That's a wrap for 2020!

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As many of you are already aware, Grassroots 204, along with Brett Konkin at Transcanada Moto Park, made the decision late last week to cancel the last race of the season in Brandon due to the Provincial Government increasing their restrictions in the region due to a spike in COVID cases.  We all felt it was in our best interest of both the safety of our members and our reputation as a sport.  We had planned to present our year end championship trophies at the conclusion of the race in Brandon as COVID would not allow us to have a year end awards banquet this fall.  

Further to this, we made the decision last night to make Grunthal our last race of the 2020 season.  We believe that with the spike in COVID in our province we aren't willing to risk one more weekend of racing as we believe there is much more to lose than there is to gain in the end.  We have, along with each promoter, established strong working relationships with the regional health authorities and we want to ensure this relationship remains intact come spring 2021.  At this point we feel that this decision reflects our long term vision for a strong start to the 2021 motocross season.

Grassroots 204 would like to thank the promoters for their excellent work this past season, both on and off the track as we navigated our way through this pandemic.  Each track and their staff delivered an excellent weekend of racing, and our combined communication was seamless.  

We have many more people to thank, including our staff behind the scenes and of course our advertising partners as well.  For now we wanted to get this information out  to all of you so that you can go about making plans as a family for what is left of this glorious summer.  Finally and most importantly, we would like to thank all of you for your support this season. We know that we introduced a great deal of change, and naturally there was some initial skepticism with our plans.  And COVID did not help!  So we want to thank all of you for giving us an opportunity to execute our vision for what we believe motocross can look like in Manitoba.  And thanks for cooperating with our COVID protocols as this allowed us to go racing.  In the end, we feel like we all kind of stole this summer of racing, and we did what practically no one else did in the country.  We went racing!  And we had a tremendous turn out and steady growth in many classes throughout the summer.  It was worth every bit of stress and struggle.

Stay tuned for more news in the coming days.

Cheers,

204GMoto

2020 Season Update - Let's Go Racing

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To our motocross community:

I would like to provide you all with a complete update as to where we are with our series for this summer.  To begin, there has not been one personal situation or one professional occupation or business that has not been affected by COVID-19.  We have been working and communicating constantly with our members, industry people, the MRC, the promoters, regional health authorities, and the MDR as well.  Ever since this shutdown began, we have planned and planned again until we find ourselves at our present day.  I want to thank the MDR for their help in directing us to gain the approvals we just recently acquired to allow us to go back to racing-more on that below.  I want to thank Lawrence Hamm for his input, and I would like to thank the promoters for staying engaged with us to get us back on track with a series.  And all of the riders and enthusiasts that I run into at various practice days that both understand the challenges we face and encourage us to stay with this thing.

I would like to hope that everyone in our community can appreciate that neither party that is responsible for putting on our series for this summer, are going to take any undo personal risk that would put us at odds with the Provincial Health Order.  If we could not satisfy this most important component, we would not be going to be racing this summer.  We all have families and professions that we are responsible for, and as much as we are all passionate about motocross, we would not put this passion ahead of the more important things in our lives.  Having said that, we have not waved the white flag on the season because we believed strongly in doing everything we could do to see a motocross series go in some form or fashion, if it all possible.  The easy thing to do would have been to pull the plug a month ago, wash our hands of it, and say sorry, nothing we could do.  But we did not want to take the easy way out, and we hung on to the last possible minute, and we got rewarded for this patience.

We just finished a conference call tonight with the promoters after a very fruitful week of progress. 

We proposed a set of protocols to return to racing after a great deal of communication with the Regional Health Authorities and their office was critical in helping to understand how we fall under the Provincial Health Order, and their office was supportive of our protocols to return to racing.  Finally, the Regional Health Authority provided a letter that gave us permission to run our series under the protocols we put forward to them.  And we also needed this letter so that we could insure our events-racing would not have happened otherwise.  It has taken this long to arrive at this moment in time.  If we had pulled the plug a month ago we would have lost the opportunity to go racing this summer.

To this end, we will execute a summer series very close to what we posted back about a month ago. 

We will post and send this out by the end of the week.  It is our goal to have an 8 week series, ending by August 30th as previously proposed.  Obviously we have a great deal of work to do in the coming weeks to be ready for our first weekend that I can confirm will be July 4 & 5.  Believe me, if we could have put this together sooner, we would have done it.  It will be different, and we will have to adhere to these protocols to ensure successful events.  These are the same protocols we have all come to accept and live with in order to get through this time as safely as possible.  So whether you want to go out to dinner, buy some groceries, or heaven forbid go to Costco, we all have to abide by these rules to get back to normal sometime down the road.

Finally, I would like to say to those that have been sending angry and at times disrespectful emails to us, please pause and take the time to consider all of the challenges we have faced to get to this point.  If you have decided that for some reason that you don't want to race the series we have worked tirelessly to put forward, your choice.  I would like to point out to everyone that we will be the only Province racing this summer in Western Canada.  Not one sport has continued on without being adversely affected, and sport is the last thing on many people's minds.  I'm sorry we are not racing yet-we wish we were. 

The fact that we are going to actually go racing this summer is a huge win, and I am really proud of the fact that we hung in to see this through to a positive end. 

And I have often been reminded about why I got involved in motocross all those years ago, and that is because of all the really good people I enjoy hanging out with, riding with, and working with.  It took an entire community to help us get to this point and we are immensely appreciative of this. And all of our communication with the good people in Government has been equally positive. 

Sorry for the long post but this message had to get out.

Thanks everyone and we look forward to seeing everyone at the track real soon.

Sincerely,

Ken Bentley on behalf of 204GMoto

2019 Season Announcements

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The 2019 race season is right around the corner with the first gate drop happening May 12th at Sandy Oaks Raceway in Melita! Please have a read below of 2019 changes and announcements. Any questions or concerns can be addressed with the board manitobamotocross@gmail.com

2019 MBMotox Board Members

President
Kyle McCannell

Vice President
Charlie Westfall

Treasurer
Warren Wiebe

Track Safety
Jamie Burmey and Troy Revet

Clinic coordinator
Adam Orvis, Michaela Hamm, and Tyler Groening

Promoter rep
Jamie Burmey and Troy Revet

Referee Rep
Warren Wiebe, Troy Revet, and Mark Cosgrove

Membership Rep
Sandra Bonneteau

2019 Changes

SIGN IN TIMES

Saturday sign in 8PM - 9PM and Sunday morning from 6AM - 7AM.
For the Saturday evening registration, if we still have a lineup at 9PM we will continue sign-in until there is no lineup anymore. 

LATE FEES

In previous years the late fee for not preregistering was $10 per class, if you did not preregister for the race you will now be charged a flat fee of $5.

NEW CLASS: PLUS 50

The Plus 50 class will race with the Vet Junior class.

VET MASTER & VET JUNIOR

Vet Master and Vet Junior will now be separated classes. Vet Junior will now run with the new Plus 50 class.

GATE DROPS

No more double gate drops. There will be only 1 gate drop for races with combined classes with the only exception of the 50CC 7-8 and Little Ladies race, they will continue to see 2 gate drops.

Rider Advancements

C ADVANCING TO B CLASS

  • Nathan Williamson

  • Sean Banman

  • Zack Plaster

  • Tyler Hrychuk

  • Brendan Kokorudz

  • Wesley Dyck

  • Ricky Fredrickson

  • James Dallman

  • Bryce Fehr

  • Brendan Muzyka

  • Tristan Wiebe

B ADVANCING TO A CLASS

  • Ryan Kokorudz

  • Rylin Katazinski

  • Jake Parnell

  • Ethan Spagrud

  • Nicholas Friesen

PLUS 40B ADVANCING TO PLUS40A

  • Calvin Kotowich

VET JUNIOR ADVANCING TO VET MASTER

  • Leon Desmarais

If you would like to move up, but do not see your name on the list OR if you cannot/do not want to move up, and your name is on the list, please send an email with past results and reasoning to the MMA @ manitobamotocross@gmail.com