Austin Forkner has competed in three AMA Pro Racing events in 2023. First off, the Monster Energy/Pro Circuit/Kawasaki was taken out of the 2023 250SX West Supercross Championship when he crashed in the opening race of the season at Angel Stadium the first week of January. Badly tearing his right ACL as well as fracturing his tibia and fibula, Forcer was immediately put in the injured reserve list by team owner Mitch Payton.
After missing virtually the entire 2022 AMA Pro Racing season due to a shunt suffered at Arlington, Forkner hoped that 2023 would be a turnaround year. That didn’t happen.
“I felt good (at Millville and Washougal, where he made his return to competition),” he said. “It is so hard to come back for the outdoors. Supercross is one thing because it is a little bit less fitness-focused. Natural talent comes into play a lot in supercross versus motocross. You don’t have to be the absolute fittest person. It’s more about bike skill in Supercross. You can sprint for 15 minutes, you can go really hard for about 10 minutes and then you can ride out the last five minutes, you know? Outdoors, 30 minutes plus two laps is pretty serious, and that’s twice and in the heat. It’s a lot harder to come back in the middle of an outdoor season versus supercross.
“Maybe that’s because I’ve raced a lot more supercross in the past few years, so it is coming more naturally to me maybe because I’m a better supercross rider than a motocross rider now. I don’t know. Either way, I think it is a lot harder to come back from injury mid-outdoor season than Supercross season. I knew it was going to be that way. It wasn’t a surprise. I knew it was going to be tough. Right now I’m right around a 10th place guy. That is not far off from where I figured where I would fit in. I really had no expectations coming into it. I hadn’t raced the outdoors since the first round at Pala last year, so that was over a year since I last raced if you don’t include the A1 heat race I crashed in.
“The last couple of races, I knew that I was a little bit slow in the first 10 minutes and that I needed to work on my sprint speed a little bit, so we’ve been working on that. With working on certain things like that, you’ve got to just throw yourself in the deep end now and then to learn those things. You can practice all you want at the practice track and you can be the fastest guy, but race day is so much different. That’s why I didn’t get my expectations up super-high or super-low. I just kind of went in to just go in and to see where I fit in. From there, I could work on those things that I needed to work on. That’s where I’m at right now.”
Forkner addressed some of the major changes he has made to his racing program to get things back in order.
“I changed off-the-bike trainers to Charles Dao,” he said. “I changed on-the-bike trainers to Ryno (Ryan Hughes). Now I’ve moved to California and I’m there full-time. I’ve changed a lot of stuff and missed a lot of racing. With a combination of those two things, I really did not know where I was going to fit in at all. I didn’t know if I was going to be fit. I didn’t know if I was going to be fast. I didn’t know anything. I just knew that I needed to go race.
“Some people criticize me for making a recent change to Ryan Hughes,” continued Forkner, speaking of Hughes, a former works racer who competed in both America and the FIM Motocross World Championship circuit.
“Then there was the whole moving to California thing. That’s really wasn’t my decision, that was kind of forced on to me by Mitch and the team. They wanted me out here. I’m also still good with Robbie Reynard. I love Robbie. Robbie is like family to me. I’ve known him forever. He’s partially like a father figure to me. But I need somebody I can work more hands-on with while out here in California, so I made the switch to Ryan Hughes.
“I got some criticism for that. I’m not opposed to trying things. I’m not saying that everything that I’ve been doing has not been working, but certain things haven’t been working. Obviously, the whole getting hurt thing for me. That’s my Achilles’ heel, you know? That’s the whole thing that has held me back in my career, basically. The injuries have really set me back. My speed has never really been a huge issue. It’s usually just getting hurt and missing so much racing. However, now at this point, my speed has become an issue because I’ve missed so much racing, so certain things are kind of starting to present themselves with the amount of races that I have missed.
“I tried Ryno out for a couple of days and I liked some of the things that he had to say to me. He was a good guy, too. He was easy to have a conversation with. I feel like he knows what he’s taking about on the bike. I felt certain changes that we made on the bike helped my riding. That is a key thing. People can tell you things all you want, but unless you feel the noticeable change and you can feel it, that stuff really doesn’t matter. It’s all about feel, and Ryno said some things and showed me some things that I liked and I felt good around him.
“I really do want to win. I’m doing everything that I can. This sport is brutal. I’ve had a little bit of a rough go at it. It’s taken a toll on my body. Certain body parts don’t work the way that they used to when I was younger and I had a bit more of the send-it mentality. I see a lot of people who say to me, ‘Man, you send it more! You need to go for it more like you used to!’ I’m not the person I used to be, you know? I’ve had 15 surgeries in the past five years. I mean, I wish I could send it a little bit more too like I used to. That’s just not me anymore. All f these things have taken a toll on my body and mental state. My mental state now maybe makes me think twice a little bit more than maybe I used to.