GNCCRacing.com: First off, I just have to say that was a heck of a race at the Mountaineer! It was really inspiring for a lot of people to see you coming out and taking the win after all the time off and on a bike, you weren’t very familiar with…

Stu Baylor: Yeah, it was good! There was definitely a sigh of relief there going into the last lap, knowing that I should win as long as I nailed my marks. Honestly, I rode better my last lap, just knowing that a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders – in my mind I had already won the race. From there moving forward, I was already ready to celebrate.

Give us a short play-by-play of the race

The Yamaha came off the line really good. I haven’t had the best starts in my career, so it was good to get off the start with those guys. As we were going down the hill towards the woods, I saw one of the worst crashes I’ve ever seen somebody walk away from, it was an ugly one. Toth’s bike stepped out, and next thing he knew he was flying backwards through the air at 15 feet. His bike bounced off mine and then cleaned out Layne. That was really the only eventful thing to happen during the race. I just kind of settled in but felt like I could make moves when I needed to. I was in fourth, with Andrew DeLong and KR setting the lead pace, with Ben Kelley and I behind them. Ben got around Andrew, so I made a pass as well. We really just shuffled around, didn’t gain or lose time on each other. Once Ben got into the lead, I decided since he had really good lines, I would follow him through the sections where I didn’t remember all of my lines. When we went through scoring, I looked back and saw the rest of the pack was still pretty close, so that’s when I decided to start really pushing. I was able to make the pass and then we really picked up the pace that second lap – I think we were gapping the guys by a good 30-40 seconds a lap. The hard part for me was managing the race and not try to win by minutes. For me, whenever I get into the lead I always want to keep pushing as hard as I can, and that’s where I’ve made a lot of my mistakes in the past.

How did this whole deal with Yamaha come to pass?

So, after I was released from my previous contract, I got a text from the team saying they had a bike for the next race if I wanted to ride. But at the time, there were some other things that had taken place – injuries and some stuff most people didn’t know about at the time, and I just couldn’t ride. Since then, I’ve bounced around… I had talked to just about every other team and I tried to make things work. Even went out and bought a Kawi as soon as I could ride, since I felt like I needed to prove myself after being off the bike – but it didn’t seem to matter that I put it on the podium here at the NEPGs, and the fact that I was still capable of winning races didn’t matter to those guys, or any of the other teams, really. I had only one offer on the table, a one-year deal, and wasn’t really much even to get me through this season … I don’t want to say that I value myself too much, but at some point, in your career, you have to put a certain value on what you’re doing. It doesn’t make sense to devalue yourself. That’s why I wasn’t able to take that deal at the time. I turned it down, and at first, I regretted it and felt that I had been really foolish. I was talking to Corey McDonald, one of the Yamaha mechanics that I’m good buddies with. He talked to some people and said that there was still a bike for me to race if I wanted it, but it would be a one-race deal with no guarantee of anything else. I picked up the bike Wednesday, tested Thursday and Friday, then headed to Mountaineer.

So, I’m sitting here interviewing you at the Lead Belt NEPG, looking at a blue bike, so I’m assuming that one-race deal has at a bare minimum become a two-race deal.

Yeah, it was (laughs) … I feel like Yamaha got more press off this then they did off Barcia winning A1, so... As I stated in an earlier interview, I don’t know if they were all breathing sighs of relief or if I’m going to be a thorn in their side, but I think they want to do something. I’m just going to be patient and wait at least until the next GNCC. The AmPro crew was great and they were able to help me out and keep me racing for this race and the following. It’s good to have a team behind you. My previous mechanic was helping me out, but having a team is huge for a racer at our level. I hope everything works out but there’s nothing concrete. I’m sure there will be some kind of announcement if everything works out.

Gotcha. Testing is generally considered super important at your level, almost approaching holy grail status. But you showed up on a bike you’d ridden two days and won XC1. Does that mean testing isn’t as important as everyone thinks, that you can just get a bike set up for you insanely fast, or that the Yamaha’s are just that good out of the box? How should we be interpreting this?

You know, the Yamaha is actually a tough chassis for me. It’s the only part of the motorcycle I struggle with. It almost wants to be set up a little soft, which does well at NEPG and GNCCs like the last one that was rocky and technical. So, in this case it actually helped me out quite a bit. My suspension guy has also been with me a long time – he knows what I need, and even better, he actually owns a Yamaha, so he knows the bikes too. We had a good setup to go straight to. Giving the bike a little more credit as well, the motor on the Yamahas is probably the best out-of-the-box that I’ve ridden. It has a very diverse power and you can ride it at almost any RPM range from bottom to top. A lot of times also, suspension and other things you’d spend time testing on can be compensated for with the motor or your riding. For example, if the back end has a kick, you can manipulate that by running the bike higher in the RPMs so it’s making less power and riding your rear brake to settle it down.

Now in your interview with Rodney Tomblin on the Ten Seconds podcast prior to the race, you said that if you were a betting man, you would have pegged yourself as the 4th place finisher at Mountaineer. Were you lowballing that to keep expectations reasonable for everybody, or is that really where you thought you’d be?

Well, I … (laughs) I told some people before the race that it was checkers or wreckers. I came there to win. If I had ended up fourth, I was not going to be racing any more GNCCs this season and just trying to focus on next year. I knew I had to win and that this track suited me very well, but if I hyped it up, it can be taken as you being cocky or arrogant, and since I hadn’t raced most of the season that seemed like the wrong move.

How did you manage on-the-bike training while you were stranded without a ride? Like, how do you practice when you don’t even know what you’ll eventually be riding. Is it just a case where you pick something at random and ride it, under the assumption that training on something is better than nothing at all?

I went over three months without touching a motorcycle. When I got back on a bike, it was actually Ricky Russell’s bike, he left it at the house when he headed back home. I was just able to go spend 15 minutes on it, and realized I was good to go racing. That was the weekend of the PA National Enduro, so I jumped on another bike for the weekend. At that point in time, I was training off the bike, but I wasn’t riding or practicing. Even after that, I was going around doing riding schools, so that I could afford to go ride and at least chase the NEPG series. So, I was spending no real seat time directed at what I needed to do. And only having one bike – which had to be a practice and a race bike, it was just difficult. So, that’s one area my program is really lacking at the moment, and hopefully as things move forward with Yamaha that can change.

You mentioned you didn’t touch a bike for three months – do you want to elaborate on that and your injuries, or leave that out for now?

With the injures, there’s a pretty crazy backstory on what happened, between the injuries themselves and time spent at the hospital. There was a lot of craziness that went on in a very short amount of time. There will be a video coming out soon, which is why I haven’t spoken publicly about this, because I really want to hype the video up. Mason Rader and I have been hard at work on that, so it should tell the full story for everyone to hear.

Speaking of that teaser video you posted on your Instagram recently, I know a lot of racers struggle with injuries and self-doubt, wondering if they can still do this, but it’s not very common to hear them speak publicly about it. There’s like this whole macho, can’t show weakness culture about it. Why did you decide you wanted to share this with everyone?

I think you basically hit the nail on the head. It’s this macho thing, and I don’t know if it’s necessarily a macho thing, I think it’s more a case of not knowing if the industry wants to hear these things. Everybody is so terrified of what somebody might think about them, and at the end of the day I personally don’t care what people think about me. I started this and I started racing because I love it. I had a conversation with someone this past week about this actually – I hate that I love to race so much. Because the people you have to deal with, the hoops you have to jump through, all the ways you have to alter or hide your personality – at the end of the day why are we doing it? So, with this video project I wanted to show a more real side of what actually goes on behind the scenes. You know, you’ll see the podium picture, or hear about an injury and see them saying you know, “be back stronger” or something like that. You don’t realize when an athlete at our level gets injured, it’s not just a one-month deal, something you can bounce back from. It’s a life-changing event, from a bonus-structured career, you no longer have bonuses coming in, you have medical bills piling up and at the end of it you’re trying to do anything extra you can to get back on the motorcycle as fast as you can and put through yourself though it all over again. You’re spending the extra money and time to go to the PT, to hire a nutritionist and a trainer and all that… I just want to show that side of things that nobody gets to see.

And then there’s the mental toll injuries take as well. When you put so much of yourself into this and so much of who you are is based on racing, and then you can’t race … in my experience anyway, that’s a hard thing to go through.

For sure. I enjoy announcing from the sidelines, it’s better than sitting at home, but I wouldn’t choose it over racing any day. Yeah, it’s tough because even still, you start thinking, if I had pushed through the injury and raced one more National Enduro, the points would be totally different. I would have a much better shot at the championship. It’s more the regret of not knowing what could have been, and of course the struggle to separate who you are from what you are as a racer. It becomes really easy to second-guess yourself.

Not to try and pry too much more information out of you, since you have that video coming out, but what kept you going through the low points this year?

Honestly it was the fans. I have a phenomenal fan base, and a lot of people that back me, more so than other riders. It’s not just the social medial side, it’s the texts and phone calls and emails. Those guys love what I stand for. I say it over and over – you don’t see guys in button-downs out here, you see real people. I feel that I’m a real person and relatable, somebody who will talk to anybody and help people out when they can. Those guys, when you’re down and out they make sure you’re feeling like yourself. The signs around the GNCCs were awesome. One big thing too – nobody enjoys being counted out, but when I have something to prove is when I ride my best. When other people might give up, that’s when I dig the deepest.

I was actually going to ask a question related to that. Taking the win obviously felt pretty good, but did it feel good more from a sense of relief that you could still do it and that you had money coming in again, or was it more because you enjoyed sticking it to the people who counted you out.

Yeah, 100%. I enjoy proving people wrong. Everybody that gave me shitty offers, that chose to overlook me or fired me… that’s where I want to show all those guys, they made a big mistake.