Steve Cox | September 19, 2018
No Respect, I Tell Ya!
COLUMN
Last week, former 250cc SX champ Jake Weimer decided to retire from racing. He’ll be 31 in December, and the sport doesn’t get any easier as you get older. That said, I’m proud to call Jake Weimer a friend, and I’m even prouder of him for what he managed to accomplish in his career, despite—for a reason unbeknownst to me—being one of the least respected racers in the industry throughout most of his career.
You might roll your eyes at that, but I watched it happen. Constantly. We became good friends about the time he signed up with the Factory Connection Honda team in 2006. He was a nice kid and he was funny. He had a way of saying things in a matter-of-fact, straight-faced manner that you just don’t come across very often. Example: One time I asked him about how confident he was, and he said, “You can be confident, but if you aren’t fast enough to get to the checkered flag first, what good is it? And if you are fast enough, why do you need confidence? You’re either fast enough, or you aren’t.”
In the beginning of his career, Weimer wasn’t. Not really even close. But he wasn’t one of these racers who was bred to win championships in the first place. He was an Idaho boy whose dad put in a lot of effort to get to the big amateur races, but when Weimer turned pro, he had to go to Canada first in 2005. Then he got a chance to try out for the Factory Connection Honda team. He got the final, unpaid spot on the five-man roster in 2006 and was happy just to have top-level equipment underneath him. His best finish that year indoors was sixth at Anaheim II, and he ended up 13th in points. Outdoor racing was never really his strong suit, but his rookie year was pretty pathetic. He missed four of the 12 rounds, and in the eight races (16 motos) he raced, he scored a total of 26 points—31st place in the championship. Some guys would’ve folded up, but Weimer just buckled down. He simply didn’t know what he was up against until he was in the middle of it. And injuries didn’t help.
In his second year, though, Weimer started showing some promise. He grabbed his first podium at the San Francisco Supercross behind his teammate Josh Grant (in second) and Ryan Villopoto, who won. He was fourth in points in the 250cc West, and then he finished second to Ryan Dungey in the East/West Shootout in Vegas.
Outdoors took an even more dramatic turn, with Weimer snatching sixth in points. Compared to the year before, it was night and day.
Then, in 2008, after crashing out at Anaheim I, Weimer grabbed his breakthrough win in Phoenix, and he did it after battling the entire main event with Ryan Dungey, Broc Hepler, Brett Metcalfe and eventual champ Jason Lawrence. His first win came after a race-long battle with top-tier talent.
The rest of his 2008 season wasn’t great, but Weimer had decided that if he wanted to contend for titles, he wanted to race for Pro Circuit. He took less money to sign with Mitch Payton’s Monster Energy/Pro Circuit Kawasaki squad the following year and almost took the title from Ryan Dungey. Weimer won three main events while Dungey won four, and Weimer ended up five points behind Dungey at the end of the series. Then, outdoors, Weimer had another breakthrough, winning his first AMA National in Colorado, and then his second at Budds Creek, before being chosen to race MX2 for Team USA at the Motocross of Nations with Ryan Dungey (MX1) and Ivan Tedesco (Open). They won.
And after all of that, as we headed into the 2010 season, it seemed like absolutely nobody was talking about Jake Weimer. Everyone was talking about Trey Canard or Weimer’s teammate Josh Hansen. I was working at another magazine at the time and nobody there seemed to take him seriously either. I basically had to beg to do an internet story on him at the Kawasaki track. This is after he won three supercrosses in 2009, along with two nationals, was on the Motocross of Nations team, and his main rival from 2009, Ryan Dungey, was moving up to the 450cc class!
That’s how Weimer was treated throughout his career. He rarely, I felt, got the respect he deserved. Of course, he dominated the 250cc West in 2010, with his only hiccup coming when he crashed at Anaheim III while trying to pass Wil Hahn and couldn’t get his bike started. He got going last and still finished eighth. He won four of the eight rounds, then won his fifth race at the East/West Shootout, leading home a historic Pro Circuit 1-2-3-4 of Weimer, Hansen, Christophe Pourcel, and Dean Wilson.
The next year, Weimer moved up to the 450cc class as a teammate to Ryan Villopoto, but missed almost the entire 450cc SX season with a broken arm. The next year, Weimer grabbed a podium at round two. It was his first of five podium finishes, and Weimer ended up fifth in points.
Over the ensuing years at Kawasaki, Weimer suffered from some injuries, as well as not being afforded the ability to set up his motorcycles the way he wanted and other things like that, and when it came contract time after he lost his ride at Kawasaki, he always seemed to be signed as an afterthought or a replacement rider for injured racers whom I always felt Weimer was better than anyway. And then, prior to the 2018 season, Weimer finally got a deal signed early in the off-season with the MotoConcepts Honda team. He was very, very fast at the test track, and things were looking really good for him with months yet to prepare for the 2018 season when the unthinkable happened—he had a rear hub break. It’s a part that rarely breaks. Nobody on the team had seen it happen on a Honda before. Yet, in the middle of a supercross practice session, the rear hub broke, sending Weimer over the bars.
It took him months to recover, only to get back to the track early in the AMA Supercross Series and get injured again.
And that was it. Weimer announced his retirement from racing this past week. We all kind of knew it was coming. He’s 30 years old now, and he has a family. His wife Nicole and his daughter Kennedy are his world now.
Weimer is a champion. And he became a champion the hard way. And regardless of whatever else happened in his career, that’s something not a lot of other racers can say. But as a friend, and a fan of his, I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if he’d have been shown the kind of respect he deserved during his racing career. CN