An athlete never truly arrives, as even after a title or a win the work is never finished. This applies to Chase Sexton in both the big and small pictures. In the summer of 2022 he was riding at a very high level and nearly reached the summit of Mount Everest—or the theoretical equivalent in this sport, which is beating Eli Tomac for a Pro Motocross Championship. Sexton was riding well, yet KTM folks were also interested to chat about his future. For Sexton, the question was similar to the one Tomac faced when he left Kawasaki. Yes, his old team wanted to keep him and made him an offer. But what about that other bike over there? Could it possibly be better?
We know that, a year later, Sexton’s Honda deal expired, and he was off to Red Bull KTM proper. By then he was Monster Energy AMA Supercross Champion, and Honda, in general, was in the midst of a massive run of success. He was headed out, though, to see if a new bike would be a better bike.
Well…it wasn’t an instant success. Sometimes we hear these grass-is-greener stories as soon as someone hops on something new (See Dylan Ferrandis) but credit to Sexton, he was honest throughout the off-season and never did much more than say that it’s a process to adjust to the new bike. “Overall, the bike is a lot different, it's a lot to get used to but it's fun for me as a rider to learn a different bike and see what it does better and what things I can work on,” he told us in December. Then when he finally did race it and snag a podium at A1, he really came clean, saying, “A couple of weeks ago if you had seen me, you would have said, ‘This guy is not doing good at A1.’”
Yes, there were insider tales of Sexton struggling with the new bike, but we’ve seen December test track days and January race days often do not reflect each other. And so, Sexton ends up winning round two and carrying the red plate for a week, and now sits just one point out of the series lead, just behind, yes, another KTM rider in Aaron Plessinger. That’s a heck of a turnaround.
“Before the season I was having some tough times. Just really struggling to get comfortable on a new bike,” Sexton said on the PulpMX Show on Monday. “Then we had a big test right before A1. We found some new stuff with the shock and the rear end of the bike. I raced A1 and was able to get through it. The forks I wasn’t able to really get comfortable with, but the week after we tried this whole new setup in the front, and it ended up working out real well. I haven’t really touched my bike (during the week after San Francisco), we messed with it this weekend because we had some dry conditions and I wanted some certain things fixed. For the main event that was the best I’d felt all day.”
Yup, a rough off-season but just-in-time fixes for the races.
“I shouldn’t say it was harder than I thought, but it was different,” he said. “I wasn’t finding any new problems, I was having the same problems and trying to find different ways of solving them. I’m trying to get better and better. You’re never going to have a perfect bike, really, but I’m trying to get as close as possible so I can feel like I can really push it. The last few days have been the best riding I’ve had all off-season.”
When Sexton first switched teams, he went on Adam Cianciarulo’s Plugged In podcast and explained that he was probably too “raw” and blunt with his bike comments when he first went to the Honda HRC 450 team. And there are stories of Sexton losing his cool back then, but it’s all under the guise of wanting more performance. Few who see Sexton outside of that environment will say he’s a bad guy. But when performance counts, he gets fired up. He hoped that personality would mesh better with the KTM staff.
“The team has been really working with me,” he says now. “I’ve been trying to be more mature and calm, and that’s hard for me. I just get really emotional when I test. I’m very passionate about racing. Like I said, it’s been really fun with the new guys, Carlos and Frankie, and it’s really enjoyable.”
On the Pulp Show, Steve Matthes also asked how Chase’s dad, Keir, got along during the bike struggles of the off-season. Chase and Keir can both get fired up. “[Laughs] I can say the preseason was not the calmest we’ve ever been as a team,” says Chase. “But we’ve been getting better. Its’ a learning thing for him and for me.”
It’s easy for a team to act nice when they’re in recruitment mode, but has KTM actually provided that family feel when things get down to business at the test track? Sexton was asked about working with Team Manager Ian Harrison.
“He’s a really nice guy, honestly, through and through a nice guy,” Sexton says. “He and Roger [De Coster] are the ones who came to me and were eager about signing me. His positive attitude has been really nice for me, because I’m passionate. I expect to be up there, and he’s more calm, and that’s something I needed in my corner. As well as Roger. He’s highly respected. It’s kind of cool that they’ve stayed together so long, so they know each other really well. Actually, the whole team, they know how to get the most out of the bike and out of me. They’re really familiar with each other and that works really well.”
Chase is on a path of constant improvement, and he knows that’s not all on the bike. Kellen Brauer asked him about his own riding style, and how he’s trying to adapt and learn.
“I’ve always said the bike fits me better,” he said of the ergonomics. “That is the rider triangle, how I look on the bike and also how it feels to me. I honestly worked on getting farther back because a lot of times when I get too far forward, and that caused some of my crashes. With the Honda being a little bit taller in the rear, it wanted me to go to the front. This bike is a little bit flatter, doesn’t have as much pitch, it allows me to stay back and not push me to the front. It’s something I’ve practiced, but also the bike helps me stay back. I grew up riding ruts, and you want to ride forward, pretty much. Then I moved to Florida and I had to learn to ride sand. I was not good at riding sand at first, because you need to be further back.”
It’s then that Sexton talks of his troubles of the past, which was losing the front end just when he seemed to be riding at his best. It wasn’t all because of the bike.
“Before, a lot of my front end little problems was me being too far over the front,” he says. “It wasn’t always me dealing with the bike, it was me being too far forward, and that’s something I needed to be conscious of and something I’ve been trying to fix.”
A great athlete’s work is never done. Sexton made the big change, went through an adjustment period, got it dialed, but continues to look for more. As everyone knows, the goal isn’t merely the red plate once, or a win in a mud race. That’s why he’s putting in the work.
“There were some dark times, I will say, in the off-season,” he says. “I’m glad we’re through those at this point…but I gotta win in the dry.”
