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We Went Fast's mission is to improve the sport of motocross through stories. Because better stories = a better sport. If you love history, data and details, you'll enjoy We Went Fast.
This is part 2 of
The Greatest Gamble in Motocross History
If you missed part 1, go find it on the We Went Fast podcast channel.
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And now, Part two of The Greatest Gamble in Motocross History
The untold story of Ricky Carmichael’s shocking switch to Suzuki.
January 2004: A Mother’s Love
Jeannie Carmichael played dual roles throughout her son’s upbringing and professional racing career. She was a mother first and an accountability coach second. When Ricky showed up at the practice tracks around northern Florida, more often than not, it was Mama C. who brought him. And rather than sit in the truck reading romance novels, she recorded lap times. The one time she missed a practice session that she could have attended, he crashed and broke his collarbone.
Long after Ricky moved out of the house and paid experts to train and coach him, Mrs. Carmichael stayed engaged. When he traveled to California to work with a race team, she wanted daily check-ins from Baker. “Did Ricky improve today? What is going on? Aldon, are you letting it slide out there?”
Even though Jeannie says she and Ricky’s father, ‘Big Rick’, didn’t get “involved in decision and deal making,” she was still aware of what happened with teams and sponsors. She corresponded often with Ray Blank. Blank was so respectful of Jeannie’s involvement that he sent her flowers every single time Ricky won on a Honda.
On January 27, 2004 she sent an email to Blank with the subject line: ‘new email’. She passed along new e-mail and mailing address.
Blank replied the following day with pleasantries and a thank you and asked how Ricky was doing? “I haven't bothered him on Chuck's [Miller] advice, but I'm hoping he's getting through this ok. Saturday nites just much [sic] fun this year."
Jeannie responded just two hours later. "Actually, I believe Ricky's STRUGGLING more than anyone realizes, not being part of the SX season,” she wrote back. “To be so prepared physically and mentally then have things stop abruptly is something he's never had to deal with. While maintaining professionalism and discretion, it's easy for him to mask a lot of emotions.
If Chuck advised you against phoning Ricky, that may have been a while back. With time progressing and the upcoming seasons approaching I know for a fact Ricky would like to hear directly from you."
Blank replied later that day and said he would reach out to Ricky. He also said he was working on the “contract situation”, which faced “the same obstacles” he had already discussed with Moorman and Ricky. He also mentioned a new challenge: the yen to dollar depreciation had affected Honda’s profitability. “But Gary and Chuck and I are plodding through it,” he wrote. “We just have to be a bit more patient.”
Ricky doesn’t remember struggling to cope or even being in a dark or depressed state after surgery and recovery but people close to him then, and still today, have different recollections.
“It was surprising that no one from Honda had called you guys,” says JH Leale in a three-way conversation with We Went Fast and Carmichael. “There was no contact.” As President of Ricky Carmichael Racing, Leale manages Carmichael’s endorsements, appearances and requests. Before he moved into his current role, he was a close advisor during Carmichael’s motorcycle and auto racing careers and worked as a district sales manager for American Honda from 1998-2002. In a 2004 conversation with Gary Christopher, he remembers saying, “Somebody should give Ricky a call.”
Christopher says they did have concern for Carmichael but felt like they were on a tightrope. “We were just kind of trying to figure out, you know, where is that line?” Christopher says. “How much did we communicate? How much did we not? I'm sure [more] communication could have been better.”
Christopher knew Carmichael and his circle were getting anxious. He flew to Orlando to meet in person with Moorman, not to finalize terms of a contract but to show Honda’s commitment to their franchise rider. Moorman claims he didn’t know what Gary’s intentions were for the meeting but remained positive.
“We were all hopeful that Honda would break out of their normal deal making paradigm and be willing to directly address some of the deal points we proposed in the July (2003) proposal,” Moorman says.
Both Moorman and Christopher said the meeting went well but nothing moved forward. Today, Moorman calls Christopher, “a total pro, said all the right things” but was not empowered to negotiate business terms. The offer from Honda, made the previous October, didn’t change.
“I told him that there's nothing I can guarantee because frankly, it's out of my hands and it's gone to top level management,” Christopher says.
Early 2004: The Man Who Came to Gamble
Rod Lopusnak experienced a lot of motocross heartbreak throughout his tenure in various roles at American Suzuki. He went through the single season stopover of Jeremy McGrath. He was there in 2002 when 18-year-old Travis Pastrana, a rider they had already spent a decade supporting, got on the premier class podium three times in the first four rounds of Supercross. He also watched the evaporation of that magic. Pastrana only raced a handful of main events after that and never added more to his trophy case.
That same year Suzuki lost Kevin Windham to a broken femur. The team limped through the next couple of seasons with a series of fill-in and one-year contract riders. “It was always the next great hope,” says Lopusnak, now the General Manager of Triumph North America.
With its GSX-R line of sport bikes, however, Suzuki had a dynasty in AMA Superbike competition. “We were literally the brand to be,” Lopusnak continues. “Suzuki used racing to escalate that whole platform and it got to the point where we were selling a hundred thousand GSX-R and Hayabusa models. We wanted that same thing for motocross.”
In motocross, however, Suzuki became known as something nobody wanted to say out loud: career killers.
But there was one man at the top who never lost hope, no matter how bad the results: Mel Harris. Harris joined Suzuki as a district sales manager in New England in June 1981, just weeks before Mark Barnett won the AMA Supercross championship on an RM250. Harris rose to vice president of motorcycle/marine operations, the highest ranking non-Japanese position at American Suzuki.
Bespectacled with a full head of curlicued hair, Harris wore a smile everywhere he went, with everyone he talked to. He exuded positivity and loved to have a good time; and while he took business and winning seriously, he still remained approachable and welcoming. He advocated fiercely for his motorcycle dealers and passionately supported racing. The brand won a little of everything during his time – even dominated some disciplines – but not at the premier level of motocross and Supercross. What Harris really wanted was for the motocross team to be as successful as the road racing team.
In May 2005, I interviewed Harris at the American Suzuki headquarters in Brea, California and I bluntly asked him what happened to Suzuki’s legacy. It was the first Japanese brand in World Motocross competition and the most dominant throughout the 1970s and very strong in America in the early 1980s. “Our company really struggled in the 1980s,” Harris said. “The industry in general had a glutton of product out there and everybody was discounting and doing whatever they had to do to get rid of it. A decision was made in Japan to reevaluate the motocross team. We went from being the stars to the also-rans.”
In early 2004, several factors and opportunities aligned to allow Harris to pull off his dream: the right riders entered contract years, they had the RM-Z450 in development and American Suzuki got a new president who wanted to win as much as Harris did. That made it easier to convince the executives in Japan.
Japanese OEMs rotate presidents cyclically, every four to five years, according to Lopusnak and Chuck Miller. “An interesting piece of it is, every one of them has a different background,” Lopusnak says. “So, one guy could have been an accountant for 10 years. You never know what you're going to get.” Simply: one president might be more passionate about racing than another.
In January, Suzuki announced an organizational realignment and the appointment of Masaki “Mac” Kato as president of corporate operations for American Suzuki’s motorcycle/marine divisions. Harris reported to Kato, who quickly recognized that the plan to dominate road racing and the sport bike market worked.
“Mr. Kato was super supportive of Mel,” says Lopusnak, who was American Suzuki’s marketing manager in 2004. Lopusnak said he often watched Harris get told ‘no’ when attempting to make big gambles. Or he’d have lukewarm support from the American president and couldn’t convince executives in Japan to say yes. But he never gave up and in Mr. Kato he had a staunch ally. Kato and Harris traveled to Japan and presented a plan to escalate the entire brand.
Lopusnak’s recollection is that Suzuki was also eyeballing James Stewart, whose rookie contract with Kawasaki expired at the end of 2004. Carmichael was the priority, though. First, they needed approval from Japan to overturn the piggy bank and agree to spend the money for a rider of that caliber.
“They had to educate everybody over there on the depth of Ricky Carmichael and all his greatness and what it could mean,” Lopusnak says. “And then building a business plan to calculate out how and why we're going to pay him up front. Because to get him to move from Honda, the most dominant power sports company, to come to us, we're going to have to make a very unique proposition here. And Mel sold it. It was through just being relentless. That’s the only word that I can use. Relentless. Mel put his career on the line, in my opinion.”
In the May 2005 interview, Harris wouldn’t say who, but he said Carmichael wasn’t the only rider Suzuki had their eye on. “There were a couple of other riders that tested the bike that didn’t get the offer from us that maybe they were expecting, and I think they would have appreciated riding the bike this year,” he said. “But we felt that Ricky was the rider that could win the championship for us on our bike.”
Harris died in March 2022 at age 76.
It was a massive gamble to bet so much on a single motocross athlete but Harris wanted to win that badly. At that point, Suzuki hadn’t even won a Supercross main event in five years.
February 2004: Let’s Find a Plan B
As winter dragged on they could see they were not getting what they wanted from Honda and it was time to find an offer to compete against what they already had. Moorman was excited for the challenge. “Negotiating 101 clearly teaches you that you cannot be successful negotiating against yourself,” he says.
Carmichael doesn’t know the exact moment riding for Suzuki came up at all but his feelings, in hindsight, remind him that it started as a joke, an eye-rolling, ‘are-you-serious-Clark’ conversation between he and Moorman: “What would it take for you to ride for Suzuki? Would you do it for five million bucks?” That’s what he wants to believe and remember Moorman asked him. That’s how Ricky remembers it.
Moorman says he simply asked Carmichael if he could see himself riding for a different manufacturer and, if so, who would it be? “Because of his loyalty to Honda, he was reluctant to respond to my question,” Moorman says. When he did, he emphasized more the people he’d consider working with. “[Roger] De Coster is a legend,” he told Moorman, referring to the five-time World Motocross Champion and the then-team manager of American Suzuki. “He is the ultimate competitor, his mentorship will be valuable, he has big plans for Suzuki, and I have heard good things about Suzuki executive Mel Harris.”
The name Roger De Coster brought forth a distant memory for Moorman. He grew up 30 minutes south of Red Bud and his older brother rode dirt bikes. When ABC’s Wide World of Sports ran a one-hour special on the Carlsbad United States Grand Prix, the Moorman boys tuned in. The legend from Belgium was a fixture in that event.
Moorman sent a proposal to De Coster.
Late February to Early March 2004: Suzuki Came to Play.
Carmichael looked out the window at the roller coasters that rose above the treetops of Six Flags Over Georgia. His torso lurched and lunged along with the erratic and brutally congested stop-and-go flow of Atlanta’s afternoon rush hour traffic. He was being driven to an autograph signing at Freewheeling Powersports, a Honda dealer in Douglasville, Georgia. It was Friday, February 27, 2004, the day before the Atlanta Supercross.
He got a phone call from David Moorman. With the phone to his ear, he stared at the roller coasters while Moorman asked what he wanted first: the good news or the bad news.
Carmichael likes to get bad news out of the way. Moorman laughed and said there wasn’t any bad news. Not really. He had asked Suzuki for $5,000,000 per year in guaranteed compensation. No performance or championship bonuses. Suzuki countered with a three-year deal, $4,700,000 in contract year one, paid out in 12 installments of $391,666.67 per month, starting in the fall of 2004. Suzuki also offered championship bonuses at $300,000 each. So, if Carmichael won the AMA Supercross and AMA Motocross titles in 2005, he’d end up with $5.3 million, or $300,000 more than originally proposed. And, if he won both of those titles, his base salary increased to $5,300,000 guaranteed for year two of the contract.
It seemed like nothing but good news. And it was. But it also wasn’t. Carmichael hung up and stared out the window. The next night he appeared in the opening ceremonies for the Atlanta Supercross, riding a Honda pit bike, the first motorcycle he’d ridden in over three months.
The amount of good fortune and options weighed heavily on his mind. Deep down part of him wanted fewer options, not more. A piece of him wanted Suzuki to say ‘no’, which would have left him with no option but to stay at Honda, which was where he truly wanted to be.
Still, when he returned to Tallahassee and February turned into March, he didn’t jump into signing a letter of intent. He continued to try to get Honda to budge from the numbers offered back in October. Before the Daytona Supercross on March 5, where he served as the ceremonial grand marshal, he took a walk on the beach with Jeff Stanton, who won six titles with Honda. After his 1994 retirement, Stanton became a consultant with the brand.
“We talked numbers that day,” Stanton says. “Ricky said if Honda could just come up another ‘X’ dollars, then he’d stay.”
Stanton went back to his room and called Ray Blank, with whom he had a good working relationship. “I’ll never forget what Ray said to me,” Stanton says, reminiscing. “He said, ‘Jeff, at some point you have to separate the friendship from the business.’ That was it.”
March 2004: Roger De Coster Smells Opportunity.
As a purveyor of dirt bike racing talent, Roger De Coster watches, listens and engages. He knows what’s going on, who’s not happy and where improvements can be made. In his ninth season as Suzuki’s Team Manager, De Coster still searched for the dominance he enjoyed when he was at Honda through the entire decade of the 1980s and early 1990s. A talent like Carmichael becoming available was not going to slip by him unnoticed. De Coster’s relationship with Carmichael went back to Ricky’s days as a 125cc-riding teenager who popped into the Suzuki semi to chat up the veterans.
“He had mentioned to me that things were not going as smoothly as he expected them to,” De Coster says of Carmichael’s Honda negotiations. “I had let him know that I would love to talk with him. And I could feel that there was, after mentioning some things a few times, I could feel that there was an interest there.”
Moorman’s initial proposal to De Coster set forth terms important for Carmichael: market value compensation and the freedom to maximize other business opportunities in the marketplace. The barrier-breaking upfront compensation package didn’t faze De Coster.
“I'm always for the rider to make good money if he delivers,” De Coster says. “And I had no problem with thinking that way. I knew that if we gave him a good bike that he would win.”
Once Moorman had a soft commitment to those terms, he met De Coster at a neutral location between Orlando and Daytona during the first week of March, around the same time Carmichael took his walk on the beach with Stanton. He wanted to make sure Carmichael was a top priority to Suzuki and listen to De Coster. The two gelled.
“We had a great meeting,” Moorman says. “De Coster, as expected, was a straight shooter. He did not mince words and his plans for RC were impressive.”
De Coster instantly recognized Moorman wasn’t like other agents he’d worked with. “He actually was pretty smart and did a good job,” De Coster says. Although De Coster had already informed Harris and Kato that he wanted to pursue Carmichael and laid out the logistics and equipment required to make such a venture possible, he still worried about actually getting that support. He’d been through this before. Even though the McGrath deal came together less than two weeks before the 1997 season started, De Coster said he never felt like he had adequate backing to help McGrath succeed.
“We were not ready,” says Ian Harrison, who worked in research and development at Suzuki. “We didn't have the parts and the manpower to support McGrath and it cost us.”
At the end of the Daytona Supercross, De Coster told Harrison that Carmichael-to-Suzuki was a serious possibility. “I thought he was messing with me at first,” Harrison says. “I said, ‘come on.’ Then of course I was so excited. I mean, flip, anyone would be.”
As the R&D director, Harrison stressed about having enough parts in stock for someone of Carmichael’s caliber. He started planning before ink touched paper. If they normally stocked five sets of titanium bolt kits for a race season, for Carmichael they ordered 20 sets. Harrison says extra wheelsets for Carmichael’s 2005 RM250 still sat on the shelves when he left Suzuki in September 2010.
Late March 2004: Decision Time
Moorman had momentum with Suzuki and he flew to California to meet with Mel Harris and American Suzuki’s general counsel. They laid out the objectives and goals and agreed upon all the pertinent terms. “Mel was impressive in that he trusted me from a business standpoint and believed Ricky was driven to win more championships,” Moorman says.
Carmichael officially now had two offers to consider and he remembers getting pressure to make a decision or risk losing both. In our fourth conversation on this topic, he revealed unshared thoughts about what was going on in his head at the time. He calculated how many races he had to win on a Honda to equal Suzuki’s guaranteed compensation. Suzuki also had no injury clause in the contract, which meant he would get paid even if he missed races.
“I would've won it back on bonuses,” he says. “I would've made more money at Honda had I continued on the trajectory I was on with the same amount of race wins.”
It’s true, but not by much. Doing the hypothetical arithmetic, if he’d stayed on a Honda and finished exactly how he did while riding a Suzuki in 2005 and 2006, he would have made almost $500,000 more at Honda given the terms offered.
“You don’t want to race for money but you also don’t want to do a f---ing bad deal,” he says, laughing. “You can’t be stupid. You can take two and half million less dollars. I mean, listen, at some point you have to draw the line and make the best decision for you financially.”
But Carmichael also had confidence in Suzuki. He knew their RM250 two stroke was a good bike, comparable to the Yamaha YZ250.
Despite Suzuki’s base salary offer being more than double Honda’s, Carmichael still wanted to make something work with Honda. After doing all the math, he settled on a number that would make him happy: $300,000. If Honda would agree to raise the base salary offer from $2,300,000 to $2,600,000, he’d sign the contract and stay with Honda for 2005 and beyond. Honda had first right of refusal and they wanted to see this Suzuki offer.
In an e-mail dated March 17, 2004, Jeannie Carmichael told Blank that Moorman was in the process of “finalizing some paperwork” and Blank should expect to see it the following week.
On March 23, Blank wrote to Jeannie in a polite but exasperated-sounding tone. Attached to the message was a Word document titled ‘Honda First Rt. of Refusal Memo’. Blank pleaded, “Please help me with this if you can. This is not an offer. It’s a letter from Ricky’s agent. I could write a letter like this. I need a bona fide offer on company letterhead, unredacted with a signature on it. Not an agent’s letter. If I take this to the president’s office, he’ll throw me out.”
Instead of sending over an official contractual agreement, Moorman had typed up his own document containing the Suzuki contract details Honda wanted.
When asked if this was a strategy or stall tactic, Moorman said via e-mail, “We provided Honda the necessary terms of the Suzuki offer. My sense is that Mr. Blank always felt I was bluffing and that we would never find a motorcycle manufacturer to agree to the guaranteed compensation and sponsorship freedom we proposed. At the end of the day, I do not believe Mr. Blank was a fan of athlete’s having agents and he wanted to control the negotiating process by dealing directly with athletes and their families.”
Two days later, Thursday March 25, Blank wrote to Jeannie again. He said he had spoken via phone with Moorman and was given 48 hours to respond. Blank told Jeannie he needed more time because of staffing logistics. He didn’t have the necessary people with him to make this decision. “I'm now waiting on David's callback after he discusses my dilemma with Ricky,” Blank wrote. “It doesn't sound too positive to me. I'll let you know as soon as I hear something."
Carmichael told Moorman to tell Blank that he wanted this finished for good; he planned to start riding again on exactly April 1. He believes his memorable phone call under the oak tree–where Blank said Honda’s offer was final–happened on March 25.
He wishes he could recall the emotion that his friend and mechanic, Mike Gosselaar saw in that moment, but he doesn’t. “At that point, straight up, it was just a f---ing business deal,” Carmichael says. “I wasn't disappointed in [Ray Blank’s] tone.” Still, he was confident that Honda would find the additional $300,000. When they didn’t, he knew he could make a decision and move on. “I hate gray area. I hate being in limbo no matter what it is in life.”
Chuck Miller acknowledges that, while it came down to $300,000 for Carmichael, it was about more than that for Honda, that they were already overextended. “Ray really wanted Ricky,” Miller says. “He loved the success. But he was already way out on a limb with what we were going to offer up. If it’s only $300,000, that doesn’t sound like much right now, but it was probably more like $800,000 to $1,000,000 over what he was supposed to be spending in some other area of the business.”
Like Suzuki, Honda also underwent a 2004 leadership reorganization. On March 1, they announced the appointment of Koichi Kondo from COO to CEO, effective April 1. Koichi Amemiya was CEO during Carmichael’s first Honda contract negotiation.
In the 2005 Racer X article, Blank didn’t discuss numerical details, but he did mention the unique payment structure offered by Suzuki. “Honda chose not to comply with this request,” he said. He explained the reasons behind the bonus-heavy industry standard, then laid out the reasons for the decision: Honda simply did not prioritize athletes over company principles and ethics.
“If we made adjustments like this for Ricky,” he said to Eric Johnson, “then it would only be fair to provide the same scenario for others, and we would not do that: not even after the first-ever perfect season; not even to keep the winningest champion of all time; not even for Ricky Carmichael… We believe this ethic is a big part of our success. It is our way of life. And if we lose a Ricky Carmichael or even a Valentino Rossi, over our principles, so be it.” A few paragraphs later, Blank also confirmed he was eventually given a copy of the Suzuki contract and a deadline and that he made a difficult phone call to Ricky, “asking him one last time to reconsider the situation.”
After the phone call with Blank, Carmichael called Moorman. “Button up the Suzuki offer and let’s go to hard copy,” he told his agent. Mel Harris’s signature on the official Racing, Endorsement and Personal Services Agreement between RC Racing, L.C. and American Suzuki Motor Corp. is dated March 25, 2004.
Carmichael kept the cover letter Moorman sent along with three copies of the Suzuki contract, which were waiting for him on April 3 in a suite at the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan. “I know this process has been difficult for you,” Moorman wrote. “You have handled it with dignity and I am very proud of you. Congratulations on establishing a new standard in the industry. You deserve all the benefits!”
With Roger De Coster standing next to him, Carmichael officially signed a contract to ride for American Suzuki, a company that had only won four premier class AMA Supercross and Motocross championships in his lifetime. He was leaving a company that won 27 championships in that same span, four of them being his own.
April 3, 2004: The Wildfire
JH Leale sat on a runway-bound airplane when he got a phone call just as he was about to power down his cell phone. “I did the deal with Suzuki,” Carmichael said. Leale knew about the negotiations but was still shocked. Shocked that Carmichael did it, shocked that Honda didn’t do it, and apprehensive about the eventual outcome once starting gates dropped in 2005. He worked at Fox Racing in 1997 and, as the gear sponsor representative, saw what McGrath went through. He asked Ricky, “Are you good with this?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” he replied. “I’m going to go win on that thing.” Leale could feel the confidence in Carmichael’s voice but he couldn’t ask any more questions; the plane was taking off.
By the time he landed, the news was everywhere.
Harrison vividly remembers standing in an elevator with De Coster at the Silverdome, about 15 minutes after the signing, and someone congratulated them. Harrison was baffled that people not related to the team were already discussing the news.
Chuck Miller went to California Speedway in Fontana, California for rounds two and three of the AMA Superbike Championship. According to a report written by Paul Carruthers of Cycle News, the story broke Friday morning in the paddock, which is curious because the date next to Carmichael’s name on the contract was April 3, 2004, a Saturday and the cover memo even stated “VIA FEDEX – SATURDAY DELIVERY”. The news may have broken in California before Carmichael even signed on April 3.
Either way, Miller confirmed to Cycle News that the signing had taken place. He declined to make an official comment but said, “Right now all we want to do is focus on the outdoor season.”
Carruthers wrote, “Carmichael’s move to Suzuki increases the speculation that Honda will make an offer to Chad Reed… Honda would also be a natural fit for James Stewart, but the word at California Speedway was that the phenom is on the verge of signing a deal with the Red Bull KTM Team.” (A KTM employee I spoke to said discussions did happen back in 2004 but ‘on the verge’ is quite a reach).
When Carruthers asked about Reed and Stewart, Miller responded with a long and passionate-sounding message that echoed Honda’s ethos: “Those opportunities [Reed and Stewart] were available before this as well,” Miller said. “We’ve looked at all of those options, and some things are very pro and some things are a bit con. We didn’t even want to ever go down that road because always our first choice was to retain Ricky Carmichael and keep him on a red bike, but that looks like that’s not going to happen now… We won’t be driven by another manufacturer or rider or manager.”
Blank told Racer X that rumors of Honda stalling on Carmichael to consider Reed or Stewart were “patently untrue”.
September 12, 2004: The End
Late in the morning at Glen Helen Raceway, Carmichael asked Honda’s motocross race team crew to assemble around the CRF450R that he would soon ride in the final two motos of the 2004 AMA Pro Motocross Championship, his last ever on a Honda. These men had helped him win 22 consecutive motos on that four stroke and he wanted to let them all know how much he appreciated what they did to help him succeed. Miller described it as “really neat.”
With #1s on the number plates, the bike itself looked unfamiliar. Carmichael had swapped them with his trademarked #4, not as a show of force, but out of respect to that crew. It was the only time he ran number one in a championship race in his premier class career. “I just felt like I should do that and pay homage to Honda,” he says. “I’m thankful for my tenure there. Just wanted to give them the glory of running number one.”
Carmichael could have easily ducked out of the final race and he had a solid excuse to do so; he’d severely sprained his left ankle that morning. When Kevin Windham crashed on the backside of a jump, Carmichael landed on top of his bike. “My ankle was absolutely exploded,” he says. But even with his first Suzuki test just eight days away, he never considered sitting out at Glen Helen. But he was bummed that his sore ankle dampened his mood a bit.
Riding with a shifting foot he could barely move, Carmichael beat Chad Reed by 39 and 21 seconds to cap off another perfect season. He won all 12 overalls and all 24 motos. Dominant might not even be a strong enough word for what he did. No other rider even sniffed a moto victory.
Carmichael set the single fastest lap time in every moto and led 359 of the 371 laps run. Of the 12 laps he didn’t lead, all were within the first three circulations of each moto. If he was trying to let people know whether or not he could win again, he said it loudly, without saying a thing. Glen Helen also roughly marked one year since he tore his ACL.
By the time he hobbled across Glen Helen’s dusty parking lot, the sun had long sunk into the San Gabriel Mountains. For the second time in his career, he found himself, literally, dragging his gear bag to a new home at the close of a championship run. This time he hoisted it into the Suzuki race truck.
Then he took a week off to rest his ankle.
EPILOGUE
“They have a great two stroke…”
That footage you just heard is from another trip down to the Farm. This was the fall of 2004 and Carmichael had started riding the Suzuki.
For Suzuki and Carmichael, the gamble worked out. He continued his winning. In 2005 he returned to Supercross and regained his title, giving Suzuki its first since 1981. In motocross, he won all 12 overalls for the third time in his career, falling two motos shy of yet another perfect season. In 2006, he won double championships again. In 2007, he cut his schedule in half and raced a partial season. He was first or second place in every single race he entered.
For Honda, 2005 started on a high note. Kevin Windham won a very wet and sloppy Anaheim Supercross opener. All the hype was on the new champion, Chad Reed, Suzuki’s new rider, Carmichael, and the premier class rookie James Stewart. But it was Windham and Honda that stole the headlines.
But Honda didn’t win another race – motocross or supercross – until July 2007, when Windham won the Unadilla Motocross, the first round Carmichael didn’t race in his retirement season. Honda was once the most dominant brand competing in the sport, a complete dynasty as the Yankees, Patriots and Celtics have been at times in their respective major league sports. When Chase Sexton fell seven points shy of winning the 2022 Pro Motocross title, Honda’s premier class drought extended to 18 seasons and set a new record among brands that have been active since the 1970s. Suzuki owned the old record at 17 seasons.
Johnny O’Mara, who won his championships with Honda in the 1980s and now works with brothers Jett and Hunter Lawrence as a riding coach says Honda has definitely paid a steep price over the past two decades. He’s optimistic though. “It’s going to happen in the near future,” he says. “But they still can't move forward without thinking about Ricky.”
On May 13, 2023, it finally happened. Honda’s agonizing drought ended a few months shy of 19 years. Throughout the Monster Energy Supercross season, Sexton stayed in the hunt despite a series of inexplicable, win-robbing late race crashes and a costly mid-season points penalty. When disasters befell two championship rivals, Sexton was close enough to capitalize.
The Curse of The Goat is finally over.
Thanks for listening. This is the end of part 2. But there is one more story in this Ricky Carmichael saga. “24-0: Ricky Carmichael Makes Lightning Strikes Twice” will hit the We Went Fast podcast channel soon. Until then, visit shop.wewentfast.com and help us continue to tell stories such as this one. The shop is full of Ricky Carmichael-licensed merchandise and We Went Fast branded products. Join the Fast Family today.
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