Age 10 Sacramento, California Brenden Ketelsen got into racing the old-fashioned way. He watched his cousin race, he watched his friends race, he watched the slightly-older local fast kids race—and his dad did a bit of racing and rode at track days. Nowadays, Ketelsen is racing—and winning—in his own right. Ketelsen took a stack of wins and a pair of Championships with MinimotoUSA en route to second in the club’s 2013 overall standings. It’s been a little more than five years since Ketelsen stood at the side of a motocross track, watched someone else race and caught the bug. “I was four and a half,” Ketelsen says. “I saw my cousin racing.” It was not long after that when Ketelsen got his first bike, a Honda CRF50. Ketelsen proceeded to learn to ride at the Prairie City MX track, just outside of Sacramento, and when he was five years old, he competed in his first race weekend. What Ketelsen enjoyed was winning—and the size of the prize. “How big the trophy was!” Ketelsen says, when asked what he remembered most from his first race weekend. “It came to my nose!” A year later, Ketelsen watched a young racer named Anthony Alonso race at the kart track in Stockton. And just like that, young Ketelsen wanted nothing more than to road race. “I loved it,” he says, recalling that day in Stockton. Like many kids, Ketelsen started on a Blata, the 2.6 pocket racer. He moved on to a Cobra TM. At some point, his father Dean, who did a little bit of racing with AFM in the 1990s, got rid of his track-day bike. It made room for the youngster’s growing fleet of the racebikes. Young Ketelsen now has a Honda NSR50, a 70cc Metrakit, a Honda RS80, a Honda CR85 and a Kawasaki KX65 in addition to his Supermoto bikes. “I don’t have any bikes anymore, and he’s got seven,” Ketelsen’s father Dean says. At least the youngster is putting them to good use. Ketelsen earned nearly two dozen podium finishes with MinimotoUSA during the 2013 season, including 13 wins en route to the GP65 and Formula Moto titles. Most importantly, Ketelsen says he’s having fun. He likes road racing, he says, because “it’s fast, and you get to drag your knee!” His favorite bike is the RS80, and you can guess why—“It’s fast,” he says.