The date passed quietly a few weeks ago. It has now been 50 years since the birth of supercross, which began on July 8, 1972 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Dubbed the Superbowl of Motocross, the race attempted to place the best of motocross within the confines and comfort of a stadium. It worked, and this began what’s now known as the Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship. The invention of supercross is easily the biggest change in the trajectory of dirt bike racing over the last five decades.
Today comes the announcement of the 2023 SuperMotocross World Championship, a three-race series in the fall taking place after the traditional Monster Energy Supercross and Lucas Oil AMA Pro Motocross Championships. Fittingly, the final round will take place at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. This might be the biggest change since that first Superbowl of Motocross. Roger De Coster, who was around for those Coliseum events and is today the North American Racing Director for the KTM Group—but is known within these circles (more accurately) as The Man—senses the gravity of it.
“The creation of the SuperMotocross World Championship is the biggest and most positive step to ever happen in our sport,” De Coster said in today’s press release announcing the series.
How could a three-race playoff really have such a large impact? Well, real quick, let’s give you the concept of these races and then get back to the deeper meaning. Think of these races as something like the old Monster Energy Cup—a fall hybrid race—but now paying out points and its own championship. The big money remains. Riders will qualify for these three events via points scored in the individual Monster Energy Supercross and Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Championships (which will still hand out their own titles). Purse money is about to go up significantly at all the races throughout the year, including a big bonus for that SuperMotocrcoss World Championship, with the total prize for the season standing at $10 million. Where does the money come from? Bigger TV and media revenue—which is what you get when you sell the sport as a whole and not as individual, separate seasons.
That’s big and new, but that’s not what gets De Coster talking. De Coster, and the industry, is buzzing about the collaborative process that it took to get here.
“This is the first time, actually, since the very beginning of the sport in America that the two groups are working together,” De Coster says of the new collaboration between Feld Motorsports (producers of Monster Energy Supercross) and MX Sports Pro Racing (producers of Lucas Oil Pro Motocross, and a sister company of Racer X).
“For years and years there’s been friction and all that,” De Coster says. “This is … the biggest news in our sport as far as the organization side. We really look forward to it, and there seems to be a real effort now to work with the industry. In the past there was always the feeling that they were out to get us, the side of the promoters and the AMA. Now they want to work with us. You can see what that can do. That’s what Dorna is doing with MotoGP, and MotoGP has become huge. I think we have the potential to emulate that.”
You used to hear the chatter about Monster Energy Supercross not really embracing Lucas Oil Pro Motocross, and vice versa. That all changed at the Daytona Supercross in 2020, with a closed-door meeting between Feld’s Todd Jendro and Dave Prater and MX Sports’ Carrie Coombs-Russell and Davey Coombs. It was a simple “Hey, can we just get along?” meeting to clear the air and maybe help each other through social media promotion. Maybe motocross can tweet about supercross in the winter, and supercross can tweet about motocross in the summer. That was it.
“You’d hear fans comment, teams and OEMs comment, ‘Oh those two groups hate each other.’ And that’s not good!” says Prater, the Vice President of Supercross. “That’s not good for either series, either company, or the industry as a whole to have this perception that these two giants are at odds. There was some validity to that at times, because of things that had happened in the past with the previous regime, but in the current state the relationship was fine. But you just continue to hear it, so we just wanted to set the record straight once and for all and walk out of that room friendly.”
Literally five days after that meeting, the two groups were forced to work together when the COVID-19 pandemic put the world on lockdown. Good thing the ice had already been broken.
“I thank God all the time we had that meeting at Daytona and we didn’t wait until Indy, because then it just looks like a reaction to Indy Supercross being cancelled,” Prater says. “Carrie [Coombs-Russell] was instrumental to creating the Safe to Race Task Force to get racing going again, and we were part of that group. Aside from that, we were collaborating together individually on scheduling. We went from saying, ‘Hey let’s work together in the future’ to being forced to work together a week later.”
Both series adjusted schedules together and completed their racing calendars in 2020. The groups looked back and realized working together really does have benefits. Of course, this was obvious from the outside. Do any hardcore fans of the sport really see the two series as separate, anyway?
In February of 2021, Monster Energy’s Dave Gowland stopped by MX Sports’ Morgantown, West Virginia, office with prominent IndyCar and NASCAR team owner Chip Ganassi at his side. The gentlemen were en route to the Daytona 500 but wanted to drop a quick message: the sport would be better if both series worked together. This wasn’t a motive from Monster Energy on the business side, it was just two people with deep backgrounds in racing (Gowland was once team manager for Kawasaki Team Green and Rockstar Energy Suzuki) stating the obvious.
By the way, check your email inbox from last summer July 26, 2021. That’s the day both series sent out email surveys to the fans, asking fans if they watch both supercross and motocross championships. You can probably guess what the data indicated.
To get to this point, some of the biggest heavies in racing met at the Feld offices in Bradenton, Florida, in April of 2021. The MX Sports team, the Feld team, and AMA Sports Pro Racing’s Jim France and his team all began to explore opportunities to work together.
“That’s where Kenneth [Feld] said are there opportunities to work together,” Carrie Coombs-Russell says. “He’s very engaged, and he’s had his finger on the pulse since the day we said we had this idea together. Think of what he’s accomplished on the business side of things, and the team he has assembled. He gave us access to that team.”
“We started to build a relationship, and we found so many commonalities,” says Kenneth Feld, the Chair and CEO of Feld Motorsports. “I would say the major thing is that you’ve got two family-owned private businesses. What happens is—and I’ve seen this somewhat before—but we take a very long view of the business. We want to grow the sport. Everything we’ve done in the 53 years that I’ve been involved in our business is really grow franchises and have the long-term view. What I realized after having a lot of conversations with Carrie Jo Coombs-Russell, is that she and their family really have the same mission and the same goal. And that’s what they’ve done. When you look at the amateur side, with Loretta Lynn’s, that’s where the sport begins. That’s the future of the sport. So for us to work together, to collaborate, it was just logical. It allows us to work together along with our partners, the OEMs, and bring more value to the table.
Feld’s primary goal was exponential growth.
“I can tell you from day 1, Kenneth believed that,” Prater says. “He would tell us that the sum is greater than the parts. One plus one equals three, at least, and the aggregate value is much more than individual championships by themselves.”
“I said, well, my TV contract is up,” Coombs-Russell explains. “Take it to market for us.”
There are many huge upsides to this process, but just to keep this story out of the weeds and keep you interested, here’s the finish: selling two series together as one season-long TV property, and including a final playoff-style set of three rounds with a cool tagline like SuperMotocross World Championship, gets TV executives excited. The two series believe they can capture a bigger bounty for TV rights than by working individually. Because of that influx of capital, there’s an increase in purse money coming, both at the individual races and in a title bonus at those final events. Probably better promotion, too. All sports need better TV, and also more TV revenue to pay the athletes. Combining the two series into one media deal does that.
How different is today’s relationship? Previously, the two series had TV deals that expired on opposite years. The offsetting contracts literally prevented the two series from shopping for TV together. When MX Sports’ TV deal expired at the end of 2021, it could easily have entered into new multi-year deals, but chose instead to take a one-year deal to align the timing with supercross. The series stuck with long-time sponsor Lucas Oil and its Lucas Oil Productions TV arm, with MAVTV and MAVTV Plus. That streaming app never quite worked properly, and has now moved over to FloRacing. Streaming the races this summer hasn’t been as effective as it should be. The sport, as a whole, is always fighting for visibility on TV and the media market in general. Perhaps selling itself as one can improve the situation.
“We think this is the way to really enhance the overall interest in the sport and have continuity from the OEMs, our partners, so they get the full benefit,” Feld says. “The final goal, which is the primary goal, is to get more fans to appreciate what it takes, to appreciate these athletes, and the enjoy the sport.”
“I made the comment at one of the meetings recently that we’re kind of a C-level sport,” Kawasaki Racing’s Bruce Stjernstrom says. “People laugh at that, but then the same people will say, ‘I can’t believe golf gets so much TV coverage!’ They pay more prize money to 20th place than we pay for both series all year. So I think the idea of a year-long series, encompassing both series, even some additional events, is very intriguing for television people who can give us a better opportunity on TV to make this segment more important to people who aren’t in the paddock. It's something people expect—who is the best guy? We’ve come to accept the way things are, but once you get outside of our paddock, people scratch their heads over probably 50 percent of the things that we do.”
Teams are excited because they feel more involved in the decision making than ever before—yes, ever before, to De Coster’s point. A new steering committee has been formed where teams get to weigh in on rules, officiating, and the future.
“We always had team meetings before, but never anything happened from them,” De Coster says. “Pretty soon the meetings just faded away, because people were tired of sitting around talking and talking without any concrete action. This definitely feels different—it feels like a ‘working together’ atmosphere instead of working against each other atmosphere. Before there was always a feeling that we were trying to take advantage of things or take things we didn’t deserve, and maybe that was from both sides. Now there’s really talk about cooperating and exchanging ideas. I’ve never felt this way before.”
“The key word is exponential,” Prater says. “The teams’ excitement is exponential from what it would have been if we had done something by ourselves. I don’t even know if we would have had any excitement if we had done something by ourselves, like a new Monster Energy Cup event or whatever it could have been. But coming together, it’s been refreshing to see these guys getting legitimately excited.”
If you want proof, realize that the race teams are usually asking for shorter schedules and fewer races. If you consider Monster Energy Cup part of the usual racing schedule, the year should feature 30 races. There will be one less Lucas Oil Pro Motocross National held in 2023, so when you add up the traditional 17-round Monster Energy Supercross season with 11 Pro Motocross races and three SuperMotocross World Championship events, you arrive at 31. The teams have already expressed an interest in paring that down to 30 in future years. The ’23 season will end on October 14, but it’s expected that the season will end in September in 2024 (simply, they wanted to hold the finale symbolically at the Coliseum, but September dates weren’t available for 2023). For now, and for once, the teams are willing to be flexible, and patient.
“We’re looking at the playoff side of things as a concession from the teams to make the TV thing work,” Kawasaki Racing’s Stjernstrom says. “Everyone has realized you need to give something to get something.”
What the teams want to get is a better, more well-aligned rulebook, better officiating, and a longer-term vision of where the industry is going. MX Sports and Feld are working on it, along with traditional sanctioning bodies AMA and AMA Pro Racing.
“We’re working on the rulebooks and to align the anti-doping programs and drug testing,” Prater says.
“We understand we need to work together so it can be better—more formalized officials, training and education,” Coombs-Russell says. “This is an opportunity to improve officiating, and the AMA will lead that charge. Mike Pelletier does a great job at supercross, and we’re going to work together to get the best officiating team from the AMA. We’re going to take the best of both sides.”
“We can never be an A sport,” Stjernstrom says, referencing the more traditional stick and ball sports. “But we could be a B sport with the right leadership. I’m really happy to see what’s happening now. I think the direction is the right one. Everybody has so much in common—it was almost laughable that it has taken this long to do it. But it’s nothing to laugh about. We have never been as closely on the same page ever in this sport as we are right now.”
