Big Season for Baker Getting Back on Track

Dryad’s most accomplished racer suffered a minor setback, but plans to be back in action soon to wrap up an impressive year of work.

Brad Baker, 22 and the 2013 AMA Pro Flat Track Expert Grand National Champion, plans to be back on his Factory Harley-Davidson XR750 on Saturday at the Calistoga Half-Mile in California for the penultimate race in the AMA Pro Flat Track series.

“Things are healing really well, and everything’s looking really good,” he said. “I’m trying to get this into good shape as quick as possible.”

Baker was 13 points out of the series lead and racing in Rapid City, S.D., at the Black Hills Half-Mile when a baseball-sized rock jumped off the dirt — as he was riding out a straight stretch at close to 100 mph — and broke his tibia.

“When you’ve broken a bone, you know what the feeling’s like,” he said. “Just right to your shin, and I’ve never had much protection in that area. Just hitting it in the worst possible spot.”

A few missed races, however, can’t spoil the season for the third-youngest Grand National champ, who posted a win on July 11 at the Indy Mile event in Indianapolis.

Chief among those was competing in ESPN’s X Games. Baker rode in the first-ever Harley-Davidson Flat-Track Racing competition in Austin, Texas, helping kick off the event on June 4. He was one of 24 riders invited and finished third.

“It was a big deal, live on ESPN, and it was a really cool deal for me, since Harley-Davidson was one of the main sponsors for the X Games,” he said. “And me being the factory Harley rider, I got to do a lot of the press conferences and was kind of the poster child for flat track racing at the X Games.”

After Calistoga this weekend, he’ll be on a two-month break until the Grand National season finale on Nov. 20 at the Orleans Hotel and Event Center in Las Vegas.

The day after the AMA finale, he’ll be racing in the Superprestigio of the Americas, also in Vegas, which features riders from every discipline of racing the continent has to offer.

“Supercross, motocross, road racing, speedway trials — every discipline they can think of, to get the top riders to come compete,” Baker said. “There’ll be quite a few gunslingers there, but it’s kind of a cool organized event.”

In December, he’ll head to Barcelona for the Superprestigio of Spain, a similar event he’s competed in a handful of times.

Baker is in the second year of his two-year deal with Factory Harley-Davidson, and has a sponsorship deal with Monster Energy Drink, along with a laundry list of racing-related sponsorship — all of which he’s thankful to work with.

“A lot of cool things have happened this year,” he said. “And there’s a lot of cool ones still to look forward to and be proud of.”