Motoring
More Than Equal: Shayna Texter
The story folks like to tell about flat-track racer Shayna Texter is as timely as it is predictable: She’s the girl who beats the boys. The real story is considerably more interesting than that.
All the motorcycle racers know they have to get a good start. The flat, half-mile dirt track at the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth will be difficult to pass on. So establishing the best possible position off the line is crucial.
Which is why, when the orange bike marked number 52 twitches faintly on the front row at the yellow light, then stalls for the blink of an eye when the light turns green, it’s enough to lose the race. The bike fishtails off the line, but a swarm of nine or 10 hungry racers has already jumped ahead.
But then 52 starts to move. Later, someone will say it was as if the racer was possessed. The bike carrying the smallest rider on the track slices through the pack, diving into spaces that shift open and then disappear in split seconds. Tenth place. Fifth place. Third place. It’s happening so fast the announcers are only now catching on. Their voices squeak with excitement over the buzz of 17 motorcycles, which sounds like the hum of a thousand angry hornets.
Check out a new episode of Change of Pace featuring Shayna Texter.
15 min
Shayna Texter
Meet motorcycle racer Shayna Texter and find out how she’s taking on the big boys of AMA Pro Racing.
The racers swing wildly into turn three, straining against the g-forces that threaten to pull them into the wall, left feet out, steel soles of their boots sliding across the greasy dirt, heating with friction. But racer 52 swings just a little tighter. For a few breaths, 52 is side by side with the second-place rider, so close they could be touching. But then the orange motorcycle slides ahead.
The racer gets low over the handlebar like a cat getting ready to pounce. She makes the final pass to take the lead. The young men on motorcycles behind her hover for the next six laps — stalking, at times inching their front wheels into her periphery, but she dangles out of reach. The top three cross the finish line together, but 52 crosses it first. She stands up on her motorcycle, all of 5 feet tall, and pumps her fist. Shayna Texter has won — again.
Texter became the first woman to ever win a flat-track main event in 2011.
© Laura Barisonzi
It’s a good story: Shayna Texter is the girl who beats the boys. It’s the one the 28-year-old is accustomed to being told about her, at least. Texter has been called that, and “the face of American flat track,” a gritty discipline of motorcycle racing where riders rage around dirt ovals ranging from a quarter mile to a mile long, powersliding into corners and banging bar ends as they jockey for position. On bikes with rear brakes only, they hit speeds of 120 to 140 mph in the straightaways, up to 90 mph in the curves. Course conditions vary from venue to venue, day to day, even lap to lap. Crashes are common.
After languishing in obscurity for decades, American flat track (AFT) is enjoying a resurgence thanks to a major rebranding effort in 2017, a new broadcast deal with NBCSN and livestreaming that’s attracting a younger and more global audience. It’s still mostly overshadowed and outsponsored by flashier motorcycle disciplines like Supercross. But even in this niche sport, Texter has garnered mainstream renown for being not only one of two female racers on the professional circuit but one of the most winning, period.
In 2017, Texter won five races. In 2018, she won three times. Both years, she came in third in her series. She’s known for her prowess on longer mile and half-mile courses, where many say her small size enables her to tuck and get more aerodynamic on the straightaways, and her light weight allows the bike to accelerate quicker.
That theory annoys Shayna and those close to her, who instead credit her finesse, aggressive racing style and determination — which allow her to make seemingly impossible passes like she did to win the Texas Half Mile in Fort Worth earlier this year. In any case, she’s won more races than any other rider in her class.
Texter races a 450cc bike for the Red Bull KTM squad.
© Laura Barisonzi
And the fans love her for it. Though the AFT Singles class, where Texter pilots a single-cylinder, 450cc motorcycle for the Red Bull KTM Factory Team, has traditionally been seen as a stepping stone to the top-tier Twins class, where riders race more powerful 750cc bikes, AFT CEO Michael Lock says that “during meet-and-greets at the races, the longest line by a mile is the one outside the KTM tent for Shayna.” Outlets like the New York Times, ESPNw, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal have covered her as an entry point to the sport.
And though many of these articles say that Texter is inspiring a new generation of young girls to ride motorcycles, most of the fans at Shayna’s meet-and-greets represent AFT’s traditional demographic: boomer-generation men, often muscled and tattooed and tough-looking. They come week after week and stand in line, awaiting their chance to tell the 5-foot-tall, 95-pound, baby-faced Shayna Texter just how badass she is.
Texter has spent a lifetime fixing her own bikes.
© Laura Barisonzi
Here’s how you raise a girl who is never intimidated to race against the guys: You treat her the same as her older brother, and you never tell her there’s anything she can’t do because she’s a girl.
Shayna likes to say that turning left on dirt is in her blood. Her father, Randy Texter, was a professional flat-track racer; her maternal grandfather, Glenn Fitzcharles, is in the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame. Her older brother, Cory Texter, 31, also races AFT, and at this writing her boyfriend, Briar Bauman, 24, leads the Twins series in points.
Randy and Shayna’s mom, Kim Mitch, separated when Shayna was 1, and Shayna and Cory enjoyed two happy childhoods. When Shayna was with the Mitch family in Limerick, Pennsylvania, she played soccer and went hunting with her uncles. When she was an hour away at her dad’s Harley-Davidson shop in Lancaster, in the heart of Amish country, she and Cory banged around on golf carts and stirred up dust clouds in the parking lot on their mini bikes.
Shayna learned to ride motorcycles when she was only 3, and started racing at age 12. In 10th grade, she started online schooling to focus on racing.
Texter learned to ride a motorcycle at the age of 3.
© Courtesy of Shayna Texter
Shayna never went to her prom or her high school graduation. Instead, she was at the races with her brother, her dad and all their best friends in the tight-knit, family-oriented flat-track community. These were good times for Shayna and Cory. The shop was their main sponsor, and Randy was their mechanic. Anytime they needed something, they just grabbed it off a shelf and plopped the price tag on their dad’s desk.
Randy Texter died suddenly on August 30, 2010, at the age of 48. He had battled cancer and heart complications for years and had been awaiting a heart and lung transplant in the hospital when he suffered a sepsis infection. Shayna was at a race in Indianapolis. Before she left, she’d kissed her dad goodbye. It was the last time they spoke.
Shayna had always been the responsible one among her four siblings (she and Cory have a younger stepbrother and sister). She had always been the caretaker. At 19, she planned her dad’s funeral, picking everything from the flowers to the casket to what he would wear.
The following year was the hardest in her life. Randy Texter had accumulated significant debt, and to cover it, his side of the family sold off the vans they had used to get to races, the stake in the Harley shop that had always been promised to Cory and Shayna. “We lost everything,” says Shayna.
Well, almost everything: They inherited the house in Lancaster, and they still had their bikes. Just minutes after their father’s passing, Shayna turned to Cory and said, “We’ve got to get to the track.”
But racing wasn’t the same without Randy. Shayna had to bum rides to races every week. She had to figure out how to cover the mortgage payments on the house. Sometimes she just wished that she could pick up the phone and call her dad for advice. The struggle showed on the racetrack. Shayna was getting pushed around and crashing. She was running out of money. She contemplated walking away. But then she called a mechanic that she and her dad had worked with for a long time.
“Look,” he said to Shayna. “You can either step aside or you can step up and show these guys who you are — prove them wrong and fight back.”
So she did just that.
A young Shayna Texter with her father and brother.
© Courtesy of Shayna Texter
In September 2011, Shayna got back on her bike and took the lead halfway through a race in Knoxville, Iowa. She battled it out to the finish against a young up-and-comer named Briar Bauman to take her first professional win. It was also the first professional flat-track main event won by a woman, ever. The night she made history, she slept in the front seat of a friend’s van at a truck stop, her head resting on the steering wheel.
Shayna ticked off more wins and podiums after that. It was during this time that she developed her reputation for being a mile specialist. Her weaknesses were short tracks, where there was more physical jostling and fewer opportunities to get away, and events called TTs, which involve a right-hand turn and a jump. Her smaller size, both she and her opponents reasoned, made it harder for her to move around on the bike, and Shayna didn’t have the lifelong background in motocross that many of her competitors did. But for the time being, her talent on ovals made up for it.
In 2014, Shayna upgraded from Singles to Twins. But here she struggled again. Her team couldn’t dial in her setup — some weeks, the engine wouldn’t even start, recalls Gary Nelson, team mechanic. Other weeks, the handlebar would get “death wobbles” at high speeds.
For the three seasons she raced Twins, Shayna rarely qualified for the main events. Even her crew at times questioned, why are we doing this? “But here Shayna shows up with a smile on her face and the determination to go and get ’em each week,” Nelson says. “Anybody with less determination would’ve quit.”
Still, when AFT rebranded and restructured its categories in 2017, Shayna made the hard decision to go back to Singles. She needed to get her confidence back, to learn to win again.
“All of a sudden we were in the hunt for a championship,” she says. That was the year she won five races and led the series until a flat tire took her out of a crucial mile race. In 2018, her three wins included a statement-making victory in Lima, Ohio, on a pea-gravel half-mile track that many say was the roughest and most physically demanding on the circuit. “Some people say, ‘you only do good on the miles because you’re little, your bike’s faster,’ and you prove them wrong by winning Lima. It was important for her to go and do that,” says Shayna’s manager, Scott Taylor.
For 2019, Shayna wants that elusive Singles championship more than ever. But flat track is changing. With more viewership has come more sponsorship dollars and more hungry young racers. And more TTs have been added to the calendar. To win the series, Shayna can no longer rely on her prowess on ovals — she has to get better at TTs.
Texter racing in Lima, Ohio, in late June 2019.
© Scott Hunter
To be a star in a sport that objectively almost died eight years ago is a funny thing. For one, it keeps you down to earth. Shayna can still remember the days when she and her fellow racers would look out at their dwindling, aging fans in the stands and wonder, “What are we going to do when all of them die out?” Even today, she and Briar are two of what they estimate to be about 12 fully supported factory riders (Bauman rides for the dominant Indian Motorcycle Wrecking Crew). They are among the lucky few who can now fly to their races, instead of driving and sleeping in their vans.
But Shayna still lives a simple, sensible lifestyle. She and Briar own a log cabin on 5 acres of woods in the village of Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, just 2 miles away from her mom’s place. This is Shayna’s refuge, where she recharges between races with her family, Briar and her puggle (half pug, half beagle), Ogio. A rotating cast of characters keeps the spare bedroom constantly occupied — usually free-spirited flat-track pals looking for a break from the #vanlife.
At races, Shayna is professional and well spoken — her mom used to critique her presentation during interviews — but there’s an intensity to her. She’s serious, focused on doing her job. “But that’s only one day out of the week,” she says.
The Shayna I meet when I spend three days at and around her home is disarmingly relatable. She is open, easy to talk to and speaks with a languorous Pennsylvania drawl (“silence” is sahl-ence, “racing” is racin’, “last” is lay-ast). She cracks dry jokes followed by sidelong smiles. She is quietly and consistently thoughtful, the kind of person who will offer to hold your coffee for you when you go to the restroom at the gas station and ask you questions about yourself — then actually remember the answers.
Texter finds time to work on her bow skills at her rural home base in PA.
© Laura Barisonzi
One might assume that a woman who gets her thrills darting in and out of a raging pack of motorcycle racers would be fearless and invulnerable. But Shayna admits to several things that scare her — actually, the word she uses is “terrify.” Things that terrify or have terrified Shayna Texter: Motorcycles, when she was little — part of the reason she didn’t start racing until she was 12. Pulling the trigger on her rifle when she shot her first doe at age 9 (she took so long to do it her stepdad put the camera down). The bike she raced Twins on that shook like it was going to explode. Being kidnapped, because she’s tiny. Doing jumps on a motorcycle.
Which is why we’re on our way to a motocross track in Millville, New Jersey, to spend an entire day doing exactly that. On the hour-and-a-half drive, with Briar behind the steering wheel and their friend and fellow racer Jake Johnson riding shotgun, Shayna tells me about how this season she and her team are laser-focused on improving her TTs. She’s working with trainer Aldon Baker, who is known for producing motocross and Supercross champs like Ricky Carmichael. She spent the winter at Baker’s facility in Florida, where he built her a practice TT course. Shayna always did cardio and strength training, but Baker has her on a structured program for the first time, which includes heart-rate-based running and cycling, weight lifting and a nutrition plan that requires her to send him photos of her meals.
Shayna is tired of people saying she needs to get better at TTs. She doesn’t read the comments on social media anymore, or the AFT race reports. Sometimes she wants to reply along the lines of “you go ride the bike and let’s see how you do.” But she knows she needs to stay professional.
To improve her skills and power on TT courses, Texter works with a trainer.
© Laura Barisonzi
She also knows that most of the commentary is well intentioned. “I think the fans just want me to do well; they want me to win the championship,” she says. Jumping is something that’s out of her comfort zone, especially after a couple of bad crashes. For a long time she simply wrote off TTs. “But now I want to face the challenge,” she says. “I’m not giving up, that’s for sure.”
At the track, we meet eight-time enduro national champion Mike Lafferty, who is here to coach Shayna. I watch from the sidelines as Shayna, Briar, Mike and Jake rip off warm-up laps on the smaller, tamer “vet track.” The guys all have the easy style of lifelong moto riders, whipping the back end casually over jumps. Shayna at times struggles to make the sloped landing on the other side.
She can’t wait until she gets to the point where this is just natural, where she isn’t thinking about her speed or technique on every single jump. When we take a break in the parking lot, she consumes her standard lunch of an almond butter and jelly sandwich and tells me, “I think a lot about everything. The younger guys have no fear — they just send it. I gotta build myself up to be comfortable and confident.” But she’s motivated by the progress she’s making.
By the final session of the day, the guys move over to the bigger pro track, but Shayna continues her focused practice on the vet track. As I watch her small, lone figure approach a 40-foot tabletop that’s been giving her trouble all day, I detect a fresh burst of energy, maybe even a vengeance. The left-hand berm leading into the jump has been rutted by her tires so many times it looks like planting soil. She charges out of it and holds the throttle all the way up the face of the jump, like Mike told her to — elbows out, no brakes, no hesitation — and just about clears it.
Texter at the Grandview Speedway in Bechtelsville, PA.
© Laura Baronsizi
Shayna always wanted to race with the guys: “I wanted to be the best. I wanted to be equal. I wanted to go into the Hall of Fame.” Those closest to Shayna say it’s this attitude that sets her apart from most other female athletes. “A lot of women focus all their time on getting to that [professional] level just so they can say they got to it, and then they want to beat other women,” says Cory Texter. “Shayna just wants to beat everyone.”
Shayna gets asked a lot about being the only woman in the paddock, and she makes it clear that her competitors treat her the same as anyone else: “When our helmets are on, we’re just racers.”
But it’s tricky. “When she puts her helmet on, she’s still Shayna Texter, and fans know that,” says manager Scott Taylor. The fact is, Shayna gets attention for being a successful woman in a maledominated sport — attention she’s at once uneasy with yet savvy enough to leverage. She understands the immense marketing value of her story. After all, Shayna has seen how some other riders and drivers have pulled what she calls “the female card” to get attention or sponsorships. It’s not a bad thing, she says, but it’s not how she wants to approach it.
“I want to use the female card to help grow the sport,” she says. “I always said when I win this first race, I’m going to do every interview, everything I possibly can to blow this out of the water for the sport as a whole.”
Taylor tells me there’s still some jealousy from other racers — grumbling about how Shayna gets all the exposure “because she’s a girl.” But for the most part, Shayna has managed to dodge the shade often thrown at female athletes in male-dominated sports. Cory Texter pulls no punches in contrasting this to the animosity many auto-racing fans and some drivers felt toward Danica Patrick. “You see a lot more there, ’cause Danica kind of crashes a lot and makes excuses and whines. Shayna never makes excuses. You don’t see that whininess or crying a lot, things like that.”
While inherent in all this is a thinly veiled sexism — an assignment of certain traits to women, an assumption that Shayna is a good racer because she doesn’t “act like a girl” — it does illuminate the fact that Shayna’s natural personality shields her from a lot of criticism because she doesn’t hew to traditional female stereotypes. And perhaps more crucially, she has the results to justify the hype. Which Shayna knows is important.
“At the end of the day I want to be known as a good motorcycle racer first and a female second,” she says. “And in order to do that, you got to earn it. You got to win races.”
“When our helmets are on, we’re just racers,” Texter says.
© Laura Barisonzi
In Shayna’s kitchen, there are two prominently displayed signs. The first reads “Never Give Up,” signed with the initials RLT. They’re words that Randy Lee Texter lived by, an ethos he passed on to his kids. Even as his health deteriorated, Shayna and Cory watched their dad continue to go to work early and stay late. When doctors told him he had a 40 to 50 percent chance of surviving a heart and lung transplant, Randy told them, I’m a motorcycle racer; I’ll take those chances any day. Shayna says this is the most important lesson she’s learned in the last several years: “Grit your teeth when it’s tough. Never give up.”
The second sign hangs over the kitchen sink. In decorative, italicized script, it reads: “Prove Them Wrong.”
I ask Shayna what this means — if she ever felt like people doubted her, maybe earlier in her career. Her answer is a little vague. “I don’t think people really doubted me. I just don’t think they . . .” She pauses. “It’s like you’re a female, there’s no expectations. But it was more the people that didn’t know me.”
Later I ask Cory if he’s ever seen people underestimate his sister. “Oh, I see it all the time,” he says. “You still have guys out there that no matter what she does, they downplay it. They say she only won ’cause of her size, or ’cause she’s on good equipment. I think Shayna sees a lot of that. She doesn’t let it get to her, but she definitely has it in the back of her mind.”
But then Cory switches tracks. “That poster above her sink is kind of uncharacteristic of Shayna, honestly. She doesn’t really need to prove anything to anyone.” When Cory and Shayna were younger, he explains, he used to get caught up in the chatter, what other competitors or fans were saying. He’d say to Shayna, did you hear what so-and-so said about us, and she’d always reply, I don’t care.
But maybe, under the dogged, unflappable exterior, she does, if even a little.
Cory thinks for a moment. “Yeah, that’s kind of uncharacteristic.”
“I want to use the female card to help grow the sport,” Texter says.
© Laura Barisonzi
By a stroke of bad luck and scheduling conflicts, the only race of Shayna’s that I end up being able to attend is one in which she is not expected to do well.
The Laconia Short Track on June 15 in Loudon, New Hampshire, is new on the AFT calendar this year. The fresh-cut, quarter-mile sand track is as soft as a beach. In the first practice lap, I watch riders slide into the first turn, jerk upright as the bikes threaten to high-side, then accelerate back into the straightaway, rear ends wagging in the deep brown sand. As the day progresses, the ground clumps into wavelike braking bumps so tall they send wheels chattering inches off the ground.
Shayna’s had a slow start to her season. She won that Texas Half Mile, but the Sacramento Mile, which she’s won three times in past years, was rescheduled due to bad weather, and she was second at the Lexington Mile the weekend before this. Otherwise, the calendar has been TTs. Shayna is showing improvement, though — at her last TT, she was in the top half of the field before another rider crashed her out in the semis. Before, she would have been bottom of the pack.
And she’s riding well today, on this physically demanding short track that should not be her forte. She comes in third in a qualifying heat, then fifth in the semifinal, barely missing a front-row start in the main event. Her hard work seems to be paying off.
“I want to be known as a good motorcycle racer first and a female second."
© Laura Barisonzi
Then everything goes to hell.
When the green light goes off for the Singles main event, the pack surges forward, and I search for the blue and orange of Shayna’s Red Bull KTM leathers, but she is nowhere to be seen. No, wait, there she is — third from last. As the group roars around the track, blasting us with sand each time they go by, Shayna drops to last position.
There’s a crash. The race is stopped as the rider is cleared from the track. The mechanics run out to check on the athletes, and when Shayna’s mechanic, Justin, returns, he reports that she can get the bike up to third gear, but there the engine is spinning out. With no top-end power, when the race resumes, Shayna is left to simply survive. She rolls in 16th out of 16 racers.
This is not how the story is supposed to go. Shayna is the girl who beats the boys. It’s a good story, one that draws an unending stream of fans to her table each weekend — the guys in the leather vests telling her to “give ’em hell,” the bashful kids, the women who ride motorcycles, too. They love to watch Shayna because she shows how you can be underestimated, outmuscled and outnumbered and win anyway.
But what most of us miss, or maybe forget, is that coming in last place is part of her story, too. Shayna was not an overnight phenom. She is not fearless and her mental game is not bulletproof. She toiled for years, for the love of it, in a niche sport. “I could’ve gave up in 2011 before I won that first race,” Shayna had reminded me in Pennsylvania weeks before. “Could’ve gone out and gotten a regular job. But that’s not what my dreams were.”
When you’re the underdog, when you’re outgunned, you don’t win all the time. Maybe not even most of the time. But if you never give up, you will have your day. You can prove them wrong.
You just have to truly believe in yourself.
I walk over to Shayna and Scott at the tent. He is relieved to hear it was a mechanical, not her riding. But he’s already thinking about how it must look: to the haters, to the fans, to the new team manager who is impatient for results. How unfair it all is. “You almost wish you could throw up a flare,” he laments, “like, ‘It was a mechanical — her clutch was fried!’”
But Shayna just gives him a sidelong smile. She punches him on the arm. “It’s OK,” she says. “We’ll beat ’em next weekend.” I can tell she really means it.
Because two weeks later, at the Lima Half Mile, on the rough, pea-gravel track where she surprised everyone last year, she wins again, by 2.57 seconds.