Crossing Over

Joe Gibbs Racing is finding its niche in Supercross motorcycle racing

By WILL GRAVES

AP Sports Writer

Josh Grant can almost hear the wheels turning when motorcycle fans see him and his Joe Gibbs Racing motocross team getting ready for an AMA Supercross race.

Joe Gibbs Racing? Motorcycles? Really?

Believe it.

Grant understands the curiosity. He also was a little surprised when he first saw JGRMX join the popular Supercross series last year. But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

“I was like, ‘You know what? That’ll open our sport up to a new side and open up new opportunities for riders to get into NASCAR,’ ” Grant said.

Then the 22-year-old went to the JGRMX shop at the team’s North Carolina home base. A quick tour of the facilities told him all he needed to know about how seriously JGR was taking its motocross program.

“They’d really built it up,” Grant said. “Their whole deal was pretty exciting.”

Motocross racing is nothing new to the Gibbs family. Joe Gibbs raced in some regional circuits during the NFL offseason in the 1970s, and son J.D. caught the bug too.

Getting into motocross on its highest level, however, was the brainchild of younger brother Coy Gibbs. He saw motocross as a way for JGR to reach a new audience, one a little younger and a little edgier than a typical NASCAR crowd.

“This was Coy’s dream,” Joe Gibbs said. “Both boys love it. They each own one half of the race team. Coy said, ‘Hey I’d like to start that venture’ and J.D. agreed so we took off in that direction.”

Like most things it does, JGR didn’t enter into motocross lightly. JGRMX has 16 employees, the same number the team had when it started its NASCAR program more than 15 years ago.

The MX garage has its own separate building and is run by veteran manager Jeremy Albrecht, who helped Jeff Emig become one of the top motocross riders in the 1990s.

Albrecht’s experience helped JGRMX get off the ground, and in its second year the team is flourishing.

Riding a Yamaha, Grant is fourth in the season standings after a sixth-place finish at last week’s race in Seattle. He wasted little time picking up his first victory, winning the season-opening race in Anaheim in front of a slew of friends and family.

“The goal was a top-five, let’s get a top-five,” Grant said. “But then [the leaders] went down and I had the lead on lap seven and thought ‘This is my chance.’ I ended up with a banner stuck in my wheel [for winning] and doing it so close to home was just crazy.”

Joe Gibbs placed some of the credit for joining forces with Toyota. Besides manufacturing JGR’s NASCAR cars and being a major sponsor of the JGRMX team, Toyota is the title sponsor of the Supercross series.

“They’ve been involved in motocross for a long time, they know what they’re doing,” he said. “In a way, it’s a lot like starting a Cup team.”

For Grant, it meant finding a way to get a handle on the massive 450cc bike used in Supercross. It’s a major step up from the 250cc of the Supercross LITE class.

It wasn’t easy. Not the biggest guy in the world at 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds, it took time for Grant to get used to controlling the machine.

“You’ve got to be stronger,” Grant said. “The laps are longer. There’s more races. It’s like starting all over again and learning the ropes.”

Grant has learned quickly, something he credits to his tight-knit team, and thinks he benefits from the way JGR’s NASCAR teams run their programs.

“Everyone works together as a team and a lot of times teams have miscommunication,” Grant said. “But the way Coy has run the program, he and Jeremy have everything down.”

Grant doesn’t get so many questions now from motocross fans wondering what JGR is doing in the land of two wheels instead of four.

What he’s finding now are NASCAR fans who are suddenly taking an interest in the bikes.

“When we were in Atlanta, we had NASCAR people coming by the truck, talking about how they were at the race for the first time,” Grant said.