Ringgold High School junior Bailey Mason, 16, has qualified for the Air Nautiques/AMA Amateur National Motocross Championships the first week of August at Loretta Lynn's Ranch at Hurricane Mills, Tenn. The annual event is billed as the world's largest amateur motocross event, and Mason will be competing against 41 other racers in each of the 250-C stock and modified classes.
More than 20,000 began the qualifying process in each class, said Mason, who rode a dirt bike for the first time on Christmas morning of 2005. It was the Yamaha YZ 85 he received after his dad, John, casually asked him one day if he was interested in a motorbike and thought he could handle one.
The National Motosport Association's biggest motocross competition, the Grand National Championship starting next Monday in Ponca City, Okla., will include 12-year-old Aaron Okrzesik of Hixson. He'll be returning to the same part of the country where he first rode after a 2007 Christmas present.
The family was living in Kansas at the time but moved back to the Chattanooga area last summer. Okrzesik is a seventh-grader at Hixson Middle School.
What does he like about motocross?
"Just the thrill of it, I guess," he said Monday night.
His mother wasn't as thrilled as he was when he first started doing jumps and seeing how much air he could get under his bike.
"I had to hold my breath and pray and close my eyes," Tina Maynard said. "I watch him now, but it still scares me, because he keeps getting faster and faster."
In his second year of motocross racing, Okrzesik qualified at the Lazy River track at Chatsworth, Ga., for the national competition in the 85(cc) stock and modified classes for his age group and for the 85 open. He has a host of sponsors.
"He said he wanted a dirt bike, so we got him a little 70 pit bike from Pep Boys," Maynard said. "We just wanted to see if he would ride it. He rode it a few times and said he wanted to ride on a track. So we did that and then got him a Kawasaki 85."
Mason, whose primary sponsor is Champion Cycles of Abingdon, Va., got his first race win "about two months" after he started racing, which was "six or seven months" after he got his Yamaha YZ 85. Both his first race and his first win were at the Tunnel Hill course.
The "C" in his racing classifications denotes a novice at the championship level, so everyone in his two events at Loretta Lynn's will be first-time participants.
"I'm pretty excited, and I'm confident," Mason said. "I feel if I ride hard and do my best, I'll do fine."
He was injured in the Southeast Region qualifying event but went to Buchanan, Mich., and qualified in the Mideast Region competition. Recently he took second in both the 250-C and 450-C classes at the Tennessee state championships in Blountville.