Observations: Motocross of Nations

I thought the track was ok—it certainly got rough, but it was pretty basic, really. A sandy top layer with a hard base reminded me of some of the softer sections of Millville, and the starting line had really deep sand. Most riders opted for the sand scoop tire for the start, and a couple of them told me that the scoop didn’t work well on the track. A right-hand first turn into a 180 was a curious decision and produced more than a few crashes. I would’ve liked a track that challenged the riders a bit more. A couple of people said it was just like a bigger version of Dade City Raceway in Florida. This is NOT a compliment, people. 

By the way, I cannot stand that many of the GP tracks continue to build starts with 180 first turn and the inside gate is the gate to choose. Part of the beauty of motocross is that holeshots can come from ten to fifteen different gates. It’s what makes motocross, motocross, dammit!

Here’s the thing. So you’re going to have this massively unfair start and then just randomly draw numbers out of a bucket to give countries a gate position for the qualifier races? Because here’s how this whole thing goes: 

1. A country spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours coming to a race where the organizers make tons of money and dish out a small monetary amount to the teams. Most of the riders make absolutely nothing to race this event. But, hey, it’s all for the love of your country, and at least you’ll get a fair chance to race, right?
2. Uh no. You show up and some Monster girl pulls #35 out of a bucket, which means, due to the ridiculousness of the start gate set-up, that you’ll be starting somewhere out by the Belgian waffle stand and have zero chance of a good start.
3. Predictably, you get a bad start in Saturday’s qualifier and you don’t do as well as you would have liked, but thankfully you clawed and fought your way into the A main. This qualifying order determines gate pick all day, so in the actual motos, because you didn’t get a great finish due to your bad gate position in the qualifiers, you just continue to get bad starts or get involved in crashes. Eventually, you take your battered and bruised body home collecting exactly no money for your efforts, and this whole thing started when some big-boobed girl drew #35 out of a bucket and you had no chance to overcome it because the first turn is designed to be unfair to those with bad gate picks. It doesn’t make sense!

For more on this theory, ask Team Australia.

Team France won the whole shooting match for just the second time in its history with an almost perfect MXDN performance. Riders Gautier Paulin, Steven Frossard, and Dylan Ferrandis were superb. Paulin won his qualifier on Saturday and both of his races on Sunday. He wasn’t to be touched on this weekend, and in this case it didn’t matter where he started, it was lights out for everyone else. Great, great job by Gautier, who we saw over here racing for Star Yamaha in the 250SX series a few years ago. Frossard was the one rider that people thought might be inconsistent but was exactly the opposite of that. Ferrandis was another somewhat controversial selection, and the kid was strong.

Thanks to David Vuillemin for digging out the fact that for last three years, the points total by the winning team has been 26 (USA in 2011), 25 (Germany in 2012) and 27 (Belgium last year), but this year the French had just 17 points! Their lowest finish was ninth place. Things couldn’t have gone much better for the French guys and it was a well-deserved win.

Well, Team USA lost. Again. The red, white, and blue have come home without the Peter Chamberlain trophy for three years straight, and it’s a bit of a shock. Since USA won its first MXDN in 1981, this is tied for the longest winless streak in years that the USA sent a team. The last time this happened, the USA finally broke through for victory in 2000 in France. Next year the race just happens to be back in France, and USA will be looking to stop a dubious streak.

Ryan Dungey once again suited up for America. Dungey’s done this year in and year out for six years now, and he deserves full marks for the effort. He placed second in Race 1. In Race 3, he was right up there when he made a mistake and shot into Canada’s Colton Facciotti (sigh), and went down pretty good. It only got worse from there, as it seemed the wind was out of his sails. He was twenty-ninth on the first lap and twenty-fourth on the second lap. Belgium’s Kevin Strijbos, the winner of the second moto, was twenty-ninth on the second lap after a fall (five spots and sixteen seconds behind Dungey), and Strijbos was able to catch and pass Dungey to finish two spots better in the race and a whopping twenty-one seconds ahead of Dungey.

Strijbos is a great rider (after all, he won Race 2 outright), but I refuse to believe he’s capable of putting thirty-seven seconds on an in-the-zone Ryan Dungey in a thirty-minute-plus-two-lap race. But that’s exactly what he did in Race 3 this past weekend. Full marks for Dungey’s second place in Race 1, but Race 3 left me scratching my head once again at a Dungey-at-the-MXDN ride, because that’s not the Ryan Dungey that I’ve seen crush dudes over here week in and week out.

Maybe he was hurt (although he didn’t appear to be), and I know from talking to Team USA guys that his bike was fine. Weird, man, it’s just weird.

Jeremy Martin rode the MX2 class and did what he could with broken toes and a broken foot. Yes, you read that right. Martin suffered a bad crash in the qualifying race on Saturday and went over the bars. I’m sure he was shot up like a circus elephant on Sunday to just try to make it through the day. Some members of Team USA said that had it been his shifting foot he wouldn’t have been able to race. I also heard that he couldn’t take his boot off in between motos, so they just left his dirty gear on.

In the end, Martin went 11-13 in his two races and finished fourth overall in the MX2 class. They weren’t great scores, but what do you want out of a dude that was as jacked up as him? He should be applauded for his grit and toughness out there. It’s just a shame that he crashed.

The question is: How would he have done had he not crashed? He was second in timed practice, half a second off the great Antonio Cairoli, but a big 1.1 seconds ahead of the eventual winner Tommy “Gun” Searle, so that’s a pretty good indicator that J Mart would’ve done well. 

But in the qualifying race before he ate poop, Martin wasn’t making that much progress, as he was in sixth before the crash. Flip-flopping back, he did have the third fastest time of the race. It’s hard to say how he would’ve done for sure, but a reasonable human being would say that a top-three in MX2 would’ve been very easy for him to attain. We’ll never know, and it’s now just for the bench racers of the world to decide.

Although going down in the first turn of Race 3 wasn’t really awesome (at this point USA would’ve needed a pretty amazing moto to snatch the win away from the French), it got worse with Dungey going down later that lap. It was over for the USA. But no one told  EliTomac that as he ripped through the pack. Tomac was unreal. (It was apparent from Tomac’s body language that he was very angry, and he later confirmed that he was indeed “pissed.”) He was on fire, finishing third, right on second and not far off Paulin. And that was with a stall later on in the moto. His best lap time was one-tenth away from being two seconds faster than Paulin’s, who won.

You see that and, just like Dungey, wonder what was going on in the other race. Tomac got a bad start and came from the back to catch up to Tanel Leok and Fast Freddie Noren for fifth. Watching the race, one would expect Tomac to say “See ya later,” and get past the two riders. Instead he just stayed there for the last ten minutes. It was like Leok had some sort of force field around him. Tomac later said that he got arm pump and was powerless to move forward anymore. He attributed his out-of-this-world speed in Race 3 to a fork setting change he made.

I’m a big fan of Freddie Noren—whose fifth-place finish was impressive—but please tell me if there were any motos this summer that Noren beat Tomac in or even saw him at any point outside of the starting line? Exactly.

To recap, we have Kevin Strijbos putting thirty-seven seconds on Dungey in one moto, and Tomac unable to pass Tanel Leok or Freddie Noren in another.

Some of Tomac’s lines were a little weird, also, as he elected to head-way to the outside in a couple of corners. The one where we were standing by was .4 slower to go outside. At the airport Monday morning, I was chatting with the Tomacs, and his father John told me that he was onto Eli for his lines after that second moto.

My buddy Jason Thomas was a little critical of the USA’s choice to put Tomac, a notoriously bad starter, on the inside for the third moto while sticking Dungey with the outside pick. The thinking was, according to someone on Team USA I spoke with, that Dungey is a better starter and didn’t need the “help” of the inside gate like Tomac did. JT’s point is that you need the low number for a score and Dungey’s not great at passing, so give Dungey the advantage and let him go. Tomac’s a better passer and is used to coming from the back, so the outside gate wouldn’t faze him. I can see JT’s point as well as Team USA’s point to this—whatever, it wasn’t the reason USA lost—but it goes to show you there is some strategy involved with this race.

Let’s dive a little deeper into Team USA’s performances in this three-year streak and see what, if anything, the Yanks need to do to stop the losses and get back on top at this race.

It is no surprise this streak started in the deep sand of Lommel. The Americans were never going to win there. It’s hard to compete against the Europeans have regular access to the track and grow up riding in the sand. Just to make the podium there was an accomplishment. 

The German and Latvian tracks were ones the Americans could handle, though. Kegums was certainly sandier than I thought it would be, but it’s a lot like Millville or RedBud in places, just deeper. The sand developed roller bumps in them like the above-mentioned tracks, but there was a hard enough base that chop and square-edged braking bumps surfaced. Anyone who points to the surface as the reason why USA lost needs to come up with a plan for the loss last year in Germany. So I don’t think it’s been the tracks these last two years. 

Here’s a three-point “plan” to think about when it comes to Team USA in 2015:

450 on a 250?

The Americans might want to look at is putting their three best riders on the team regardless of cc specialty. This year Cairoli dropped down to a 250F to help his team, and Jeremy Van Horebeek was scheduled to do it for Belgium before an injury to Clement Desalle forced him back up. Of course Tommy Searle did it for Great Britain and came away with the overall win in MX2. 

For whatever reason the Americans don’t like to do this and they don’t really even think of it. There were some murmurs of Eli Tomac dropping down to the 250F and putting Trey Canard on the 450, but I’m told the USA never really considered this an option. 

Why not? Speed is speed, and any rider on Team USA has extensive time on the 250 as well as support if they aren’t on a team that races 250s. USA 250 national champion Jeremy Martin wasn’t able to be at his best due to a bad crash on Saturday, so we never saw what he could do, but bottom line is he crashed while in sixth in Saturday’s qualifying race. It wasn’t like he was running away with it. 

In past years Blake Baggett and Trey Canard haven’t done as well as they, or the team, would’ve liked to in the MX2 class. Jeremy was heroic for going out there, but the record shows Martin was responsible for the two worst scores USA had. Whether it’s the egos of the 450 stars or USA management not thinking outside the box, I’m not sure why USA doesn’t think about this. Johnny O’Mara, Jeff Ward, and Bob Hannah all did it in the '80s and helped USA to wins. This time around, Cairoli’s move certainly looked like it was going to work out well until he crashed, and Great Britain used Searle’s finishes to help them tie the USA.

Too many helpers?

Roger DeCoster, the team manager, made no excuses or passed on any blame when I spoke to him, but this theory on the American team was interesting:

“But there’s so much pressure on our guys also at this event. We have such a big entourage, and I think we need to look a little bit at the fact that we have too many opinions, too many experts talking to the riders trying to tell them what they should be doing,” DeCoster said. “I think these guys are too good to keep being told all day “you need to go win.” Today these guys, if they’re going to come here they want to win, we need to back off a little bit, let them do their job, and trust that they’re going to do as good as they can do.” 

DeCoster hints at pressure on the riders from all the people that surround them. The size of Team USA has become a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for many of the European teams and press, and I have to admit that I’m in agreement with this. As a mechanic for Tim Ferry in Team USA in 2003, we had about ten people total for all three riders. Nowadays there seems to be about triple that number. The support is nice, but Roger’s theory about everyone bending the ears of the riders could be true.

Perhaps closing the ranks off a little bit, bringing Team USA all under one tent (for the past four or five years, the American riders have been pitting with the OEMs that help them out), adapting a bit more solidarity among the team and a guerilla attitude might help.

Stewie?

And there is the James Stewart question…isn’t there always a James Stewart question in our sport? There’s no doubt that Stewart is one of the very best riders we have in America; yet there’s never any chance he gets picked for the team. Why is that? Stewart’s gone on record as saying that DeCoster doesn’t like him, he doesn’t like Roger, and that’s why he’ll never get to go. Stewart recently told me that he’s open to going and fine with DeCoster, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever get picked.

Many times Stewart hasn’t made it to the end of the series healthy enough to be picked, and this year he missed the last half of the Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Championship for…well, I don’t really know. And he has this FIM provisional suspension for testing positive for amphetamines in supercross hanging over him right now. I get it, he brings some baggage with him and perhaps DeCoster just doesn’t want to deal with it. 

But Stewart’s ridden and won for Team USA before and although not as dominant as he was years ago, he still went 1-1 at a national this year and won a bunch of supercrosses. He’s one of the fastest riders to ever throw a leg over a bike and he should be in the mix to go if he’s healthy, but DeCoster doesn’t even look at him. 

In a way the Stewart question goes back to my putting a 450 guy on a small bike. Would anyone bet against a Team USA of Ryan Villopoto, Ryan Dungey, and James Stewart with one of them in the MX2 class? 

I don’t have all the answers (or perhaps none!), but one loss is a fluke, two is an accident, but three losses is, to me, a trend. Perhaps it’s time for a Team USA overhaul and a second look at the way things are done?

Can someone please let me know what Team Australia was thinking for this event? Of course Chad Reed brought his race bike from America (with Öhlins suspension on it by the way!) and all of his crew, which was fine, though Reed crashed in every single moto he raced. I’m confused about why his teammates Matt Moss and Luke Clout showed up with just their handlebars to slap on some bikes they borrowed. These weren’t just any bikes they got—they were full works bikes—but they weren’t set up for Moss or Clout. Showing up with just handlebars and trying to wing it with suspension set up for someone else is just an amazing waste of time in my opinion. A real head-shaker for sure and not shocking that Moss and Clout struggled at the race. 

At this point I’m pretty sure the Belgians could send pretty much three random guys off the street and top-five the event. They are so solid no matter who’s on the team. Without its best rider (Desalle), the little country that could finished second with some great rides from its two bigger names—Kevin Strijbos and Van Horebeek. Someone told me it’s been twenty years since Belgium has finished outside the top five at this event and I believe them. 

If Shaun Simpson hadn’t broken a chain with five laps to go in Race 3, Team Great Britain would have claimed third overall and kept the Yanks off the podium. Yes, it was that close. As it were, the Brits were great with Simpson, Searle, and Dean Wilson (remember when he rode for Canada? That was awesome. I’m now going to light myself on fire) putting in some great rides. Searle dropping down was a good move; perhaps I’ve already covered this? **AHEM USA***