Well, the field is set for this Friday’s Yamaha LCQ Challenge race in Denver, Colorado. Thanks for Feld Motor Sports for letting us do this, thanks to you guys for buying raffle tickets to try to win a 2024 Yamaha YZ450F or some other cool prizes. We'll keep the raffle open until Monday, so keep donating. View the raffle link and prize page.
What we do is take all that raffle money and put 100 percent of it into a giant purse for this weekend. I think we'll reach 100k, for real. Feld Motor Sports lets us run a race on Friday afternoon, and the privateers duke it out for the money. Of course, we all know it’s hard to figure out just who is really a privateer these days. Is Dean Wilson a privateer? You know what I mean?
So, here’s the format I came up with to determine who gets to race for the money: We took all the 450SX LCQ results this year and awarded fifth place (first guy to not make the main) 25 points, the sixth-place guy (second guy not to make the main) got 22, and so on. My idea is that the dudes who are routinely just missing mains are still great riders but definitely aren’t making a lot of money. This race helps them.
Anyways, after winning the whole thing last year as a wild card, Josh Cartwright didn’t have the season he wanted to and won this “LCQ Championship” going away this year, with the most points of anyone. I guess that deserves a congrats?
Beyond that, we took the top 17 in the points and then five wild cards which for the first time I wanted to reward solid hard working 250SX dudes, so I went with TJ Albright, Henry Miller, Marshall Weltin, Logan Leitzel, and Geran Stapleton. The caveat for these dudes is they HAVE to ride their 250 in this race. Some of the riders got a little mad at me about this but rules are rules!
The format is something I dreamed up in a haze one day at the U2 show at the Sphere and it’s incredible [Editor’s note: You know Steve had to get in at least one Sphere mention!]. We’re going to do two main events each five minutes plus one lap and then for the second main stagger start them 22-1 for the second main. So, the better your finish in the first race, the worse you will start in the second race, and vice versa. Olympic style scoring with the lowest combined score wins and second main is the tie-break. Seems fun, right?
But WAIT, there’s more!
I wanted EVEN MORE chaos at this race, so we went with a ping-pong draw (who doesn’t love that?) for gate pick for the first moto. Three balls in a hat, ball #1 will just be 1-22 as per the points (250SX wild card guys 17-22), the #2 ball will be 22-1 rack’em up…the third ball will be 11-1 rack them up and then 22-12 rack them up (insert me rubbing my hands together).
The guys at Vurbmoto will be streaming this thing on their YouTube channel as well as on PulpMX. We’ll have Denny Stephenson, Kyle “Chiz” Chisholm, Cade Clason, and Jason Thomas weighing in with their thoughts on this race as broadcasters.
Okay, buy the tickets!
