After sounding a bit more confident he may return to racing last week, Ken Roczen still seems to be on the fence and is dreading making his final decision – and he knows his Suzuki team are waiting on the decision too!
Roczen essentially has tonight’s race and then it will be decision time and he admits it’s the question he is dreading. Ken responded with this answer when Johnny Hopper asked in pre-race conference:
“I don’t know. You know, ultimately it’s just over the last few years, I retirement has been lingering in my head for a long time, but sometimes you have these flute thoughts, you know, because it has been tough.
“Like I’ve been down on myself and just not feeling well, and it seems like at that point it seemed a lot more real, and then every time you’re like, no, let’s, you know, let’s keep going another year, and another year, and another year, and I’ve done that already like multiple years, maybe without like talking about it. So that’s probably why everything kind of comes a little bit to a shock to you guys, maybe. But then, you know, I’ve put my heart and soul into this year, and when I topped that off, and it was simply because, and I’ve told that story before, within the last year or two, I told my wife, because I didn’t have the championship at that point, and I’m like, I was thinking and looking up in the sky, and I’m like, man, if I could somehow get a championship again, never mind even the Supercross Championship, because that’s the one that I haven’t had at all, and the feeling that it gave me right then and there, because it seemed far away, kind of like highly unlikely, it hasn’t happened so far, and I’ve been far away from it.
“So I’m like, man, if I could wake up tomorrow, and you know, this was all said and done, and I’d have the championship, it gave me a feeling where I’m like, man, I would be done. Like, this is what I’ve worked for for a long time, and if for whatever reason this is gonna happen, then I’d probably be done. And I didn’t have the championship at that point, so that feeling felt real to me, you know, now I do, and it was a massive, just rock, massive weight off of my shoulders.
“And a lot of people would say like, hey, coming back next year, you have no, no pressure, no this, no that, but I’m not that kind of rider, because I just, if I would show up next year, I would pretend like I don’t have a championship, and you just, it’s either full bore or not at all. And I don’t like the idea of, you know, do a couple races here, a couple races there. I’m like, no, I would prep myself for that one race or two race just as much, because I don’t want to suck, just as much as I would for the entire season.
“So it’s either like, I’m gonna go the whole way, or I’m not gonna go at all, and that’s kind of like where I’m at, and you know, I wanted to start racing these three races before I make any kind of decision, and to be quite honest, I’m just living day-to-day at the moment, I said it last week too, I kind of just want to keep doing what I’m doing. Because I got a bit of commitment issues, because it is, you know, once you commit to it, you’re in it for months and months and months on end, it’s not just a weekend or two, or a couple races or whatever, you are in it, and I just want to make sure that I have my mind fully made up. And I don’t know what has to happen for me to do that, to be honest, so for right now, I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing, and I know that question is real, because the team has to plan, you know, I kind of got to have a plan, and I’ve just been kind of dreading that question.”
We will all just have to keep our fingers crossed that we see the big number one on the HEP Suzuki next year!
