Scott Plessinger – Raiders of the Archives

Scott Plessinger was a four-time national champion with two GNCC titles (1994 and 1995) and two National Hare Scrambles titles (1989 and 1992). This photo captures him in 1994 at the Lynnville Hare Scramble in Indiana.

THE EVENT: "I pulled the holeshot and Scott Summers is getting kind of a little bath. I ended up winning the event, I can't remember who got second, I think it was Summers, and Steve Hatch got third. We had a pretty good race between me and Summers throughout the whole thing… I ended up winning that race I think four or five years. It was one of my favorite places to ride… I don't know, I had a few races that were like that. The terrain was really good. It just kind of fit my style, it wasn't real tight and it wasn't real fast, it just flowed really good and it seemed I flowed with it every time. I won it that year, I think I won it in '92, and then the following year I won it also; I think I followed Rodney Smith all the way until about 100 yards before the finish line and passed him. That was the year I ended up losing the championship to Summers. Between me and Summers we had some really good races. I think we started about the same time and kinda ended our careers about the same time. Pretty fun. Other than that the track down there was really good. I think they still have a race down there every year. No, actually that race, that year and the year after that the conditions were about perfect. I think it rained that morning before that race and it was just about perfect. It has some waterholes, like the one I'm splashing through there on the start, but other than that it was really good. It was an old mining area so you were either riding on a ride or you were riding down in the valley. It was really good terrain, kind of up and down the whole time, kind of fit me pretty well."

THE BIKE: "The bike I was riding, it was actually at 250SX that I converted over to kind of like an EXC. I never liked the wide ratio gearbox, so I always used the SX… Really not a lot. We changed the suspension, obviously, put the bigger gas tank on to basically make it like the XC. The only thing I did was put the EXC flywheel and ignition on it to kinda tame the bike down, but other than that, basically throughout all my years of racing on the KTM I didn't really do anything to the bikes. They were really close to being stock. I even liked the stock pipe. I always put an FMF silencer on it, but that thing liked the stock pipe, it worked really good."

TODAY: Today – "I run an off-road facility in Macon, Georgia (www.paradiseoffroadpark.com). I do training there and hold some events there, too. We did some motocross races last year and some hare scrambles, we have another hare scramble coming up at the end of September… For training, I have options for anything. We have camping, RV hook ups, and weekend stuff, too. I do motocross and off-road training. My son's into both, he does GNCCs and motocross and he's doing really good… I use all my knowledge from when I was racing and try to over onto the kids. And it seems like it's working pretty good. I've got a good fitness program, I use a lot of motocross skills, as far as over into the cross country stuff. I've been doing that with my son and it seems like its helped a lot because just last month he got eleventh overall at the GNCC, top amateur, running the 250A class… The terrain is really identical to the picture you see there; they mined it years ago, and it's a lot of up and downs, no real big hills or anything but it's pretty technical. We have two motocross tracks and about a nine mile loop through the woods."