When Gracey Hemstreet won her first elite World Cup this year, it was an incredible, and historic achievement. Then she kept winning. The Sunshine Coast racer is an incredible talent and, at such a young age, has a bright future. But, no matter how talented the athlete, we all also know it takes an incredible support team to allow them to perform their best. For Hemstreet, that’s the team at Norco Race Division.
To find out more about what goes into those wins, behind the scenes, we talked to Brett “Turtle” Ward, her Norco Race Division Mechanic. Ward walks us through the wins, Norco’s prototype race bike, life on the road, what it’s like working with Greg Minnaar, his nickname origin story, and just how much better Hemstreet can get (hint: she’s just getting started).
A long season that starts well well before the season starts
When we caught up with Ward, he’d just returned from Mont-Sainte-Anne, capping off a season that started nine whole months earlier.
“We left for a short team camp in February, then went straight into Hardline. I was back for maybe a month before we went to Portugal for a proper team camp,” Ward says. As World Cups started up and the calendar got crowded, that included one nine-week stint away from home.
2025 was Ward’s second season as Hemstreet’s mechanic and second season with the Norco Race Division. With the team’s new prototype bike, and its incredible range of adjustability, those early team camps are an important foundation for the year to follow.
Perfection, prototypes, and managing a wave of data
Norco’s wild prototype bike first rolled out of the pits around the end of the 2023 season. That made 2024 a year full of learning, with the team getting deep into how the bike would perform best on each track. “There was so much learning on the fly,” Ward says. “This year, we’ve been able to lean on last year a bit more. We knew when we came back to certain tracks what our idler position and progression positions would be.”
Hearing that the idler position is the one feature on that rig that sees the most change from weekend to weekend was, I admit, a bit surprising. Ward explains that it helps the team tune the bike for each track while leaving the suspension settings more consistent from week to…
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