If you haven’t listened to Steve Matthes’ interview with Joe Gibb’s Racing’s Jeremy Albrecht yet, here are some quotes to entice you:

“The main thing with [Charles] Summey is I feel he gives me 100 percent every time.”

“The hard thing is, you can’t get results without confidence and you can’t get confident without going out and proving yourself. You almost have to get lucky one race. He’s [Josh Hansen] way better than what he’s doing, that’s the part that’s really frustrating.”

“When I first talked to Joe [Gibbs], he asked me, ‘How do we win?’ and I said, the main thing is you pay the most money. But you can’t just pay the most money and not have a good team [to back it up]. So the first thing we need to do is lay down a good platform.”

“I actually got to go to the NASCAR facility before I signed and when you look at it, you realize, yes of course, if I can’t do it with this, I can’t do it anywhere. I mean it’s really impressive. To me, it’s more impressive to walk into their NASCAR shop than to go to any manufacturer that I’ve been to.”

“I feel really good about the team itself and it will get better over time.”

“The first thing they said was, ‘How much money does the team make?’ and I said, ‘Nothing. What do you mean?’ Because in car racing, 45 percent goes to the team, some of it goes to the driver, it all gets spread out. In our deal, everything goes to the rider.”

“The sport has changed a lot since they made these [privateer] rules but right now, the way the rules are written, if you get paid by a factory then you are a factory rider. Well, we pay our guys out of our own money and we buy our stuff from Yamaha so they truly are privateers by the rules. Now, there is no one else who can buy factory suspension, we’re the first team that’s been able to do that, so I think that the sport needs to change with the times. In my mind, of course they are not privateers, a privateer is a guy that buys his own bikes and drives himself to the race but honestly who does that in our sport anyways?”

“That’s one thing that we did do on our team—we are taking money from the rider, a little bit, and we’re spreading it out through the team so everyone gets a part of it. I wanted to do that to try to make sure that there’s no jealousy on the team and that everyone kind of gets a fair piece of it and everyone works on the team together. We did it that way; that’s how they do it in NASCAR and that’s one cool thing that Coy [Gibbs] came up with that I really like.”

“Even though you want [to hire] a guy, it doesn’t mean that you are going to get that guy because everyone … I mean we all want the same guys, every manufacturer, every team, so you have to give them what they are looking for and I feel like we have a good shot at it, we’ll see what happens. You can’t guarantee anything in this sport, just because you have the best guy, doesn’t mean that you’re going to win. That’s what I’ve also noticed.”

“If you wanted to do it by texting and you could hear the button push on your deal here, it would probably be all right [laughs].” [Regarding getting James Stewart on the show.]

“I’m Canadian, and so it’s never really that cold. You guys want cold, I’ll show you cold.” [Matthes on wearing shorts to the Minneapolis Supercross.]

“Yeah, the internet makes a big difference because if you go do something now, it’s on the internet right when you do it so that makes it a little tougher to go out and kind of let your hair down I guess.” [Regarding the changing atmosphere between now and the Emig/McGrath years.]

“Ricky [Carmichael] took it to a whole new level. He took the training thing and really made the guys work seven days a week now; it used to be like a part-time job. He made it so you’ve got to be in really good shape, ride, I mean you’ve got to do everything; you’ve got to be on your game. Ricky really stepped it up for everybody.”

“Don’t worry about what they wrote, prove them wrong.”

Favourite races:

“One that sticks out in my mind was when I worked for Emig and he beat McGrath both motos because he had to—to win the championship.” [Steel City, 1996]  

“When I was with Stewart, when we raced in Canada, and he beat Ricky, that was really awesome because, obviously that was the first race on the 450 and he won really easily, to me, he looked really comfortable.” [Toronto, December, 2005]

“Yeah, he was really fast and every time he went through the whoops, my heart would drop because he was swapping every time but just holding it wide open. And I’m thinking, why doesn’t he just he just slow down? But in his brain, back then, he wanted to win so bad that he just went as fast as he could every time he got on the bike.” [James Stewart at Orlando, 2005]

Click here to listen to the entire interview and to subscribe to Matthes' Somewhat Live and Uncensored via iTunes.