“The thing about Cooper is he would always learn,” said Rusty Reynolds of Triangle Cycles. “At the beginning of the week at Mini Os, he wouldn’t be the fastest guy, but at the end of the week, he’d be right there, or beating them.”
Reynolds was there in the early days, one of Cooper Webb’s first big backers. I ran into him at Loretta’s this year, as Cooper was about to head to the stage to be introduced as a factory Yamaha 450 rider for 2017. This ascension from very good to great did not surprise him at all.
The slow build has been Cooper Webb’s style in both his career and individual races. This summer, specifically, he made his mark with late charges, usually after the 15-minute mark in the races, and also five rounds into the 12-race series. As a pro, he broke in with a fifth in his first career moto, which was very good but not a win like Eli Tomac. In his first supercross, he was also very good, with another fifth, but not a race winner in his debut like a few riders such as Ryan Dungey. Instead of exploding onto the scene, he entered it very hot.
Further, he rarely dominates a race from the first lap the way we see Ken Roczen do it; he’s not always the fastest man in practice. But he’s effective and efficient, he rises to the occasion, and he’s able to do something few riders can—be his own critic.
“Still to this day, I watch all the races,” Webb said after wrapping up the 250 National Motocross Championship at Budds Creek. “I really break down where I can be better. I think that’s what’s really helped me this year was just I put my ego to the side and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to learn from these guys and whatever I suck at I’m going to go practice. I’m not going to sit here and just drill motos.’ I suck at doing this—not suck, but struggle—and I went out and I practiced it, fixed all the problems I had from the previous years. It’s always great to see progress but I think a lot of people skip that aspect. In any sport if you struggle with something you’ve got to practice it.”
He would need all of that self-criticism Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Ironically, one hallmark of the FIM World Motocross Grand Prix circuit is the long two-day format that offers plenty of time to find speed. But rain wiped out day one in Charlotte, and when Webb found himself fourth overall in free practice and about a second and a half off of the top three, including MX2 dominator Jeffrey Herlings. There wasn’t much time left to figure out where to find that speed. Over at the Yamalube/Star Racing Yamaha pits there a very serious scene unfolding.
“I was pretty nervous, to be honest, to come in here. Obviously I follow the series and I knew how fast Jeffrey is. I was pretty nervous. Just coming in I wanted to keep calm and do what I always did. After practice these guys were quite a bit faster than me and everything so I really had to study what they were doing and apply it to everything,” Webb said post-race in Charlotte. “You wake up certain days and you go to races and you’re fastest in practice, you win the first moto, you win the second moto and everything’s awesome. I think today I had to kind of overcome, learning and applying everything to be there with those guys.”
Even in the first moto at Charlotte, he still wasn’t quite there. When Austin Forkner fell and held Webb up, it allowed Herlings to get next to him. I was standing in the very corner where Forkner fell, and I noticed Webb looking over, knowing Herlings would be next to him by the time they got to that big, sweeping first turn. Webb knew he had to stop that pass, but Herlings made it stick. Webb also knew Herlings would then lay down a hard sprint to get away, but while he tried to stay with him, he couldn’t.
Maybe he could mount one of those late-moto charges? Not this time.
He was closer in the first moto than he was in practice, but he still wasn’t fast enough to win. And when he started last in moto two, this one looked over, especially since the Charlotte track didn’t offer many opportunities to make up a ton of time.
Twenty minutes into the second moto, Cooper was up to third, but he, Forkner and Herlings were basically running identical lap times, unable to make up ground on each other. Then on one lap, I saw Forkner and Herlings go inside in the right hander before the mechanic’s area. Webb went outside. He murdered that corner. He railed it. He killed it! And you could just see the way he tilted his head coming out of the turn…he was in the zone and he was looking for Herlings. He was going to go for it.
Webb finally figured it all out, and when everyone else was starting to get tired from pushing the intensity, he went into a zone. Same zone we saw at Muddy Creek this year. You folks have been to enough races and stood on the fence enough times to know it when you see it. It’s that little difference when you know a dude is digging deep, thinking, “I can do this.”
We’ve seen Webb do this so often that it removes some of the shock value, but I still don’t quite understand how he does it. It’s especially hard in motocross, where the team can’t just video every lap and then analyze it all in the truck after practice and between races. I saw Cooper talking to Chad Reed after the race, but he broke down to very simple terms like, “I needed to stop riding like a jackass.”
Surely it’s more complex than that. I asked Cooper’s mechanic, Eric Gass, how his rider finds this speed. Gass said teams always have guys standing around the track, and maybe they can pick up on stuff, but that only helps so much. This one was on his rider.
“Honestly, it’s just him,” he said. “He just figures it out.”
