Team Honda and the HRC tag still burns brightly in this industry. The long run of success from 1982-1996 will probably forever go unmatched. (Team Honda won 250 Supercross Championships in '82, '83, '84, '86, '88, '89, '90, '91, '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, or 13 titles in 15 years. Congrats to Jeff Ward for toppling Honda twice on his Kawasaki. No one else could!)
This is an amazing run, and it is also…a long time ago. Honda hasn’t won the ‘ship since Ricky Carmichael’s back-to-back crowns in 2002 and 2003. Meanwhile, all the competitive brands (Kawasaki, Yamaha, Suzuki, KTM, and Husqvarna) have all won the title at least once.
But Team Honda still has that glow. Plus, they’re still a threat. Packing Ken Roczen and Chase Sexton again, there is the talent and speed to get this done. Erik Kehoe is out as Team Manager and Lars Lindstrom has moved in. What steps are Roczen and Sexton taking to close on that elusive #1 plate? They talked about it last night in the pre season press conference.
For Roczen, the issue as of late has been his physical health. He’s plenty fast but he has had his issues at assorted races, often in the late laps. He continues the search for a solution.
What did Kenny do to step up this year?
“I actually ended up going to Europe this year to catch up with some family. More of a business trip rather than just pleasure,” said Roczen. “I went over to the APC training facility, which are the Red Bull guys in Austria. That was awesome. Obviously, I’ve had history with them. Back in the GP’s, that’s where I always used to go a few times a year and did a bunch of my training and testing stuff. We had some great fun there. They have just upped it a whole other level when it comes to the performance side of things and really have a specialist in every category. So, I really, really enjoyed going back there. For us, it was basically just going back to the basics on the training sides of things. I was super covered schedule-wise. Me and Blake looked at it like a collab a little bit. A couple of changes going on there, which is all great. I saw a doctor over there to try and get some more things figured out and that did really, really well. Everything was going to plan until mid-December. I came down with a gnarly sickness, for some reason. Kind of still battling the effects of it a little bit. It wasn’t COVID, but still battling the effects a little bit which kind of threw a wrench in our program for this December. That was a bit of a struggle. At the same time, I honestly kind of revived myself a little bit. I had a really good year in 2021. I just really made the sport my hobby again and training and everything. It just felt really good to go back to having fun and spending a lot of time at the track and trying to work on my craft a little bit.”
Roczen had an all-new CRF450R to work with last year. It looked like it worked well from the get-go, however, Roczen says they’ve made strides for year two.
“I feel like whether you’ve been on a motorcycle for a long time or not, we always want to try and get better. I’ve had my problems last year as well with the motorcycle that I wasn’t too stoked on,” he says. “You try and work on it again. It’s really never perfect, but it’s about making it work and getting it consistent on every part of the track. Same thing with this year. Overall, the testing side of things just takes up so much time. You can’t only just be testing and then before you know it the off-season is over and you haven’t done any laps. So, you’ve got to just try and find a happy medium. That doesn’t always mean that we are getting better and better and all of a sudden everything is great. We always every day try and better ourselves. You’ve got to explore other directions than what you usually go with and hope to find something that clears the issue from the year before.
“We have learned a ton this off-season and kind of taken some things off the table that really didn’t apply or didn’t really make us any better, and we applied some other things that potentially will make the motorcycle and us better,” he says. “I guess that’s the fun thing about testing. There’s a lot of moving parts on the motorcycle. It’s kind of fun picking those things out, but sometimes we’re in a little bit of a time crunch. I think that goes for everybody.”
Because he was so fast and successful at such an early age, Roczen will always garner hype and attention. Chase Sexton’s arrival on the radar is more recent. In fact, some fans are wondering why Sexton, who had a good 250 career but was certainly not the most dominant rider ever, is capturing this much hype.
His peers are responsible for a lot of this. Talk to the other racers and they’re the ones that marvel over Chase Sexton’s style. They watch the tapes and the ghost software. They see what he can do on a bike. That’s what leads to the hype.
DMXS Radio’s David Izer started Sexton’s press conference section like this:
“On the pre-season television show, Daniel Blair put a lot of pressure on you. He said you were as fast and as gritty as Cooper Webb, and you’re younger. With this much pressure, do you feel like with the older guys in the class that you are this guy, that this is going to be your step to contend for a championship this year already?”
“I appreciate Daniel’s kind words,” replied Sexton. “I wouldn’t really say it’s a lot of pressure. I appreciate what he said and I feel like I have the potential to do big things in the sport. That’s kind of been my dream since I was a little kid. For me this year I’ve had a really good off-season, like everybody has said. I just feel refreshed and a little bit more calm coming into this year.”
Sexton crashed at round two last year (while leading). He missed a few races and then came back saying he had lost weight and gotten fitter.
“Last year I felt a little bit under-prepared coming into the first race,” he explained. “It kind of snowballed and I had a few crashes. I felt like I was always climbing back up and trying to get to a good spot. This year I feel like I gained fitness. Like I said, calm, more mature and hopefully a better version of what I was in 2021.
Sexton also said learning the limits of the 450 led to a lot of his crashes in ’21. What is it like setting up the bike this year?
“It’s a lot easier,” he says. “When I was younger I always looked forward to having a new platform. Two thousand eighteen was my rookie year in supercross and we had a new bike. With the 250F, I feel like it’s just a lot easier to set up than the 450 is, so I kind of got a fake sense of reality. Obviously, we had our struggles with that bike and then finally when I got off the 250 we were starting to really get to a spot where we felt like we were competitive. Now last year having a new bike and trying to learn the 450 on supercross, it’s difficult because I’m trying to learn a bigger bike on a tight track and I’m trying to figure out what the bike needs and what I can get away with. I think this year we’ve had all the notes we took last year and put it into a setting this year and it has been really good. Kenny and I are pretty close on settings. That’s kind of hard to believe, because we were on two opposite ends of the spectrum last year. We’re pretty close and now we can kind of share notes and lean on one another. We have the new 250 this year with Hunter and Jett, which is pretty similar to our bike. So, all four of us kind of putting our notes in. I feel like we came up with a really good setting. Overall just more comfortable than last year.”
Finally, Sexton was asked if he was coming for Webb and looking to take the title away this year.
“I wouldn’t say it’s just Cooper,” he says. “I think like he said, there’s probably 15 guys that could go and be on the podium. So, I think it’s going to be a competitive season and it’s something that I look forward to. It's not just three guys racing each other. I think all of us have potential to win races or be on the podium. That’s what I’m excited for. I think it’s going to be a good year for supercross.”
Watch the full 450SX press conference below:
