Throttle rockets

Richie Owens blew up his mother’s dryer a while back. The 21-year-old throttle jockey didn’t mean to, but he was churning up so much earth, dirtying so many clothes and doing so much laundry that the thing finally seized up and died. The family purchased a second washer-dryer just to handle Richie’s heaps of well-worn gear.

It’s a Wednesday, 7 a.m., and Owens is looking very clean as he gases up one of the two stickered-up Kawasakis he keeps in the garage of his Wildomar home, rolls it up the ramp of his pickup and tethers it. In an hour, he’ll be encased in $1,000 worth of protective gear and kicking up plumes of dust as he revs his 250-cc dirt bike to 65 mph and jumps 30-foot triples.

Make that 45 minutes. “We drive fast around here,” Owens says with a sly smile after speeding 80, then 90, heading north on the 215 Freeway. The truck slices through subdivision after stuccoed subdivision, then through empty land with for-sale signs, then fallow fields to what appears to be nowhere but is actually part of a dairy farm. But when he kills the engine and jumps out of the cab, a driving wind presses hard against his lanky frame. It’s so strong that Owens fears gusts will blow his bike off the supercross practice track during a jump.

“I wanted to ride,” Owens says, looking out at the dust clouds skittering over the track. “I need to ride.”

When he started riding at 12, it was on an 80-cc bike that tore up the scrubby terrain of the Inland Empire near his home. With nothing to do except wallow in the dirt, he and his friends carved their own tracks, flattening the plants with their knobby tires. He loved the freedom. “It was open,” he says. “You could go wherever you want and go as fast as you want.”

Now, like a lot of people in the 909 area code -- a swatch of dry plain in Riverside and San Bernardino counties -- he goes as fast as he can on a course constructed by bulldozers.

In the ‘70s, the uncongested 619 and 714 in San Diego and Orange counties were Southern California’s big dirt-biking zones. Japanese motorcycle makers had set up their North American operations there, close to seaports and amid weather that comes in two varieties: good for riding and great for riding. Boys and girls once content to tool around remote public lands began to ramp up their skills at practice tracks that sprang out of the scrub.

But in the ‘80s, many track owners cashed out as development pushed inland. Saddleback Park, Orange County International Raceway and Escape Country closed, and 909-based tracks such as Star West, Glen Helen, Lake Elsinore and Perris Raceway took their business.

Motorcycle equipment suppliers, parts makers, clothing companies, component manufacturers and dealerships began moving in. An area sometimes associated with methamphetamine labs got a reputation for a different kind of speed.

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Whoop and holler

Even on weekdays, the 909’s tracks jump. Bikes pop up and down over dirt mounds as if they were in a popcorn maker. Knees and elbows bend and stretch to absorb shock as riders bounce over washboard whoops and fly off bulldozed pillars. The smell of overworked exhaust pipes singes the air. It is so eardrum-rumbling loud, spectators yell conversations.

After hours of catching air and carving corners, riders and their bikes are coated in grade-A filth, and they revel in it.

Riding is more than fun. For pros, it’s increasingly enough to retire young on. With race winnings, corporate sponsorships and endorsements, top riders pocket several million a year. They get the free expertise of mechanics and suspension technicians, a perk worth six digits per rider per year. Motocross is so flush these days that even low-ranking riders can make a living off more modest sponsorship packages.

Telegenic spinoffs were inevitable. Supercross, the pro stadium version of the sport, demands the most skill. Even so, crashes are common. On Jan. 24, 19-year-old Jason Ciarletta of Riverside died of a head injury after flipping over his handlebars during a supercross race in San Diego.

Freestyle showcases aerial tricks. (Picture a rider flying like a superhero above his airborne bike.) The most flamboyant form of motocross, freestyle also has its own splinter groups, such as the Murietta-based Metal Mulisha, a band of riders who try to look bad in tattoos and spiked chest protectors.

As the various permutations of moto gained traction, magazines, videos, video games and websites spread the word. “Kids who are usually into the snow-skate-surf arena, they started realizing what people can do on a motorcycle,” says Ken Faught, editor of Los Angeles-based Dirt Rider magazine. Off-road motorcycle sales doubled from the mid- to late ‘90s, then tripled by 2002.

The success of Jeremy McGrath, a 909er whose phenomenal speed and stamina mainstreamed the sport in the late ‘80s, drew outsiders to an area where there’s little snow and no ocean, just miles and miles of dry, dusty nothing to play in. Now any racer who’s serious about the sport spends time on the tracks (and in emergency rooms) in the 909. There are simply more good riders here. Great riders. And they come not just from other parts of the U.S. but the world.

“There’s a lot of riders in Colorado. They’re just not as serious as they are here,” says supercrosser Andrew Short, 21, who spent winters in the 909 as a teen and finally bought a house last year in Murrieta. “You go to the tracks on a Wednesday, and there’s tons of people out there. It seems like they should be at work,” he says. Short is still in moto culture shock. When he goes to the mall or the movies, he sees hordes of kids in Fox T-shirts and gear by Troy Lee Designs, a Corona-based maker of everything from moto camouflage jerseys to off-track knit caps.

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Her tell-tale ponytail

His wife, Jackie, also a pro, is from Texas, another producer of top riders. Even so, she says, “You’re lucky to see one bike a week there. Driving around here, you see a bike every couple of cars.”

One is probably Elizabeth Bash’s 125-cc Kawasaki.

She chews on a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich after school while waiting for her dad to gas up the bike and wheel it into the back of her Ford 250 so she can get to Perris Raceway, one of several tracks within a 45-minute drive of her Riverside home.

For the gangly 17-year-old motocross pro, riding isn’t a sometime thing. Since she got serious about it at age 12, it’s an everyday thing.

When she gets there, the parking lot is packed with pickups plastered with window stickers touting O’Neal and Pro Circuit and asking the rhetorical “Got dirt?” Buzzing motorcycles swarm the dirt.

Unlike the boys, who gear up in truck beds, Bash changes in the cab, emerging in head-to-toe red, white and blue protective gear.

She jumps on her bike, kicks it to life and, with a wave of her gloved hand, slips through a hole in the chain-link fence and over a jump. Only the brown ponytail hanging out the back of her helmet gives her away.

She rides just as aggressively, and fast, as most of the boys on the track that day. “Most people at school don’t believe me. They tell me girls don’t ride,” Bash says. “I tell ‘em, just come out to the track. I’ll prove it to you. So they come out to the track. They usually end up losing.”

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Lapping it up

Foiled by the blustery winds at his friend’s supercross track, Owens doubles back past the skeletal wood frames of new houses, to Star West, a Perris motocross track frequented by dads and sons. Over on the peewee course, a pair of 4-year-olds zip up and around hills at startling speeds while a pack of tweens and teens goes full throttle on the big track.

It’s a couple of weeks before the supercross season kicks off, and Star West isn’t the ideal course for Owens to practice on. It’s a motocross track, not the more tightly sculpted and technical supercross layout. He recently broke his femur while hyperextending his leg in a tight turn, and he needs to get back on the bike.

Owens strips to his boxers, then takes five minutes to pull on leggings and knee pads, elbow pads, pants, jersey, chest protector, boots, helmet, goggles, gloves. He throws his leg over the saddle, cranks the kick-start and speeds onto the track.

Zooming up and over a plateau, then down into a lumpy, bumpy straightaway, he passes one rider, then another. Coming off a broken leg, he’s still the fastest man out there. The others look like the amateurs they are.

Thirty minutes and as many laps later, he pulls off into the parking lot to talk to his mechanic. “I’m out of shape,” Owens says, pulling off his helmet and wiping dirt from his lips. “We got some miles to put on.”

And that means laundry -- on what “seems like every day,” he says. “I have my race gear that needs to be clean for the weekend, so I have that and my normal clothes, and I have to pack for the weekend, so it seems like Thursday I’m just doing laundry all day.”

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Susan Carpenter is a Times staff writer. She can be reached at susan.carpenter@latimes.com.