by: Jared Bolton
Thursday, January 2, 2020 | 12:00 PM
Welcome to Quick Fill.
And welcome to the first Quick Fill of 2020! We’re now a whopping two days into the New Year and it’s already getting us excited for the 2020 GNCC Racing season. We’ve got several changes in the schedule this season including a return to Mountain Ridge for the first time since 2015 and an all-new event in Kentucky at a facility that has never hosted an off-road race before. It’s already shaping up to be a great year and we’re anxiously counting down the days until we kick it all off at Big Buck… That’s just 51 days away!
We’ve also seen some more silly season changes come together. Beta USA announced their 2020 lineup with Cody Barnes making the move into the XC2 class, Rachel Gutish returning in the WXC class, and they’ll also be adding Chase Colville to the team, who will be contesting the XC3 class and their second XC2 rider will be Thorn Devlin. GNCC regulars will recognize Chase’s name for riding with the Lojaks folks for a number of years and Thorn was the National Enduro Expert-AA class champion in 2017 and has been a top five rider in the NE Pro 1 class for the past couple of seasons.
Cole Richardson announced on Instagram that he would be riding with the TEly Energy folks in 2020, which is really cool to see another team crossing over with both bike and ATV riders. Liam Draper will also be back with TEly Energy this season, so while the Baylors may have lined up the Factory Sherco rides, the TEly guys are still very much involved with some top talent on both the ATV and bike sides!
Other than that, things have been a bit quiet as of late but with Christmas and New Year’s coming to a close, now is the time we’ll see a lot of riders heading south to train for the new season. There will also be a number of racing opportunities coming up including this weekend’s Hangover Hare Scramble out in Maryland, which is hosted by Billy Schlag who won a couple of GNCC Senior A championships back in 2015/2016. You can get more info on that event HERE.
There will also be a weekend of Team Races in Denver, North Carolina coming up January 18-19. ATVs will race on Saturday and Bikes will race on Sunday. Both will be four-hour team races with two-rider teams or you can race solo in the Ironman classes. They’ll also have youth races both days, which will run as a traditional hare scramble event. Andy Barkley and Mike Culler are the two guys running this event, they’re both experienced race promoters and they help us out each year at Steele Creek, so expect a fun event. Check out their Facebook Event HERE for more info.
The weekend of January 26th presents a cool opportunity for bike racers, as the 21st running of the Burnt Gin Hare Scramble will take place at the same venue as the following weekend’s Sumter National Enduro. The Sumter Enduro Riders always put together two really cool events, as both the hare scramble and the enduro are two of the most fun events of the off-season. Both events pay points to our friends at SETRA as well. The SERMA Club is having some issues with their website at the moment but they do have flyers and more info available on their Facebook page HERE.
As usual, the Florida Trail Riders folks will be hosting several hare scramble events during our off-season as well. Looks like they have hare scramble events this weekend, January 25-26 and February 8-9 as well as a hare scramble event between Big Buck and Wild Boar. FTR hosts both ATVs and Bikes, so these events offer something for everyone. For more info, check out their website HERE. You also can’t forget our friends with the Mid-East Hare Scramble Series, which is ran by Buren Hamrick who served as GNCC’s Junior Trail Boss for a number of years.
If you’ve never been to a Mid-East event, then you’re missing out! They are essentially a scaled down version of GNCC as their presentation, course layouts, starting line layouts and podiums are pretty similar to what we do at GNCC! On top of that, they work to schedule their events to be pretty similar to the GNCC schedule to give riders good practice for the GNCC events. For example, the first Mid-East round is just a few miles up the road from Big Buck the weekend prior to Big Buck! For more info, check out their website HERE. And yes, Mid-East does host races for both ATV and Bikes!
If these events aren’t enough, there’s also the SORCS series, which hosts several races in Georgia during our off-season. They used to do a Winter Series but have since changed their regular season schedule to race from late 2019 through early 2020, and it still gives a number of opportunities for both ATV and Bike racers to do some racing prior to the GNCC season. For more info, check out their website HERE.
As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities for GNCC racers to do some off-season racing before the season gets started. There’s also the simple fact that many riders head south just to do some riding. It’s always great to see the social media posts of our riders getting in some seat time during the off-season and it gets us equally excited to get back on our bikes as well. Personally, I haven’t been on a motorcycle since I test rode those 2020 Yamahas back in November. I picked up my new 2020 KTM 300 XC-W sweep bike a few weeks ago and have been staring intently at it in my garage ever since. I can’t wait to get some seat time in and you guys that are out riding right now are making me pretty jealous!
That’s going to do it for this first edition of Quick Fill in 2020. We’ll keep this one a bit on the short side as there’s still several weeks of the off-season to get through and we don’t want to use up all our off-season chatter right off the bat! In the coming weeks we’ll recap the 2019 season and what it could mean leading into 2020, as well as discuss some of the info we hear out of these races I mentioned earlier. Until then, enjoy your weekend and we hope you get to do some riding!