For Ben Young, chasing the dream of being a professional motorcycle road racer is more of a challenge than it is for many—and it’s not easy for any privateer. He chased the dream when he lived overseas as a kid, and now chases the dream across the U.S.A. in a van that doubles as a hotel room. He’s chased the dream in pouring Scottish rain and in balmy California sunshine. The sheer size of North America and the distance he has to cover to get to races spread far and wide from his current home base in Canada makes the chase seem so long and hard. And when you add in Young’s expectations when he arrives at the track—rarely is his bike anywhere near the top 20 when you look at the trap speeds—you get an appreciation of just how much Young wants to race, and race professionally. “My goal is to do as best as I can, go as far as I can go in motorcycle racing,” says Young, 20, of Thornbury, Ontario. It took Young a while to catch the road racing bug. He got the ubiquitous Yamaha PW50 at the age of three, and puttered around the family home in Livingston, Scotland on it until he got a pocket bike at the age of six. But the pocket bike never really appealed to Young. It was only a few years later, when his father Scott started road racing, that Young began to develop an appreciation for the sport. He nailed down the Scottish Minimoto Championship in 2005, then moved up to an Aprilia 125—the street-going two-stroke—and started racing in Scotland and in England. During his first season, he says, he finished eighth in the combined 125cc Amateur/Expert class, and even won a race. “It was at Knockhill, and it was raining,” Young recalls. “There was a group of three riders ahead of me, and I just sat behind them and followed. On the next-to-last lap, I passed them, and I won by half-a-second. It was all good fun.” Young moved up to a proper racebike for the next season, a Honda RS125, and won the Scottish 125cc Grand Prix title. When he turned 14, he started racing with the British Superbike series in the 125cc GP support class, and competed in two rounds before the family relocated to Canada. It was heady stuff—the British series was intensely popular, and Young was sharing a paddock with some of the biggest names in the sport. (Young still gets a chuckle from watching the progress of the young racers he competed against, like Kev Coghlan, who now races in World Supersport.) “Since my dad was always racing, I was always in the paddock. But when I went there to race, at first it was overwhelming,” Young says. After the family moved across the ocean, Young started competing in Canada and in the United States. He won titles in Canada and put the 125 on the podium in the States in 2008 and 2009. In 2010, he moved up to a Yamaha TZ250 and continued battling in the USGPRU series, finishing second in the USGPRU (East) 250cc Grand Prix class. He also rode a Moriwaki MD250H in the series, winning at New Jersey. But Young knew that to push his career forward, he had to adapt to the four-stroke production bikes that dominate racing worldwide. So halfway through 2010, he got a Kawasaki ZX-6R and started doing track days and some local club races to start the transition. “We knew that was going to be the next step. So we thought we would get a jump,” Young says. His first impression of four-strokes? Easy, Young recalls. “It was like riding a couch! It was like riding a lazy bike,” Young says. “On the 250, you were on top of it the whole time. You were pushing it. The 600—it was like a big, poshy couch.” In 2011, Young raced in the AMA Pro Road Racing Motorcycle-Superstore.com SuperSport East series, finishing 14th in points with a best race finish of 10th. But Young wanted to make a greater commitment to his racing career, so the team moved up to the GoPro Daytona Sportbike series for 2012. During that season, he managed to get wrapped up in what he calls the most fun race he’s ever been in—a battle at NOLA Motorsports Park where, as Young recalls, “You were in a different position every lap.” On Saturday, Young battled his way to 12th; on Sunday, he was in the thick of a five-rider scrum where he ended up 17th. The 2013 season was even better. Starting with an eighth place in the Daytona 200, Young was consistently just outside of the top 10. He had to battle with the little demons that plague privateer teams—things like the faulty master cylinder at New Jersey Motorsports Park that caused him to pull into the pits, thinking the engine was about to expire. But looking back, Young views the weekend very positively. It’s easy to see why—he took three seconds off his times at the track from the prior year. “I feel like that was the best I’ve ever rode,” Young says. Young works with his father in the family’s custom home construction business, and the pair of them drive themselves to the races in a Sprinter van. It’s a modest operation, and money has to be saved whenever possible. So the van also serves as living quarters, with a pair of twin beds in the back serving as rest stations for Young and his father when they are on the road. “Me and my dad will pull over and sleep in the back, then keep trucking away. It’s not the most comfortable thing. But it’s cheap and it gets the job done,” Young says. That’s a pretty good description of Young’s racing mount. His A-bike is a 2008 Yamaha YZF-R6, his back-up bike a 2010 model. Öhlins suspension is mounted front and rear, YEC kit electronics handle engine management, and the engine is painfully close to stock. “The goal with the engine was to make it through the year,” Young says. “You look at the top speed charts and we were rarely in the top 20.” Right now, Young is talking to potential sponsors for 2014. He is realistic about his opportunities in racing, and optimistically pushing forward as hard as he can. “Every racer’s goal is to be World Champion, right? But you know, there’s only a handful of riders who are ever going to get that far,” Young says. “It would be nice to win a Championship here and there. It would be nice to race in the World Championships sometimes. We’re plugging away at that.”