Tales From The Team: Joe Bornhorst

Tales From The Team: Joe Bornhorst, from MX to RC

“As some people know, and maybe some don’t, I spent my entire childhood and teenage years racing dirt bikes with my family. It got introduced to me at a very young age from my father, who also raced his entire life, and I took my first gate at the age of 4. Week in and week out, my family and I would load up and head to races all across Ohio.

I grew up with a track 5 minutes from my house and basically spent my entire childhood there. From weekday practice nights to weekend races, basically all that I wanted to do was ride. It all started out as fun and harmless but just like anything else I started to push my limits trying to go faster. I got away with it for most of my childhood but then at around the age of 10, injuries started to play a factor. There’s a couple sayings in motocross, “It’s not if you’re going to crash, it’s when” and “The faster you go, the harder you hit.” I never really understood those sayings too much until I was living them sitting in the hospital with broken bones and in pain. It began with a broken wrist, then a broken leg, and continued to get worse from there. The latest one that ended my motocross racing at the age of 17 was breaking my left leg/ankle that still bothers me to this day. Over 20 surgeries and approximately 17 broken bones later, I was introduced to the world of RC racing.

When I first started attending the big races and got to see the big names run, I told myself that I was going to someday be one of them. I took all of the motocross background and racing knowledge and applied it to RC cars. Whether it was line selection, car control, reading the dirt, or even just watching video, I did everything I could to progress my driving as fast as possible. I tried to approach things from a good perspective and make the right decisions every step of the way. With the right people surrounding me, a lot of hard work done and money spent, I seemed to climb the ladder pretty quickly. I went from doing it privateer style to getting my first sponsorships in 2013, to now having a factory deal and racing for a living. It all became worth it when I started making the mains at the highest level. To me, the feeling that I get up on the drivers stand surrounded by the world’s best drivers is what it must be like sitting on the gate at a Supercross. You can’t buy that feeling, you have to earn it. And that’s what motivates me to keep coming back.

Obviously with having a dream of one day being a professional motocross racer to then getting it all taken away with an injury was hard. But the words that I now live by are “When one door closes, another one opens”. The moral to all of this is even if you get a curve ball thrown at you, keep your goals in sight and do everything in your power to make them happen in one way or another. Being a professional RC racer definitely isn’t exactly what I thought I would be doing when I was a kid, but one thing is for sure, I wouldn’t change one bit of my road to get here.”

-Joe Bornhorst