Team Arctic Race Manager Mike Kloety has been with the race department at Arctic Cat since 1994.
Editor’s note: The last of our interviews with the OEM Race Managers, we sit down with Mike Kloety from Arctic Cat.
If you catch Mike Kloety at a cross-country race he’ll most likely have a stopwatch in his hand, timing the laps his racers are running. It’s indicative of everything Kloety does – methodical and well-thought out with solid results. He watches over Team Arctic like a mother hen, handling the program with his calm, even-handed demeanor. Kloety took over the program from interim Race Manager Russ Ebert in 2008. It was a race program that had run on some rocky times when it lost Blair Morgan to Ski-Doo in 2001, Tucker Hibbert to motocross in 2003, fielded problematic race sleds in 2002-2003 and had some internal management problems with the program. Now entering his third year as Team Arctic Race Manger, Kloety has helped steer the program back to succes, leading it to one of its most successful seasons ever last year. On the brink of the 2010-2011 season, we sat down with Kloety to talk about winning two 500s, track failures and what the one thing about Team Arctic is he wouldn’t trade for anything.
sledRacer.com: What’s new in the race shop for 2011?
Mike Kloety: Right now it is really clean and getting ready for the new race sled that is going to be showing up here any day. Once the race season starts the shop stays pretty calm as long as things go as planned and there are no major issues to work on with the race sleds. The one exception is the few days before the Red Lake I-500 here in Thief River Falls, then it gets pretty busy.
Ryan Simons serves double duty for Team Arctic, racing both snocross and cross-country.
sR: What will the focus be this year?
Kloety: Arctic Cat plans to focus on the same race venues we have been, but there are a few areas in the country where we are going to try improve racer numbers and there are some particular classes that we would like to have better numbers in. But overall, I have said before if we can keep all the racers we had last year racing again this year we will be just fine.
sR: Arctic Cat had one of its best race seasons ever last year.
Kloety: Arctic Cat had a very good year racing last year and we see no reason not to expect another very good season this year. We are lucky to have many talented and dedicated people surrounding the race program all the way from the people building and engineering the sleds to the teams and racers competing with them. I have been doing this for more than 16 years now so I have learned to not get too high on the wins or too low on the losses and as long as Arctic Cat and I don’t ever settle for losing I am good to go.
sR: Cat won the Soo for the first time ever last season. How did that come about?
Kloety: The Soo I-500 – what a race that was. Greg Cadarette, the team owner, kept in touch by cell phone because I was in New York at the snocross race and couldn’t be there. Originally he had contacted me because he really wanted to win that race on a Cat. We didn’t have much to offer them as a group so little by little we pieced together what turned out to be the winning race effort. That race is one where experience is very important and Cadarette Racing for sure had that since they’d won the race before, so add a very adaptable race sled and good motor package and the experienced team and driver and you make it to the checkered flag. It was great for all of us, but what a good deal it was for all the Arctic Cat fans that have been keeping up with that event for so long. It was overdue for sure.
Dan Ebert drinks some victory Smart Water after his win in the Red Lake I-500.
sR: Cat won the Red Lake I-500 for the first time in 10 years, too. What does that race mean to Team Arctic and to Arctic Cat?
Kloety: The 500-mile cross-country race I hope is very special not just to Arctic Cat but to all snowmobile race enthusiasts as we can all relate to this type of riding/racing. Over the last few years we have done very well at this event as a team but hadn’t broke through with the big Pro 600 class win. We were looking at a really good finish until we had some of our top riders start having track trouble.
sR: You won the 500, but it was somewhat of a disaster with all the track failures. How does the race shop respond when it runs into a widespread issue like those tracks? Does engineering take over? What the process of sorting things out?
Kloety: When you have things go bad with one part you can overlook it, but not when you have multiple issues of the same part. With something like the tracks at the 500, you need to dig in deeper and we did get engineering and our supplier involved. They go through a process of diagnosing pieces of the bad tracks and try come up with a cause. I wish I could tell you what that cause was but it wasn’t a single factor that caused the trouble. It was most likely a series of things led up to the failures. We like this track because it works good we have not seen any issues after that race or in any of our other production models and our cross-country race sleds will be built with that track again this year.
sR: One thing I think makes Arctic Cat so dangerous is it never has the big budgets of some of the other manufacturers. What is the mentality regarding that in the race shop?
Zach Pattyn was once a Junior racer on Team Arctic, he now races Pro.
Kloety: I would say there is some extra satisfaction when you feel you accomplish more with less. Would it be nice to know we are all playing the game with the same number of cards? Yes, but I would NOT trade the group of people we have playing with us for their money ever!
sR: Even with tight budgets Arctic Cat still seems to spread its efforts around really well as evidenced by the Soo win, Red Lake I-500 win and the Winter X Games gold, not to mention grass drags, ovals and hillclimb.
Kloety: I like to tell people that we need to grow the participation numbers in racing again to get back to where we once were. There are times when one venue grows at another’s expense but I don’t think eliminating any one venue from our program is good for the sport.
sR: Back to budgets, it seems Arctic Cat’s success is tied more to the people involved than to a race budget.
Kloety: We spend many hours making hard decisions about racing and race programs and again we are blessed with dedicated people that are addicted to the racing drug and stick with us when the grass may seem greener elsewhere. I like to think that our people and our products and the dedication to Arctic Cat’s racing heritage is why we have such a great foundation to our race program and its fans.
sR: At the USCC banquet, Brian Dick got all choked up when he gave a speech about the value of cross-country racing and how much he appreciates your support. How does that make you feel?
Brian Dick won the USCC Pro 600 points taking three race wins in the process.
Kloety: The USCC banquet last year went really well for the Green Team. We had a lot of success in the year-end points so it added to the fun for all of us. But I think what you saw in Brian’s speech was 3-4 years of his life dedicated to the success of this race sled chassis come to its high point to date and his success on the track just added to the emotion. Brian is the perfect example of the dedicated people we have that I keep mentioning. When I see this in any of our racers and or teams it makes me really proud and I’m honored to be a part of it.
sR: Dovetailing on that, what is the best part of your job? The worst?
Kloety: One of the best parts of this job is watching race plans come together and seeing families spend many of their winter weekends racing together enjoying this sport that we all love. I have seen some very big smiles from racers while standing at the podium and when I get to shake their hands it makes a lot of the hard decisions worthwhile. As for the worst part, for sure the worst part of the job is making the hard decisions on where the race budget gets allocated. I have been working with a lot of these racers for many years now and when we started together our goal was to keep adding support as they kept climbing the racing ladder. But as the economy struggled racing budgets where trimmed back accordingly and this made things difficult.
sR: What advice would you give a young rider, say a kid who wants to get into racing and get that “factory” sponsorship deal?
Kloety: For the racer that is looking to take their racing to the next level I would say get out there and make sure people know who you are. Get your name going across the right peoples desk every Monday morning with race results both good and bad and when an opportunity opens up be ready to take advantage of it. One thing I worry about is, have we made racing hard to get into for many would-be up-and-comers with special-built sleds that are not always available at the dealers, race applications, hired mechanics and 53-foot NASCAR type trucks and trailers?
Tucker Hibbert is going for the points on the ISOC National circuit this season.
sR: Tucker Hibbert decided to race a full season this year. What are your thoughts on that?
Kloety: Tucker racing a full season…first off I think is very good for the sport of snowmobiling. He brings an excitement and professionalism to the sport like no one else does. I would suspect that there are some racers that are not so excited to have to compete against him for the whole season but I am sure the fans will be treated to some very exciting racing.
sR: Have you set any goals for 2011? How do you top last season?
Kloety: To set goals in racing is not something that I dwell on. For sure there are things I would like to see happen and an improved effort in the East Coast Snocross circuit is high on our list. We have taken some steps to improve our numbers out there and we are looking forward to seeing that come to life. Having said that, I guess I do have one goal. I want all our racers running the new sleds to finish the 500 mile cross-country race with out any mechanical DNFs. It’s not going to be easy to top last year’s race results but if I would see some new names hit the podium along with those that have been there before I will be happy.
