Monster Energy Kawasaki’s Ryan Villopoto has now won five AMA Supercross races this season, but he still has 17 points to make up on the points leader if he’s going to win the championship. And he only has seven rounds to do it in.

On one hand, you have to be pretty stoked to win another race, but on the other hand, you have a lot of points to make up, and it probably stinks that your title rival keeps finishing right behind you, huh?
Ryan Villopoto: Yeah, I mean, it would definitely make it nicer if he’d finish third, fourth or fifth, but uh...

Or like 19th like you did...
Yeah, exactly. But I think he can finish there every weekend and I’ll keep winning and I’ll end up winning the championship. So I guess if it has to go that way, then it will, but we’ve both made mistakes this year, and I made a pretty big one at Atlanta and put myself in the position I’m in now, so I’ve got to do some work to catch back up. I was at 23 points after Atlanta, and now it’s 17, so it’s definitely looking up. The whole team’s working hard, the bike setup is working really good right now. We did some good testing in the off-season which has put us in a good position now.

When you’re on the line now, do you have the same kind of confidence you used to have in the Lites class, where you expect to win?
Sitting on the line, actually, tonight, I was really nervous. I had a little bit of watering of the mouth when I was on the line, and it just comes and goes sometimes like that. Sometimes I’m perfectly calm, and other times, like tonight, I’m pretty nervous. I know that I’m a guy that can win races, and for me, I just have to give myself that chance.

On the podium, you talked about Trey Canard riding a wide bike. He was trying real hard to race with you guys, and he’s not in the championship hunt, so is that frustrating to deal with?
It’s happened to me in the past where it works in my rival’s advantage in that situation, and it worked for me tonight in that situation, where I was able to get a little bit of a gap. As far as times go, though, once he got into second, I think I had some tenths [of a second] on him, or a half of a second, for a couple laps here and there, so I was able to pull a gap.

For a while, but it looked like toward the end he started gaining on you again. Was it because of lappers?
The lappers were really bad, and then Davi [Millsaps] actually went down over there, and I actually had to roll the finish line one lap, so from lap 15 on, there were lappers in the way, and I couldn’t do some of my rhythms that I was doing, and I’m assuming that he had that same problem. It definitely makes it tough once you get into lappers. I think there was one guy out there who I lapped twice. Lappers are there every weekend, though...

Well, this weekend there wasn’t anybody eliminated in qualifying, though...
No, there wasn’t, but there was still the same amount of guys out there as when they are eliminated, so that made it tough, and it makes every weekend tough when you’re leading the race.

You’ve got Dallas coming up, so does that help you or hurt you?
Dallas is normally pretty hard-packed, but it’s a new stadium, so I don’t know if they have new dirt or not. The old stadium had a hole in the roof, so part of the track would get baked in the sun, and the other part wouldn’t, so part would get really hard-packed, and the other part wouldn’t, but I don’t know how the stadium is now. But I don’t think I’m in any better position than he is going there and knowing the dirt and stuff.

What about the eventual return of the defending champion and your teammate Chad Reed? What will that do to things?
It’s definitely going to throw a wrench in the program when they come back, and I think it can work in my favor or it can work against me. We’ll see when they come back. I haven’t heard much about James, but I know Chad’s injury was pretty quick and there’s talk about him racing next weekend, but I don’t know if that’s for sure.