Today, GasGas announced the end of a five-year run with Justin Barcia. Said the press release: “Rockstar Energy GASGAS Factory Racing would like to express its thanks to Justin Barcia after five historic years together in the AMA Supercross and Pro Motocross Championships, which included the brand's first 450SX Main Event and 450MX overall victories.”
This is the rare moment where even a flowery press release can’t truly sum the impact of an effort. Barcia’s move to GasGas for the brand’s debut in AMA Supercross and Motocross in 2021 should be considered the best launch for a brand in racing ever. Really. He’s leaving now (heading to Troy Lee Designs Ducati) but there are also rumors that GasGas won’t be racing AMA Supercross and Motocross in 2026, anyway (the full team could be moving under the Rockstar Energy Husqvarna banner). If true, that means Barcia was there for the entire GasGas run. This season, Barcia failed to generate podium finish, and he took 10th overall in the combined SMX standings. It was an okay year but certainly not a great one. As the saying goes, you’re only as good as your last race. Really, though, that’s not a fair way to see this relationship. It started with a bang, and for a new brand, the start is more important than the finish.
Let’s look at how the Barcia-to-GasGas tie up really started. The KTM group purchased the GasGas brand, and Troy Lee Designs/Red Bull team moved from a KTM effort to the official GasGas factory team. Barcia came on board with a fun video showing him taking people out on a GasGas trials bike. GasGas, it turns out, really wanted to lean in as the “fun” brand of the KTM portfolio, so instead of trying to restrict Barcia’s BamBam ways, it put them out in the open. GasGas! FunFun! BamBam!
Then came the greatest trick, something dreamed up by both Troy Lee and the Red Bull folks. COVID-19 plagued the 2021 racing schedule, so when the ’21 season was announced, Anaheim wasn’t on it. Barcia, by the way, had won the A1 opener in 2019 and 2020. So TLD and Red Bull rented out Angel Stadium anyway and staged a fake 2021 A1, with Barcia as the victor again. More than a few confused fans, probably tuned out on all the latest racing gossip during the off-season, saw the video and thought, “Wait, did I somehow miss the first race of the season?”
Nope, that was fake.
“It felt like no one else was out there,” said Barcia in the video, a not-too-subtle wink and nod.
Great theatre, and a great way to announce that Barcia, TLD, Red Bull and GasGas were in the FunFun business. But it also made things much more serious when the actual opener began in Houston a week after the video dropped. What if Barcia couldn’t back up the fake reality?
Well, we’ll never know. Because he went out and won Houston! As BamBam told us back then, Houston didn’t carry the pressure of Anaheim…but that video put him in a tough spot.
“It’s not Anaheim,” Barcia said. “Definitely the pressure on Anaheim is a little bit bigger, especially it would have been probably a little bit bigger for me just because I won the last two years. So, it felt good to come here and not have that pressure. The three-peat thing was not even a thought. I had enough pressure just on myself doing that Anaheim video and stuff like that! So, I just had to deal with that pressure and stuff.”
GasGas won the first Monster Energy AMA Supercross event it ever entered. Intros can’t get better than that, but, on the performance side, it wasn’t a huge shock. Barcia’s bike wasn’t far removed from a proven KTM, anyway. What made this one really count was the connection between the fake A1 vid, Barcia’s personality, and what GasGas was supposed to represent. For years, fans had been trying to understand the thin slice of difference between the KTM and Husqvarna wings of the company. It took just one week of promotion and racing for everyone to understand exactly what GasGas stood for. Barcia’s BamBam brand has long been established and so had the punk rock meets art house style of TLD. This was the team that sounded like it hosted a rave under its tent at the end of a long night of supercross. This was the team with the weirdest list of sponsors. This was team owned by an artist! This was a rider that was wide open—can we say, on the gas?—all of the time. It was the right guy, right team, right time.
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BamBam won a few more times for the squad, including a Pro Motocross overall at Millville later that year. Did he win as much as riders like Eli Tomac, Cooper Webb, or Chase Sexton? No, but he was absolutely solid and a weekly podium player. He was perhaps at his fastest, ever, in 2023, which culminated in another win in the mud of New Jersey (the state where he was born) at MetLife Stadium. Barcia crashed out of Nashville the next weekend, and never quite found that magic again. By 2025, the TLD part of the GasGas equation was gone, as was Red Bull. GasGas became an in house team, a sister operation to Rockstar Energy Husqvarna. TLD and Red Bull started talking to Ducati. Barcia and the old crew will likely be reunited on a new bike.
Barcia is five years older now, and with Ducati he’s truly developing an all-new machine that has never seen a supercross track. Don’t expect the same win-the-opener fireworks to start this next season. GasGas, meanwhile, might not even line up, a victim of needed financial contraction over at its parent company with the KTM Group. The run might be over, and the magic might be hard to find again. But as far as launches and runs go, it couldn’t have gone much better than how it went for BamBam, GasGas and FunFun. You’re only as good as your last race, but the first one was as great as it gets.
