A number of people have asked how I ended up getting a wild card ride in the Asia Road Racing Championship series. It is kind of cool how it happened, and a nice surprise when they replied.
After the last CSBK round my dad was checking out some websites on Australian races and found something that caught his eye. Some Google searching brought him to the Asia Road Racing website. We watched some of the Asia Dream Cup race videos. Being a CBR250 class, I thought it looked fun. The battles they had were very close, with six to ten bikes in the lead group. Dad asked me what I thought about racing with them and then sent an email asking about wildcard entries along with a summary of my 2012 race season.
A few weeks went by without a reply and we forgot about it, not thinking very much would happen. The Red Bull Rookies tryout was coming closer and we had planned for it. The Thursday before our flight to Spain dad woke me up earlier for school to tell me we had received an email back from ARRC. Honda Japan had reviewed the email we sent and granted me a wildcard entry for the final round in Qatar. I was really surprised and excited, so I forgave dad for waking me up an hour before my alarm!
The problem now was what to do. My parents had already planned for the Rookies tryout, but my dad felt we could not say no to an invitation from Honda Japan. Somehow we had to make it all happen. We posted the news on our website and Facebook pages and the fundraising started. The biggest thing that kicked it off was all the media guys that had raced the Honda CBR250R cup with me this year. David Booth sent them all an email asking them to support me. They even ended up making it a little competition amongst themselves. It was really great that they did and it helped us out a lot. Thank you guys for your support. So far, 56 people, families or groups have helped out and we are at 91%. For more information and to donate to our cause, you can go to www.statoniracing.com. We’re almost there – help us reach our goal!
My dad got the visas last week and says all the other stuff is in place. Now we need to try to fit everything into two hand luggage cases as we fly out today! We also got a nice surprise this week on some help we will have at the race, but that can wait for the next update…
– Stacey