester)

The Kurt Caselli Foundation is looking for racers to participate in a study at the upcoming Ironman GNCC. This is a great opportunity to help the foundation’s work of improving the safety of riders and racers in the off-road motorcycling community. Volunteer racers will sign an informed consent form and will wear a small lightweight inertial motion sensor system including a helmet sensor and a chest sensor. Researchers will be in attendance to help each racer put on the sensor before the race and collect the sensors after the race. These sensors are designed to not interfere in any way with the rider. The information collected will help expand knowledge related to normal exposure sub-concussive head accelerations by off-road motorcycle riders, as well as a number of other rider safety goals established by the Foundation.

Click HERE for full details and please feel free to contact: Greg Merril, Research Coordinator: [email protected] (cell: 240-899-2532). 

Ironman Update (Jared Bolton)

This weekend we head to the Ironman for the 22^nd time in the history of GNCC Racing. 1995 would mark the first-ever GNCC event held at the Shaver Family Farm and backyard of Tom’s Marine Sales in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The event itself began innocently enough as one of the landowners, Ken Shaver, had made his way out to ride the famous Blackwater 100 in the early 90s. While hanging out one of the hotels in town, Ken would meet Dave Coombs and begin telling him about his family’s farm and felt it would be a great place for a GNCC.

Fast forward a couple of years and the Ironman GNCC was born! After the passing of the great former GNCC ATV champion and Indiana native, Bob Sloan, it would only be fitting to use Sloan’s own nickname to name the race. Sloan earned the Ironman name by putting in excellent ATV rides on Saturday, earning numerous overall wins, and then turning around and also racing a motorcycle on Sunday. After many years of huge turnouts of racers and spectators alike, a great idea was born to build a new motocross track on Ironman’s great natural terrain. Ironman would see it’s first Pro Motocross national in 2014 and now serves as Pro Motocross’s final round of the season, just like it does for GNCC. 

As for this year’s Ironman racecourse, well, you can expect a lot of the same sections that always serve as Ironman favorites, but some of these sections are connected together a little different and we also added a few little sections of fresh trail as well as jumping onto some older trail that hasn’t been used in a number of years. The start will be in the big cornfield where it’s been the past few years. From there you’ll head into a short section of woods that will thin everyone out a little bit before hopping onto the motocross track. You’ll run about a half mile of the motocross track before going off and crossing the motocross pro pits to the far side of the property. You’ll drop down a hill into a small, dry creek section to some flowing trails to the one-mile mark. After the one there’s a fast field section of trackside pitting before a section where you’re in the woods, into a small cornfield section, then back into the woods again for a bit until you hop out into another section of fast cornfield.

Once you get back into the woods there’s some slightly tighter trail over to the two-mile mark, then back down to the far side of the same dry creek you went through before the one. Then you’ll cross back through the motocross pro pits again, back into the woods and over to your first new section. The Ironman Raceway crew installed a new bridge over the creek into a section of fresh woods. No, this isn’t the covered bridge that was a wildly popular addition over the motocross track, but this is yet another new bridge and it’s really cool to ride across because it looks like something you’d see at a park! When you get across the bridge, it’s a lot of green undergrowth on the other side and that will lead you to the three-mile mark to a little hillclimb. At the top, the bikes will be turning left and heading off to a really fun and flowing single-track section with some cool up and down sections through a few little valleys. The quads will go straight and hit a tighter section of trail to where the bikes will tie back in about 2/10^th of a mile after the hill. When the tracks come back together, they’ll run down through a couple of little valleys then a faster flowing section that will lead you back across the creek and onto the motocross track by the motocross starting gate.

You’ll work your way around the motocross track and back through the creek again to another flowing section to a little hillclimb up to the four-mile mark. From there it’s a mix of new trail, fast trail, slow tight trail and another cornfield section over to the five-mile mark. The five will lead you through some technical type trail in a little valley before you run beside a creek and under the bridge by Ironman Hill to the six-mile mark. At the six, the 1PM races will turn right and have a option to drop off a rock into the creek, or an easier way around, and then cross the creek to hit Ironman Hill. Crossing the creek and hitting the hill adds a challenge when everyone drags water up onto the hill, so that will keep things interesting!

From there the track runs through some more technical sections before a steep downhill that will bring you back to the creek again and over to the seven-mile mark. From there, it’s another mix of fast and tighter trails over to the eight-mile mark. Just past the eight you’ll make your way into the big cornfield by the start. This year’s cornfield section is super fun with a great flow. It will take you past the nine-mile mark, where the 1PM races will go through the Pro Pits, then more cornfield all the way to the ten-mile mark. From there you’ve got some open trail all the way to the famous Twin Hills, which both 10AM and 1PM races will be going up. Once you get to the top, you’ll tie back into where you started at, hit the motocross track and work your way over the finish line. All-in-all you’re looking at ten miles even for the 10AM ATV race, just a hair over ten miles for the 10AM bikes, and just over eleven miles for the 1PM races. 

This is arguably one of the most fun Ironman courses I’ve ever ridden and I have to give big kudos to Ryan Echols for coming out a few days earlier than normal to scope out some fresh trail and hooking together some of the usual stuff. We’ll see you this weekend, don’t miss it!

What Are You Looking For? (Rodney Tomblin)

The biggest question for many fans of GNCC heading into this weekend’s season finale may be, more or less, what should I be looking for this weekend? It’s one that would seem hard to answer. Most of the major championships have been crowned and there is very little hype in that realm. So what do we watch for? Well, the answer is a lot and with this being the Ironman GNCC, just be ready to expect more than you realize.

One of the first things that comes to my mind is that this is the season annual pink race for GNCC as the GNCC Racin’ Nation will be dawning all their pink attire and pink trimmed machines to show support of breast cancer awareness. One pit you want to make sure you hit up this weekend will be Zakowski Motorsports. They will feature a variety of shirts for sale at amazing prices. They are without a doubt one of the most popular items at this event and you want to get to them as early as possible for the best selections. All proceeds go to charity for breast cancer research and awareness. It’s a project near and dear to the team as Momma Zakowski has been afflicted and beaten cancer in the past. They realize just how important this event is and are working hard to help raise money and awareness for the cause that ultimately helped ensure her fight was one that could be fought.

Then of course, there is the celebration of the US World Trophy Team from the ISDE and the first presentation of the trophy on U.S. soil. This is a special time for all off-road racing fans, especially if you have followed or even participated in the event at some point. It is a historic feature and we will get to celebrate the major accomplishment for the U.S. Team. Taylor Robert who is a huge reason for the overall success of the team this year will be on hand as well. Taylor is not a GNCC competitor, but has proved he is one of the fastest men in the world in off-road racing scene. In fact at ISDE, he was the fastest. Taylor will also join us for live coverage of the racing on Sunday on GNCC Live to be streamed live on RacerTV.com. 

The UTV and Single Seat titles are still up for grabs as we roll into the final round of racing. As we have pointed out in the past, these divisions are getting quite competitive and entertaining. We are seeing new faces and names make their mark in the off-road world and this young sport is only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The Polaris Ace race or Single Seat will fire off the line around 9:00am on Saturday morning and will feature a national championship title battle between defending champ Sam Yokley and Robert Boynton. Only one point separates them with last race winner Tory Rush only eight points behind the leader. It should get interesting in the closing moments of this championship run. As far as the XC1 Pro UTV racing goes the overall title is still up for grabs. If current points leader and two-time race winner, Cody Miller, has another solid performance then we should be crowning a new UTV National Champion. He has a 26-point lead over defending champ Kyle Chaney, who has three wins this season, but one bad finish has him playing catch-up. The nerves are high in this one and when that happens there is an “anything can happen” atmosphere and things can get interesting.

This weekend will also mark the 2nd anniversary of the famous season ending duel between Chris Borich and Walker Fowler. It was when Borich captured championship number six and win number 74. It was one of the greatest learning experiences for Walker Fowler and the last time that we have seen Chris Borich in the center of the podium. Many have questions and wonders of if or when Chris Borich will find the center of the box. Could it be this weekend? We have seen some major strides out of him since the break and even early in the year he showed he still has speed. It may boil down to training at this point and Chris has been training harder than ever in his career so maybe we will see some benefits reaped this weekend and witness win number 75 for the All Time Wins leader. 

Take a moment this weekend and look around you. Whether you are in the pits, on the starting line, on the trail or one of the masses standing at Ironman Hill, just take moment and look around. Realize what you are a part of. It is the biggest off-road race America has to offer and with nearly, if not well over, 2,000 participants. The spectator numbers are not bad either with well over 10,000 guests watching, the sheer numbers of people at the event create a completely different ambience. You realize you are a part of something great. 

Then of course there is the long list of things to do. Nighttime activities generally are pretty entertaining here and we can have Stone Senate and Davisson Brothers providing live music Saturday evening, a Parts Unlimited hospitality dinner, Youth Activities at Team Faith including a costume contest and Chapel service at Team Faith, plus Trick or Treating (just look for the pink and black balloons). Make sure you tune into our trackside radio, which will be posted to keep up to date on everything taking place this weekend. 

As long of a season as it has been for everyone, I have to admit I am saddened realizing this is the final round for 2016. We will get to see some glimpses of riders dabbling in their new classes coming up next season as well as many names and faces we have not seen in some time. There will be some spoilers but all in all this will be a great weekend of racing. If for some reason you cannot make it this weekend log into our live broadcast on RacerTV.com this Saturday beginning at around 1:00 p.m. EST for ATV racing and 4:00 p.m. EST for the championship finals in the UTV races. Then Sunday at 1 p.m. EST catch the Motorcycle season finale race! Come out or tune in, it will feed your hunger for the upcoming off-season, but likely leave you wanting more. ​

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