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You may remember I wrote a column on attending the first ever Sofia SX in Bulgaria a couple of weeks ago. That event was well run and pretty good, but there isn’t a Sofia SX if there wasn’t Bercy SX well before it. For thirty plus years, the Bercy Supercross has been the crown jewel of off-season supercross races and folks in Bulgaria can only dream of their race one day reaching such prominent status. Bright lights, big money, big stars and packed crowds in France make this the gigantic shining star in the world of European supercross. And once again, I was lucky enough to attend it.
Yeah, yeah, I know the race is no longer in Bercy, a suburb of Paris. Last year it moved 90 minutes north to Lille, a town on the border of Belgium. The same people run it, the same people promote it and it attracts the same stars. Lille is the where the arena is located, but the soul is still very much Bercy.
And back to Bercy. I want to go there for a minute because the terrorist attacks in downtown Paris on Friday night are a huge and very sad deal. If this attack happened two years earlier and we were in Bercy, there’s no doubt the race would have been cancelled. And really, seeing as how the attackers made a point of hitting the city in spots where masses of people had gathered, I’d even think a packed arena in Bercy would’ve been a target. If the race was still taking place in Bercy, this could have been much different.
I went to bed Friday night watching BBC News and hearing six or seven people had been shot at a bar. I woke up around 3 a.m. to a bunch of texts, emails, tweets saying to stay safe and asking if I was okay. I went to CNN.com on my phone and saw the count was around 130 dead. This news hung over the pits all weekend. We were pretty close to it all and there was a very real chance the politicians from Lille were going to shut the race down regardless of what the promoters wanted to do.
There was a bit of a delay on Saturday morning while we waited to see what was going to happen. As one of the key figures told me that morning, the big question was, “What was the benefit to holding the race and what’s the potential downside?” Seeing what happened the night before, those downsides were pretty considerable.
In the end, the race went on with a moment of silence each night to remember the people who were having an enjoyable Friday night with friends and then were senselessly gunned down. I have to say that although I enjoyed the weekend (and as you’ll read here, there was some great racing), my mind was never far from what happened on Friday night.
Je suis très désolé pour vos pertes France.
Okay, onto the race. As I mentioned, the Bercy SX is now the Lille SX and this was the second year of the switch. The building is bigger, so the race is better in some ways due to more fans watching, and the track is better than Bercy, which was pretty cramped. It’s much more of a USA track now, the seats are more comfortable, the pits are probably better, the Wi-Fi and pressroom are awesome…but it’s still not Bercy. I’ve heard that the race will never be able to go back due to the renovations at the arena and if that’s true, it’s a bit sad. Lille is great, but Bercy was something special. The Bercy building is older, and the seating angle puts the fans right on top of the riders. It also had the famous tunnels for the riders to race through, and the downtown Paris atmosphere is just remarkable. Lille is, in my opinion, still the best off-season Euro SX, but it’s not Bercy. Nothing can be Bercy and just like High Point taking the wall-berm out or Arby’s taking my favorite chicken club burger off the menu, things change and we have to deal with it.
When Sunday’s main event was about halfway done, I thought Christophe Pourcel was going to be King of Lille. The #377 finished a respectable third on night one, and when he grabbed the holeshot on night two and used a pile-up in the second turn to gap the rest of the riders, it looked like France was going to have its first winner at this event (with 3-1 scores) since Pourcel himself did it in 2006. Pourcel also set the fastest lap in the Super Pole contest earlier in the night and was doing a tricky three-four rhythm better than anyone else. At one point he had a seven second lead on second. It was over. Christophe Pourcel was going to be the King of Lille!
But after halfway, I was absolutely sure that Cooper Webb was going to be the King. Webb started mid-pack and for a long time couldn’t make a dent on Pourcel’s lead. Then Pourcel tired a bit, while Webb kept up consistent laps. Before you knew it, he was all over the back of Pourcel’s Husqvarna, and it seemed like a matter of time before Webb got by and his 2-1 finishes would give him the title. Webb had engaged Weston Peick the night before in a great battle that saw both riders pass each other back and forth the last three laps before Peick prevailed. Webb’s a bad dude and someone I think will be “The Man” in 450SX at some point, so perhaps his coronation would begin here at Lille?
Well, hold that thought because Webb got bucked on the last whoop off a dragon back and went over the bars hard. It was a nasty crash that left Webb seeing stars and probably wondering if he was in Lille or Leipzig. That ended Webb’s chance for victory, although he did get up and somehow salvaged fifth.
At that point I was back to thinking Pourcel had this thing in the bag. Peick, Saturday’s winner, had to go to the LCQ after a slide-out in his heat and with the bad gate pick, his start was predictably poor and his chances to win the King of Lille were just as bad.
Peick had managed to work his way to third but that was about where he was going to finish because GEICO Honda’s Malcolm Stewart was in second. Although a ways from Pourcel, Mookie was far enough ahead of Weston that Pourcel’s 3-1 was going to beat Peick’s 1-3. Pourcel was back to being the man.
Then Stewart crashed on perhaps the easiest double on the track when he either got sucked into a rut or hit a false neutral. Bingo, bango, Mookie was over the bars bad. Somehow he escaped injury, although his bike did not. That was the gift Peick needed to get into second (although full props for Weston coming from around tenth to third in the first place). Pourcel won Sunday’s race but had 3-1 scores for the weekend, which meant Peick won the battle with a 1-2 for his first ever King of Bercy. Back in the pits, he celebrated by thinking of crude ways the winner’s trophy could be used on his mechanic Patty.
Combine Webb and Stewart’s crashes with some heavy ones from Frenchmen Dylan Ferrandis and Nicolas Aubin and you had a nutty race from start to finish. The track broke down, got soft and rutty and when you add in the riders pushing it, you got carnage.
If you were thinking “Hey, man, wasn’t James Stewart at this race?” you would be correct. But Stew didn’t have a good weekend at all. He set the fastest time in practice on Saturday but it took him a while to do the three-four combo and he didn’t lay that many fast laps down. He did win the Super Pole contest on Saturday thanks to some blazing whoop speed (did you watch Straight Rhythm? He’s Stew, bro, he can always ride whoops!), but he crashed in his heat while leading then got a poor start in the main. He came into a turn hot, plowed straight into the berm and fell over. It was a weird crash and Stew got up limping and had to be carried off the track with a foot injury. I heard it’s not broken or anything, but it was bad enough that he was done for the weekend.
Stew is supposed to race in Australia next weekend. Last week he sent out a PR saying he was pulling out of that race before what I would bet were many lawyers making him change his mind, leading to the announcement that he was back in. I would bet a lot of money that he’s now back out for that race. The year off for an FIM suspension has definitely taken a bit of wind out of Stew’s sails with him failing to finish the Monster Energy Cup and now Lille due to crashes. Yes, he won the Red Bull Straight Rhythm, but this off-season has been rough for the #7 so far.
It was up to Mookie to hold the family name up, but his DNF-DNF scores over the two nights had him openly wondering if his team would even let him go to the next scheduled Euro SX in Geneva, Switzerland. Mookie was on a 250F and was hella-fast but he also hit the ground hella-hard. Not a good weekend for the Stewart brothers, but I suppose the good news is it can only get better from here!
Shaun Simpson has had one of those years where everything he did turned to magic. The Scot won a couple of GPs as a privateer, got a factory bike for next year, did great at the Unadilla National and showed up at Lille hoping to get some decent results. Simpson, like a lot of Europeans, doesn’t have a lot of supercross experience but he fared pretty well throughout the weekend. Fourth best time in the Super Pole contest on Sunday was solid and good starts led him to some good lap times. Unfortunately for Shaun, he was forced to jump off the track in the second corner of Sunday’s main event and landed on a freestyle ramp! That ended his race, but overall he was pretty good throughout the weekend.
MXGP World Champion Romain Febvre was there and like Simpson, he doesn’t have a lot of supercross experience. Also, a lot like Simpson, he got better every time he was out on the track. There was a huge single there before the start straight (the landing for the FMX guys) and Febvre, not James Stewart, not Malcolm Stewart, not Cooper Webb, was the best guy at scrubbing it and staying low. Like Antonio Cairoli at Bercy a few years ago, he didn’t look awesome right away but he’s a world-class rider so he figured things out rather quickly.
I’m 100 percent positive that if there were supercross whoops put into any of the last four Motocross of Nations tracks then Team USA would not have this losing streak. Anytime I’m at an off-season Euro race it’s very obvious that the European racers do not have whoops down. It’s probably a combination of rider skills and a lack of whoop experience for their suspension guys. Going back to Febvre, I’m sure in his nightmares he’ll see a set of huge SX whoops coming at him laughing manically.
The best part of these races is the downtime to hang out with everyone. Everyone usually eats together, hangs out in the hotel lobbies and around the pits with one another. Here are, in no particular order, some of the highlights of the off-track stuff:
- Peick’s mechanic Patrick Barker is leaving his job at JGR because he wanted to get off the road so Peick just referred to Barker as “The quitter” all weekend.
- The amount of jokes that Cooper Webb, Parker, Peick and myself made about “Filthy” Phil Nicoletti all weekend.
- Me trying to sneak Pulpmx.com stickers on Peick’s bike or helmet this weekend only to be foiled by Weston each time. Worked in Bulgaria though!
- Roger Larsen from Seven gear was working on Stew’s helmet after his heat race crash when I noticed that the mouth guard looked funny. I pulled on it and it came right off revealing that the tab had broken. Roger didn’t think this was funny but then realized that I had saved the day. And they didn’t have a matching painted one so it was a solid color the rest of the weekend. Still, I showed them there was a problem. #problemsolver
- You would think that Webb and Febvre would absolutely hate each other after racing hard at the Glen Helen USGP, the Motocross of Nations, the All-Japan National and now Lille, but they actually have a bit of a bro-mance going on. That’s a good thing because they have probably another ten years of racing each other.
- We went to the same restaurant next to the hotel for every single meal and at one point our waitress thought that Barker, Peick’s mechanic, was a racer. She did not think for one second that I was one however.
- Getting into the TV booth with Paul Malin for a couple of segments was cool but I forgot to bring up his 1994 MXDN win for the first time on-air in years. Dammit, now that streak is over!
- The moment of silence for the victims of the attacks in the arena was chilling. Not a sound made by 13,000 thousand people for a couple of minutes.
Thanks for reading, I enjoyed my time in Lille, but at the same time with everything that was going on I definitely felt a little uneasy that first night of racing. Makes you understand how small this sport is in the big picture. Email me at matthes@racerxonline.com if you want to chat.
