One Man Crew: Justin Starling on Running His Own Program

A lot has happened in the life of Justin Starling since we last saw him at the Salt Lake City Supercross. If you follow him on social media you’ll know all about his off-season racing including the World Supercross Championship in Wales and the Paris Bercy Supercross. However those races came with very limited time on the bike as we’ll dive into in a minute. The main point of this article is to produce hype for the 2022 450SX top privateer.

Since May, Starling has moved into a new house, got a call from a few teams for WSX, took the Pipes Motorsports WSX ride, was supposed to fly out and test the bike, but Hurricane Ian hit, went to Wales, tore a ligament in his thumb, raced Bercy, got engaged, and now he’s ready to take on another year of SX racing on his own program once again. 

Heading into the second year of the FXR/General Grind & Machine/JSR Motorsports program, Starling learned a lot from 2022. One of his biggest goals for this new season was to stay off the road as much as possible after driving all 17 rounds by himself last year. 

“I would rather lose money than stay on the road again,” Starling admitted. “If you look at it in a sense from A1 to Salt Lake, I rode a total of two hours during the week in total. So, if you add that in there, I drove every mile except for 417 of them.”

Starling was doing his own bike work at the races as well. He would hire a mechanic for as many races as he could, just to get some help along the way. 

In all, the season paid off tremendously. He finished 15th in points, received top privateer honors, and finished a career best ninth in the main event at Salt Lake City. From the outside looking in you would think that Starling would be over the moon with how his year went, but he wants more. Way more. 

“I think the results were okay, but I don’t think they were unreal,” Starling said. “The ninth was good because if you look at my times and how close I was to Justin Brayton (in eighth) I was only seven seconds from him at the finish. That’s good, but I only did it once. That’s something I’d like to do more often than not.”

For 2023, Starling enlisted the help of his fiance Nicole Nahas to take over team manager duties and he hired Justin Meyerson to be his mechanic. This will take a lot of the pressure off of his shoulders as he looks to focus more on his riding this season and less on driving and the other stress that comes with running a program of his caliber. 

“I’m still striving for more and that’s a good thing.” Starling said as he looked into the future. “I think if I were sitting here content with the year or super happy with it, it wouldn’t make 2023 better. I think I have a lot more in the tank, which is good.”

Starling will turn 30 this March and he says that he feels like he’s only getting better. He said that he can break down a track a lot easier now than he could when he was younger to find the good lines. He also said that he still feels young and not 29, which ten years ago 30 was considered too old for the sport. Now it’s the new normal.

Starling did tell me that he received some offers from some teams for 2023, but turned them all down. He wants to be in control with the way things are run, he wants to choose what parts to use and make the decisions on his own team.

“If I have a bad week then no one’s yelling at me, it’s just you had a bad week and you move on,” Starling said. “ I’m not getting the cold shoulder or not getting talked to by team managers. At 30 years old I don’t want to be treated like that.“

So, kids reading this column, you can have some serious success as a 450SX athlete out of a van and driving the country on your own. You don’t need to have a factory bike to compete. You just need to be organized and fast. It’s the best of both worlds. Also, it qualifies you to be an ELITE athlete in the now infamous Troy Dog Squad. Starling said that the Squad is a big part of his success because it keeps things fun. We bring the good vibes and the fun factor. 

“It’s a small program, but that doesn’t matter what you pit out of at the track,” Starling said. “As long as you can get the results, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, it’s up to you.”

Written by Troy Dog

Faster than Slaw Dog. Editor-in-Chief

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