We were on the east side over the weekend with the Monster Energy AMA Supercross series hitting Tampa, Florida. Was there some awesome stuff that happened? Yes, there was. But also, the series got a bit of a blow with losing Eli Tomac for a while, as well as Pierce Brown for a long time.
Let’s get into it shall we?
Everyone loves Malcolm Stewart, even Justin Barcia who has had 853 run-ins with Mookie loves Stewart now! Seriously, for as reclusive and introverted as his big brother James could be when he raced, Malcolm has always been outgoing, funny, nice, and has a smile for anyone and everyone. Through the ups and the downs, he’s been a great representative of the sport. So, to see him ride that well in Tampa and get the win was awesome. Hometown, also! If you had been watching, you would’ve noticed he’s been pretty good this year coming off a horrific 2024 450SX season. He told me two weeks ago this is the best he’s felt on the Husqvarna and on Monday on the PulpMX Show, he mentioned it’s been a really good feeling around the team this season. He also mentioned that he was clicking into fifth gear coming into the whoops off the double-triple beforehand!
Lewis Phillips pointed out on the PulpMX Show that Malcolm had the fourteen best times in the segment that contained the whoops! Like, WOW. Makes you really laugh out loud, right? Whatever it was that set Mookie Fever off in Tampa, he and the team hope it strikes again! Cool race man. I’m stoked I was there to see it.
I don’t know what happened to Chase Sexton, he looked great, and I fully expected him to win the main event. But I think, I don’t know, that he saw Malcolm catching him, moved around some lines, and it affected him. He wasn’t doing the double-triple before the whoops and honestly, it didn’t look hard for a guy like him. He started to get a bit slower in the whoops also and then, bingo, bango, he was down. He’s still got the red plate and all is fine, but man, this race could come back to bite him at the end of the year. We haven’t seen weirdo Sexton crashes (much) in 2025 but he’s still lurking in there.
Cooper Webb is generally all business on race day. I’m in some group texts with Coop and he’s a funny, ball-busting guy in there during the week. Same for Friday night dinners. But on race day, he’s locked in on the task at hand. This week though, I don’t know if it was Jett Lawrence’s injury the week before, the return to the east coast, or what, but on track walk he made a couple of jokes with me and seemed to be in a much better mood than usual. And then he smoked his heat race. Like, looked great. In the main he got a poo-poo start and was on it to get second place. Great ride for Webb and oh yeah, he’s probably just warming up about now, which is scary for everyone else.
One of the things Webb's never been great at is skimming whoops, right? We all know that and it’s something he’s worked on this offseason. So much so that I was told at the GOAT farm, where Star practices, there’s a set of whoops that’s actually faster to jump through. His teammate, Justin Cooper, does jump through them and he goes faster jumping compared to Webb skimming. But Webb, because he knows that on Saturday he’s going to have to skim, does just skims every lap while J-Coop pulls away. Webb’s a gamer. A person at Star was telling me that Webb’s mentally strong enough to not worry about J-Coop beating him during the week because he knows he needs to work on skimming whoops. At some point this year, with nine whoops and we’ll get some crappy weather, the whoops will be jumpers, and Webb will be great in those also.
Meanwhile, at the races, Justin Cooper’s getting destroyed in the whoops but refuses to blitz. I don’t get it. He’s a great rider and I’ve seen him blitz whoops, but for whatever reason he’s jumping through them this year. He lost so much ground at the last few races because of this. It’s got to be driving his team nutso but hey, he did get a season best fourth this weekend while jumping away like a little bunny in the whoops. I mean, hey whatever works I guess, but imagine if J-Coop could blitz decently and then add that in with his starts and other skills?
Jason Anderson has had podium rides every other week. He’s scheduled for an off week this weekend though. Let’s see if he can break the pattern.
Max Anstie had a lot of quiet hype around him going into the 250SX opener and he delivered with a nice, quiet, solid victory. Before his teammate Pierce Brown went down in the whoops, he was catching him quickly and then after the red flag for Brown, Anstie pulled back away with ease. Also, Brown looked awesome and is now going to have a long road to recovery but should get back on the bike at some point. This sport does suck sometimes.
Back to Anstie though. I was sort of underwhelmed with his MX season on Star after he got out of his contract early with Firepower Honda and I asked him on the PulpMX Show if maybe, somehow, he’s better at SX than MX. He said that when he rode motocross, he was always thinking of hitting supercross! He said he’s a technical rider and supercross fits him better. And it definitely looked like that on Saturday night. At this point Mad Max isn’t going to beat himself, you know? He’s not a great starter but maybe, in SX on the Star bike, he will be better because that’s about his only weakness. He’s not got blazing speed like some of these kids to rip through the pack like some guys, but he’s got enough speed to work up or pull away depending on his start.
Dax Bennick was great again, just like he was at the Detroit opener last year. After that though, it kind of went eeehhhh, so I’ll reserve judgement on whether he’s “fixed” or not. Still, myself nor anyone else can take this podium away and I hope he keeps it up because man, Bennick has been through some shit in just one year on the circuit.
Cameron McAdoo has a torn ACL, which he suffered shortly before the opener so props to him for just toughing it out to land on the box. I mean, it’s “Wackers”—what did you expect him to do? If he can get through this season and end up with wins and maybe a title, wow, what a story right? At least dealing with the ACL wasn't as embarrassing as what he was dealing with in last year's opener at Detroit....do you remember that?
My pick to win the race was Seth Hammaker though. I don’t know, he’s only won one 250SX race, but he’s been down at the Lawrences’ working hard and changing his program up. He’s a great rider as we all know, he just tends to crash and get hurt (like SO many others. This goes back to my point earlier about Max not beating himself. It matters). I thought Seth would break through this year, and he still might, but while the opener was solid, although Cam did pass him for third. They had some TIGHT racing also that probably caused Mitch Payton to pop some TUMS thinking of how his luck has been going.
My title favorite though was Levi Kitchen, and he had, errrr, an off night. Falling in practice, an issue with his bike in the heat, a bad start and another one or two falls in the main held him back to a ninth. Not ideal, but more than just his finishing position, I didn’t see any sort of, “I’m the best damn rider here and watch my lap/time/jump thing to prove it,” from Kitch. He just looked okay all day long and then the main happened. I’m sure he’ll be better but the margin of error for him just got a bit smaller.
I don’t know what to do about lappers out on the track, people. Yes, they should slow down more but they’re in the middle of their race and it’s hard to do. Sometimes also the AMA officials give them the blue flag way too early, sometimes they don’t get the blue flag, sometimes, they don’t mean to get in the way but they do. And sometimes it’s just Vince Friese being Vince Friese.
There’s no perfect answer for what to do with these guys but step one I think would be to enforce a rule where lappers can't pass other lappers while under the blue flag. That’s kind of greasy and doesn’t help the situation, you end up with two guys battling each other for position in front of the leader. So, what if you had a rule where, if the lapper in front slows down to a crawl, the other rider has to stay behind him no matter what. And then, maybe start docking money and/or points to guys who don’t make an active attempt to slow down or move over to one side. That’s step two. But it’s never going to be perfect and what happened to Ken Roczen is unfortunate. But in my eyes, Roczen deserves some of the blame for trying to split two lappers in the sand where bikes have a tendency to go cattywampus.
I came up with an idea a couple of years ago based on the old Monster Energy Cup Joke Lane. Maybe we make a lane off the side of the track, say, the length of the whoops and the first time you come around to that lane after you get the blue flag you HAVE to pull in and therefore give the leaders a spot where they KNOW they’re going to be able to get by you. In that lane, you set up Tuff Blocks staggered so you can’t pin it and gain time by skipping the whoops. Watch closely in practice and you'll see they do build a small lane for riders who want to skip the whoops. Maybe incorporate that into the race? Make it the blue flag passing zone?
Other people in the pits think that what we do now is enough, and that in the end lappers will help you as much as they hurt you and…(shrugs). I’d love for there to be a universal way to make them move and slow down but I’m just not sure how.
Just pointing out here that we’ve lost two of the top five riders (Eli Tomac and Jett Lawrence) and we still mostly have nine whoops and no dragon-backs. Both of their incidents were pretty innocent incidents also, it’s almost like supercross is super dangerous or something.
Some other news and notes:
Joey Savatgy had his best race of the year coming off his worst race of the year. Go figure? Joe Dawg mentioned to me at Anaheim 2 he felt they found something to help him out with his bike, suspension-wise, but then Glendale happened, and that was bad. So now they’re back to a base setting he liked before and in Tampa, he was WAY better.
I don’t know if RJ Hampshire in this deep, 250SX east field with limited races can make up the 18 points he’s down, but I do know he’s going to give it a hell of a try. Tuff Blocks man, NOTHING we can do about them, right? I’m gonna make a shirt up that says, “TUFF BLOCKS-Ruining racers’ nights since 1998!”
But IF you’re RJ, on the plus side you've got veteran Max Anstie to deal with and that’s going to be tough. Max doesn’t make a lot of mistakes and knows the game and you've got Tom Vialle, who was last year’s champ, but you’re just 13 points back of him. Kitchen is as good as you but you’re only eight back, which is manageable. Not so bad. The other guys? Well Cameron McAdoo has a torn ACL and, like Hammaker, has basically never completed an SX series. Bennick, well who knows about him, right? Brown is out of this thing, and Chance Hymas and Nate Thrasher you probably feel like you have covered. So if you’re reading this and you’re a Hampshire fan, I just laid out a reasonable defense that he can still win this thing. You got Anstie, Kitchen, and Vialle to worry about unless someone else can change their stripes.
History was made this week when Austin Forkner debuted the new Alpinestars MX Tech-Air chest protector. This is an airbag inflatable system that’s been in road-racing and Dakar stuff for years but has now been figured out for SX. It’s definitely a game changer and will be available to the public soon. Forkner, feeling the flu, crashed a few times out there but not enough to inflate the protector.
Thrasher rode pretty well coming from 20th to eighth in the main. We’re about three races away from Nate just crushing everyone by ten seconds to win, BTW. He might win the LCQ earlier in the night to set that all up.
Henry Miller is underrated. That’s all.
Thanks for reading this week. We’re on to Detroit for round six and man, things have changed, huh? Email me at matthes@racerxonline.com to chat about this race or whatever else.
