“Yeah, Hunter is fine,” offered O’Mara. “Hunter is an intense individual. You just give him his space. Give him 24 hours and he just moves on. That’s literally how we look at it. I give him his space. He flew home right away. Not sulking, but it just hurts a little bit. When you want to win that bad, you expect that to hurt. If you didn’t see it hurt, then you’d be disappointed in the person, because they lay everything on the line. I’d be the same way. Some of the greatest people that I’ve worked with, champions, business people, people all over, if they don’t get their way, they’re not too happy. They move on, though. As they say, you fail way more than you succeed. Hunter has had plenty of that. Jett has had plenty of that when he was young. Jett is going through it a little bit now. He had a couple of injuries, but he comes back. Last year he won. I don’t see Jett missing any beats on this. I think he is going to be competitive right off the bat. I think we’ll see that this weekend.”
O’Mara, who competed for Team Honda from 1980 through 1986, firmly believes, also, in the Honda HRC Progressive race team. Using some of his old connections, he has tried to help the program from the inside, connecting Japan to the American team like it was in his previous era.
“It’s a good as you can imagine,” said O’Mara, who won the 1984 AMA Supercross Championship for Team Honda. “Everyone kind of knows my history with the Honda racing team back when we built it super-strong in the 1980s. That was a long time ago, but that’s how we tried to replicate it for Jett and Hunter. So, I was part of that and the Honda guys gave me full range to help with putting people in place. We’ve got Japan way more involved now. It’s built perfectly for both boys to succeed.”
Now comes the opener at Fox Raceway at Pala in Southern California. How are they looking at it all?
“It’s just the start of another motocross series for us. We don’t really look at it any other way. You would think there are some big talks about it. There’s not. In our camp, you can only control what’s in front of us. That’s just being prepared. You guys all know how my work ethic is and how we go about business. That translates to the boys, and I’ve been around them long enough that we all kind of know what we’re doing. We don’t get wrapped up in anything other than making sure we are as prepared as possible when we go on the start line.”