Fredrik Noren | Summer Job With JGRMX

INSTAGRAM | @freddienoren

Fredrik Noren was doing a lot with a little through the first five rounds of the 2019 Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Championship. Aboard a modestly modified Honda CRF450R with support from close sponsors and friends, the speedy Swedish rider was in the mix with factory riders for spots in the top-15. Between races he, his wife Amy, and their infant daughter Jolie drove across the country to the different rounds in the diesel van with a fifth-wheel trailer in tow, with stops at predetermined practice tracks and campgrounds along the way. When Cole Seely was sidelined for the rest of the summer with a shoulder injury, many figured Noren would get the call from Team Honda HRC to ride the factory CRF450R; despite his best efforts to convince management, they passed on Noren, largely due to a lack of mandatory bikes on track from an outside title sponsor.

With that, Noren plugged along on his own. After a so-so day at High Point, Noren considered forgoing the long drive to Jacksonville for the hot and humid Florida Motocross in order to rest and recovery, but wife Amy urged him to load up the rig and go south. “At WW I was on my own all the way until the motos, when Amy held the pit board for me and Isaac Teasdale’s dad rescued me between the motos so I could recover [Laughs]. He did some bike work, so I don’t know how it would have gone if he didn’t come over,” Noren joked about the now well-known story of him doing his own bike work on race day. Shortly after the checkered flag flew, JGRMX/Yoshimura/Suzuki Factory Racing managers Jeremy Albrecht and Buddy Antunez visited Noren’s pit area with an offer to take over the factory RM-Z450 for the rest of the summer. Since the rider had a base at Club MX in nearby South Carolina, Albrecht invited Noren to spend a day at the team’s private facility in North Carolina to try their bike and told him to bring his own equipment for an accurate comparison. “I was super interested in testing the bike, so we went out on Monday and did some testing. I got really comfortable with the bike quickly and everyone on the team has been putting in work to make me feel comfortable,” shared Noren on the Friday before Southwick.

The last few years of Noren’s career have been less than ideal. After one of his prior fill-in stints with the factory team a few seasons ago, they flowed a few important items like Showa suspension and parts his way in exchange for testing feedback. But after he missed most of 2018 with assorted injuries and crashes (broken collarbone in the preseason, ligament damage in his wrist that caused the bones to move at Anaheim Two, lingering issues with the ligaments in his knees), there was little left for him to work with. Not all was lost for Noren, though, as he and Amy gave birth to their first child and ramped up their prep for the new year.

How has fatherhood impacted Noren He says all of it has been a positive element in his life, on and off the bike. “Being a dad is awesome. It changed things but it’s stayed the same in a sense,” he noted. “We’re still racing and pursuing the dream, living this amazing life, and I think a lot of it is due to having a wife that loves the sport as much or more than I do. It’s different but the same. Having a little girl around, you look at it from a different perspective. Not everything is about racing; I am fully focused on racing and will give it 100-percent, but I can disengage and see Jolie grow. It put things into a lighter perspective, things that I used to think too much about. And it’s helped me relax more in a sense too.”

Noren joined the North Carolina-based Phoenix Racing team for 2019 and contested the growing Kicker Arenacross series and select 250 East Coast rounds of the Monster Energy Supercross Series. “2018 was all injuries for me and God blessed us with a baby girl in October, so there was a lot of changes coming into 2019. Unfortunately, Phoenix Racing wasn’t able to race outdoors and I wanted to pursue that, because outdoors is something I have always loved and why I came to America to begin with,” he explained. “I wanted to race outdoors so we pursued that on our own with the help of a lot of people and sponsors, we put together a program that was competitive.”

Because the original plan was to follow the full series as a privateer in the van and fifth-wheel trailer, Noren made some alterations to his training program. With Amy’s help, they mapped out their full route for the summer, but some of those plans are now thankfully unnecessary. “I have always been a hard worker, but I took a step back. Not to say that I’m not working hard, but I am scheduling my riding a little more. I actually ride a little less during the week now,” he explained.  “I used to ride Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday and would really hammer it all out; now I ride Tuesday and Thursday, which leaves Monday and Wednesday for prep work or driving, whatever we needed to do. It’s the same with the physical training and now I train a little different this year compared to the past, and I think it has been good for me. I am planning more and Amy, she is a massive planner too, so she made us a nice schedule of what campgrounds we would stay at and when we’d be there or leave. We wanted everything to be more precise and have more quality over quantity. It’s been working really good.”

“For the California rounds, we drove out there a couple of weeks before to get settled in. As we weaved our back to the East Coast, we stopped around,” he continued. “The travel part had been a lot of driving, obviously, but as far as finding tracks and ridings, it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. I’ve always been able to ride good tracks and I think me stepping down to just two ride days a week helped me not stress out as much about how we needed to get to places. During the preseason I rode more than two days a week, but in the season, I focus more on recovery.” Now that he has a spot on JGRMX, Noren has made ClubMX his home base and will split his time there and with the team in North Carolina and will fly to the remaining rounds of the series. The close proximity of the two places will be a help too because Noren will be able to further the RM-Z450 maintained by the team and will work with Antunez on various elements of training. Their initial testing was successful because they quickly found a setting that suits his style, something they do not plan to deviate from it much unless necessary. “I got really comfortable with the bike quickly and everyone on the team has been putting in work to make me feel comfortable. I was pumped to take this fill-in ride for the summer and I think it’s going to be good,” he shared. “It didn’t take me long to get comfortable on the bike overall and then we spent quite a bit of time working on the chassis and suspension parts of it. It’s not like there was a huge amount of time, we only had two days, but with that, I feel really comfortable.”

As we all saw last weekend in Southwick, Noren has what it takes to run at the front of the pack. His 5-7 put him seventh overall on the day, which proved that a drop-off in speed didn’t come from a change in bike color. The next few weeks will be even more important, though, because the standard has been set and he’ll need to maintain a similar spot in the series. That might mean added pressure for some, but Noren is not fazed or overwhelmed by any of it. “I know the field is really stacked, but I always expected myself to be there. And nothing is going to change now, because I expect myself to be better,” he noted. “As we go along through the races, I think I will get into it even more and raise the bar for myself a little bit. I will have confidence and know that I have the best. I want to be a top-10 guy and will want to be better than that.”