Racer X: You failed the driver’s test?
Hunter Lawrence: It’s all good, mate, but yeah, I got rejected. He said I did not look in the mirror or check my blind spots. I swear on everything I know that I checked my mirrors five times before everything I did, so I don’t know. Maybe he just didn’t like me. I’ll bring him coffee or a donut for the next time.
So can you not drive?
We’re just trying to do everything right. I have an international license, but I want to get my California driver’s license.
Okay, so how long have you been back riding?
I’d say three weeks of proper training. We just raced the Cal Classic over the weekend, just to get a couple gate drops—the last time I raced was RedBud and the [Motocross of] Nations in October. Cal Classic was good, we uncovered some more stuff that we’re developing on the bike, and we carried that into a test on Tuesday. We’ve made some progress. I’m feeling good and I’m feeling confident. But that’s what everyone else says before the season!
Because you missed supercross, do you consider yourself ahead of some other riders in outdoor prep?
I wouldn’t say I’m ahead. I lost out on eight weeks of riding in a three-month period. You can argue the fact that I’m doing motos now, but those guys were racing while I was not even riding. When I was training on supercross, whenever I would jump back onto a motocross track, I could still do two 40s, no problem, and my speed was still good, so it would seem like riding supercross isn’t going to make you slower for motocross.
Supercross obviously didn’t work out—you didn’t get to race it. Do you look back at it like it was surprisingly hard to learn, or do you just consider it one mistake that took it away from you?
Like anything, mate, it’s going to take time to learn. You look back at being a kid growing up, going from 85s to 125s, those opening years on a new bike, you have some crashes. It’s normal to crash at first because you don’t have the experience. I didn’t have the experience in supercross to say, hey, I had a little crash that day, and I was feeling pretty battered. I didn’t have the experience to know I should have called it a day, it’s not worth it to push through the pain on a practice day. If it were outdoors, where I have more experience, I could have done that, but supercross is obviously a little less forgiving.
And then the whoops, I didn’t have the experience to know what to do when things went wrong. I knew how to go through the whoops—I was getting through them pretty well when my front wheel hit the top of every whoop—but I didn’t know what to do if I missed one. I didn’t have that skill set yet. I wouldn’t say it scared me. I didn’t expect to come into supercross expecting to mix it up with the top guys. I tried to be as smart as I could. The team was well aware of the position I was in, and they said they’ve seen this with every guy they’ve seen come over and try to learn this. On the days when I was feeling good, I had no doubt of my abilities and stuff like that.
When you got back on the bike, were you worried at any point that your little brother Jett might be faster than you at first?
Actually, he broke his collarbone, ironically, the week before I got back on the bike. So that was maybe a bit of luck! But at the moment, we had a race against each other over the weekend. That’s probably the first proper race we’ve had against each other. In the morning when the track was pretty smooth, he could match me for a few laps. When the track got rougher and stuff, I was able to pull away a little bit. It’s the same thing at a national or world event: the track gets so much rougher, it makes a huge difference. You see it at the stopwatch nationals out here [during the week] when everyone is riding but the track isn’t so rough. Maybe a local guy could do a lap on a practice day within a second of the top five guys at an AMA national, but he’d be five or six seconds back on race day at a national.
So you’re finally going to go racing in the U.S. How good does that feel?
I can’t wait. Honestly, the thing I’m most excited about is finally getting to work with my new team. You have such a long off-season, you just train and train and train. I really could use something like a donut on a string hanging in front of a fat kid—I need that race, that thing to chase. I’m excited. Race weekends are always fun. Even a bad race weekend is better than just working a nine-to-five in Australia.
Okay, any expectations on how this will go?
Expectations? Well, what I want is a win, but I really don’t know how it’s going to go. So many things are different. I do feel like the lifestyle is a little easier for me over here than it was in Europe, but it’s still different. The heat, the humidity, it’s all different. I just know I’m going to give it a red-hot crack every weekend. I’m the rookie. Yeah, I want wins, but I’ve just got to be smart about it. 
