This past weekend was round eight of the Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship and the 55th running of the Daytona Supercross kicked off the 2025 edition of Bike Week. If you have never been to Daytona, it is something you must experience at least once. In my opinion, Daytona is not the best round to attend if you are looking strictly for the racing experience. The viewing is mediocre at best. The tri-oval that they build the track on is very long, but no more than four lanes wide, so if you get a general admission ticket, you’ll get a good view at one end of the track but need a set of binoculars to watch the other.
But there is a lot more than that to Daytona Supercross. The Speedway is a special place, and the race provides a different vibe for fans and riders alike. It comes at the perfect time in the series. There has been exciting racing and storylines in both classes all season, but we are eight weeks straight into this thing now and just as things feel like they may be getting played out, Daytona provides a breath of fresh air. A different environment, different track and different fan experience seems to push the dog days of Supercross back a few extra weeks.
I have been to Daytona every year since 2015. I have been a racer, mechanic, and fan and I have experienced just about every aspect of the event numerous times, but this year I was going to sit it out. It has been a long, brutally cold New England winter and I planned to head down to Florida after bike week to get a head start on some prep for New England racing in the Spring amy journey to Loretta’s for 2025. All I wanted to do in Florida was ride. I was trying to avoid the chaos of Daytona, ride as much as possible, and head home.
But when my friend Jason Weigandt decided to end his own streak of going to Daytona, he offered me a view of Daytona from the one perspective I had not yet experienced. I wound up heading to Daytona for the eleventh-straight year, but as a member of the media for the first time! Look, I am seven races deep as a “media member” so at this point I am just winging it and taking whatever opportunity I can. Weege have been letting me write some pieces for this site every week this year, but that's only two months so far.
Weege did not exactly give me strict instructions on what to do this weekend. If I wanted to interview every rider in the paddock, sweet. If I wanted to just take it in, sweet. For the most part I chose the latter, but there were still plenty of things to note of my Daytona experience that you miss watching on the tube.
Come to find out Daytona does not have a traditional press box set up. The actual media center is a completely different building on the infield of the speedway, so if you want to watch any action in the media center, you are going to be watching on TV’s. Watching the races on TV while at the race seemed pointless to me so I somehow found myself up top of the 500 Club. That’s a big high rise building on the infield, and it ended up being the best seat in the house which I was pumped on. I pretty much watched by myself all day as the people that I saw up there were team filmers that filtered in and out as their riders were on track. Once I had I spot, I wasn’t leaving it!
The Daytona track is unique to any other track on the circuit, but this one was one of the best I’ve seen in recent times. There was a six or seven year run of some pretty bad designs with a lot of tight chicanes and switch backs that made for some extremely one lined tracks and some not-so-good racing. For 2025 there was only one chicane, which turned out to be a high-speed split sand section that created some good passing opportunity. Aside from that, every other turn on the track was a 180-degree (give or take a few degrees) bowl turn. There were three long rhythm lanes that gave riders fits all day.
One of the cooler aspects of being at the race is watching the guys learn the track and trying different rhythms, lines, etc. This weekend the rhythm before the mechanics area was unique because the fast line required you to step up over a massive roller at the end. It was noticeably slower if you missed that roller. During qualifying I saw a ton of guys on a fast lap send that even if they knew they were going to clip it, just because they knew how much faster it was. Clipping it? No big deal. It is always mind blowing to me how well the top guys can correct a mistake, as well as how well a factory bike can handle the hit if the riders do make a mistake. It is tiny details like that that get missed or aren’t noticeable on TV that show how locked in the very top guys are with their machine.
One thing that will be forgotten about this Daytona is how gnarly the whoops were for free practice and Q1. The faces of the whoops were steeper than normal and were not breaking down the way the track builders probably expected. Plus, riders likely wanted to experiment with the paddle tire on the rear which gives good drive out of sandy corners…and doesn’t not work well on hard, clay whoops. That’s what these were. These whoops were sunbaked hard and edgy and oh my gosh did I see some crashes and close calls. Dylan Ferrandis, Benny Bloss and Justin Hill headline the list of riders I saw crash in the whoops before they were prepped and toned down for Q2. Even Chase Sexton nearly had a BIG one. They were not too bad for Q2 and the night show but they were a trap early in the day.
Hardy Munoz’s fanbase must have tripled in Daytona. I will start off by saying he rode brilliantly. He ran top three for half of his heat, battling factory riders and even making a brief run at the leader! He backed that up in the main, matching a career best tenth. However, Munoz’s ride in the races is still under the radar compared to the show he put on in the second qualifier. He was the first rider to send the wall before the finish! The crowd went berserk. He responded, jumping the wall every lap, looking over at the crowd. On the last lap of the session Hardy went full Hardy. He over jumped the double before the wall jump, so he couldn’t jump it, but instead decided to look over at the fans and do a wheelie to the finish line. Well, because he was too busy looking at the crowd, he wheelied off the track and nearly hit the finish line structure and went down! No worries, he got up and fist pumped to the roar of the crowd! Then in the 450A session, Sexton sent the wall on his last lap to set the fastest lap of the afternoon and credited Hardy for sending it first. Legendary stuff from Chile’s finest.
Daytona also featured SMX Next racing , and to be honest those races can be hit or miss. We have gotten some great races, but a lot of time the race can be a bit spread out. The highlight of Daytona SMX Next was Muc-Off/FXR/Club MX’s Alexander Fedortsov. He is credited for being last in the main event, but if Matthes, Weege and Rarick ever do one of their Fox Racing ReRacables episode on this SMX Next main event, they would say Alex really won the race. He was by far the class of the field at Daytona. His qualifying time (first overall in SMX Next) would have put him 15th overall in the 250 class, and those kids qualify after 450C group when the track is at its worst!
Fedortsov first caught my attention last spring when he came up to The Wick for an Area Qualifier. Since then, he has been near the top of every qualifying session at an SMX Next event and even podiumed the Vegas main event. I do not think it is out of reach to say Alex is one of the most underrated/slept on amateurs right now…or ever? Nobody ever talks about him. In the first qualifying session at Daytona, he was almost three seconds faster than everybody! He was checked out in the Main Event, until he got a flat and was forced to pull off. Despite the heartbreak, as Fedortsov rode off the track, he stopped to give a fan his goggles and even did a burnout for the crowd while the race was still going on! If I am Brandon Haas, I’m doing whatever it takes to not let this kid go.
There is not a ton to note from the night show that you wouldn’t have seen on TV or has not been in the news already. That said, Ken Roczen was unbelievable in that main event, and I think it’s fair to assume most fans have come around to appreciate Kenny. Later in his tenure at Honda, he was catching a lot of slack for several reasons, but in Daytona it was all love as he crossed the line for his first win of the season. The crowd was loving that. The way he was tripling into that off camber turn was one of the coolest things I have ever watched. He was landing on the berm and essentially doing a wall ride! It really displayed how damn talented he is on a bike. After he passed Cooper Webb and Aaron Plessinger, they both went to that line but quickly resorted back to the inside. I believe the way Kenny was doing it was the fastest way, but Coop and AP could not replicate the way Ken was doing it, so it was not as effective for them.
After the 450 Main, I made my way down to the media center to attend my first press conference. A press conference is straight forward, but for me it was cool just to be in there and see what it was all about. I will be honest; I went in with intentions of asking a question but I didn’t have the guts to do it! I’m still bummed on this because after listening to some of the post-race content, my questions were relevant and will go forever unanswered. I will try to redeem myself at Foxborough next month!
After the Press Conference I wandered around the pits to see if there was someone I could potentially get a post-race interview from. I don’t know if everybody was in a rush to get to Razzle’s or what the deal was, but the pits emptied out quickly. The only riders left were either getting interviews with the media regulars or guys I did not have many questions for, so again I wussed out! [Editor’s note: Travis, any race that a rider can actually drive home from, which means races in California or Florida, will empty out extra fast. It’s a dark place for the media trying to get interviews after those races.]
Regardless, Daytona was a broad experience for me to get a little peek at the media world. As I said, the next race I will attend takes place at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. I’m looking forward to a traditional press box setting and meeting some of the media members. I felt like a small fish in a big pond this weekend, but I learned a lot and hope to carve a little spot for me in the sport I love!
