Fifth at round one of the 2010 Monster Energy Supercross Series at Anaheim, second at Phoenix and seventh at Anaheim II, Ryan Villopoto has experienced a bit of inconsistency thus far in the new season. However, on Saturday night in San Francisco, the multifold 250 champion won his first 450 main of the new year and put himself smack in the middle of the championship tile fight. He’s what he had to say about it all.

Ryan, you’ve experienced some ups and downs thus far in 2010, but things certainly went well for you in San Francisco…
The first race is always the same, just with nerves and stuff, but yeah, I should’ve been up there. Phoenix was pretty good, and I rode good there, but the track was tough to make a lot of time up, so I couldn’t do anything with [Ryan] Dungey’s lead there. I stuck with him for the first 10 laps or so, but after that he pulled a decent gap. At Anaheim II, I had another bad start, and once again the track was hard to pass on and I didn’t do what I needed to do with passing and got hung up. But in San Fran... I mean, Chad [Reed] is out, and obviously hearing that James [Stewart] is out, I think every one of us – not just me – thought about it like it was Anaheim I all over again. We’ve all got a fire under our ass and everybody’s ready to go.

Once you got into second, you started to eat away at Dungey’s lead. Could you have caught him if he would not have crashed?

I haven’t looked at lap sheets, but I heard that at one point I made up like eight tenths of a second in one lap, but yeah, he had nine seconds on me by the time I got into second, so I need to make my passes quicker so that doesn’t happen next time. The track was tough. It didn’t have very big whoops, and it was kind of a tight track, and it was really slippery, so it was hard to go really fast on.

You and Josh Hill battled hard for second for a while…
I know we went back and forth pretty hard.

Once you were in second, did you hear the crowd when Dungey went down?

I actually saw it out of the corner of my eye in that left-hander [on the third-base side] where Davi [Millsaps] fell. I was going through there and I saw him let go of his bike, so once I saw that, I thought, “Okay, well, I’m either going to get up there and be right on him or I’m going to pass him right away.” That was basically it from there.

You’ve been close to Dungey as far as lap times are concerned, but he’s been getting much better starts…

Yeah, well, I’ve struggled with practice pretty bad. I haven’t even made it on the board sometimes. This weekend, though, I think he beat me by like 1/100th of a second, or Hill did. One of them. I don’t remember which of them it was. But I was pretty close in practice, and I felt good, so I knew the race should be good. But with bad practice times, you get bad gate picks, and with bad gate picks, you get bad starts.

With Chad Reed out and you winning on Saturday night, it must have meant a lot to you and the team…
It means a lot. They work just as hard as I do, so it feels good for all of us. We’re all out here working hard, and we all have the same goals.

Have you been able to speak with Chad Reed at all?

No, I haven’t talked to him, but I know he texted Fish [Mike Fisher, team manager] though and was happy about it.

How do you see the rest of the season playing out with Stewart and Reed out?

I don’t know, we’ll see! The goal for me is to make up 13 points...