FORTH WORTH, Texas - Several things are unique to the SuperMotocross World Championship playoffs with its mix of track elements from Monster Energy Supercross and Pro Motocross. The most impactful of these may well be that riders have one additional chance to get their setup right — and with $1 million on the line for the winner at the end of three races, the stakes are high.
“It’s nice having the extra time on the track,” Chase Sexton said one week after finishing third in the playoff opener at zMax Dragway. “I tend to learn tracks pretty fast and by the first session most of us have it down and you can adjust the bike to what you think.”
While Sexton and the remainder of the field has learned to adjust quickly to the track, the combination of tight turns and massive jumps requires a different rhythm from both the stadium and outdoor series. And rhythm is critical in dirt bike racing.
“You get a little more track time so that’s a positive,” Cooper Webb said in Friday’s news conference. “You can kind of go at your own pace with no qualifying and no pressure and play it safer and then come into Saturday and that’s where it counts.”
Friday’s practice sessions do not alter Saturday’s track activity and it does not lessen the important of those critical qualification sessions. Instead, the two practices take the place of a Press Day ride, in which a rotating selection of riders get to race on part of the track. Untimed because the laps do not include the entire track, typically the whoops or tricky sand sections are omitted because they wear down more quickly, riders must go on seat-of-the-pants feel.
Webb finished eighth on Friday’s combined practice chart.
“I do like this Friday setup a lot,” Ken Roczen said. “Most of the time on these longer flights we come in on Thursday anyways and most of the time on Friday we don’t really do anything, so this is a good time to mess with the bike a little bit.”
But there are plusses and minuses to nearly every equation.
The only rider other than Jett Lawrence to win a SuperMotocross playoff race at zMax Dragway last year, Sexton knows danger of putting too much emphasis on these early practices.
“Last week the track was a lot different on Friday from what it was on Saturday,” Sexton said hours before posting the fastest time in practice. “It’s always changing and every race is unique, so you adjust on Friday and see what you’ve got.”
Roczen agrees: “Definitely good to get these Friday practices in and try and see if we can improve, but at the same time I don’t want to overthink it.
Notably, the advantage Sexton gained in the 2023 playoff opener was that he selected a mostly Supercross setting while the majority of the field favored their outdoor package.
In this year’s opening playoff round, Eli Tomac was as fast as Lawrence. Both riders won a moto and finished second in the other. The difference for Tomac was that he selected a scoop tire for both races. Scoop tires allow riders to get out of the gate quicker because of the deep, heavy ruts that immediately form on the starting stretch, but they can be risky as the track dries out and the hard-paced surface becomes more slippery.
Tomac was third fastest in practice behind Sexton and Lawrence.
With a forecast of 95 degrees on Saturday after a mostly mild summer, this will be among the hottest conditions the riders have faced all season.
That is not an immediate concern for Tomac, but he likes having one additions chance to see if his strategy at zMax will work at Texas Motor Speedway.
“For Free Practice, we just have to see how it goes,” Tomac said. “That’s actually really cool about these Friday sessions. You get to try things. You’re not super stressed out on throwing some timed laps and you can try stuff to get really dialed in for these events and see where it takes us.”
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