Could Deegan Have Raced AUS-X Open? Are Two Races on One Weekend in Australia a Bad Thing? MotoOnline Investigates
It's another jam-packed weekend on the calendar, with two separate races taking place Australia and a whole bunch of superstar riders competing in them. If you're in America trying to follow it all, it will feel similar to what we wrote about a few weeks ago when the Paris Supercross and the Canadian [Vancouver] Grand Prix of the FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX) took place on the same weekend.
If you're in Australia, though, this might feel a bit different. WSX is hosting its Australian GP this weekend in Queensland, while meanwhile the Boost Mobile AUSX Supercross Championship is holding its series' finale over in Adelaide. The Adelaide event, which will crown this year's Australian Supercross Champions, runs in conjunction with the final round of the Australian Supercars Championship. This would be kind of like holding the final race of an American championship within the final round of the NASCAR Championship here. So, it's a big deal.
But so is the WSX race over in Queensland! In a press release, WSX promised the most stacked group of talent ever to race supercross on Australian soil, and the WSX lineup this weekend does make a great case for that: Ken Roczen, Eli Tomac, Cooper Webb, and Haiden Deegan are all lining up on 450s, to name a few. This weekend's WSX race will be a huge test for Deegan against established champions like Kenny, Eli, and Coop. For Australian racing, though, the championship finale (over a 1,000 miles away) is important, also. Yes, the two events aren't close to each other, geographically, but there will be a split in interest, viewing, media attention, and more.
So much so that Australia-based media source MotoOnline.com has put together a well-written story on the conflict "that can't be ignored." It's a good read that goes much deeper than just having two races in a smaller country (by population) at the same time.
Read the Full MotoOnline Article
For example, MotoOnline explains the background of WSX. When the series launched a few years ago, it was operated by some of the the same folks, led by Adam Bailey, that are back to running the Australian Supercross Championship and the AUS-X Open. For example, the AUS-X Open morphed into the Australian GP within WSX series while Bailey's group was running the WSX series. That WSX run was not successful, though, and the series has transferred to new ownership. Bailey has left to return to focusing only on races in Australia. Bailey, in this MotoOnline story, believes WSX put an event on the same weekend as the Australian Supercross final on purpose. He's disappointed that sanctioning body Motorcycling Australia [MA] didn't work to prevent that from happening.
“They come this year to intentionally, in my opinion, impact our series," said Bailey to MotoOnline's Nic Still. "Going on the same date [as Adelaide] is clearly an attempt to do that, which I think is disappointing. I think it’s disappointing that we weren’t protected from that by MA… My opinion is that [it’s] bully tactics by them [SX Global].”
It's fair to mention here that if there is a rivalry between WSX and Australian Supercross, all of that beef is exclusively between those series. New WSX CEO Tom Burwell has been very complimentary of all other racing series around the world and has absolutely not pitched the current version of WSX as a rival to Monster Energy AMA Supercross, the Monster Energy SMX World Championship, the FIM Motocross World Championship (MXGP), Monster Energy FIM Motocross of Nations or any other established championship. Burwell did a great interview with Lewis Phillips of Vital MX a few weeks ago in Vancouver and made it clear he thinks there's a market and room for international supercross, and it doesn't need to knock down the established AMA Supercross Championship to find success.
As for Australia, MotoOnline explains how the double dates came to be:
It was WSX that announced its Australian event at Cbus Super Stadium first, but by that point it was already evident to stakeholders that the final round of AUSX would again be staged at the previously-confirmed Adelaide Grand Final alongside the high-profile final round of the Supercars Championship. And, for obvious reasons, there is zero chance of moving that particular date on the schedule.
This date conflict has created its own conflicts for teams. The last few seasons, a few squads have built teams that compete both in the WSX and Australian Championships. Namely, the top two factory teams in Australia did that: Craig Dack's CDR Yamaha team and Yarrive Konsk's Quad Lock Honda team. This year, that's not possible, though, because of that one date conflict. A team would then need to build two separate rosters and then split the squad this weekend to race in two different places at once. Konsky is still going for it, with Christian Craig and Joey Savatgy on 450s in WSX and Dean Wilson on a 450 for the Australian Championship. Dack decided not to have his team compete in WSX this year and focus solely on the domestic series.
It gets more complicated when you bring up the AUS-X Open, which is the crown jewel of the Australian series and took place last weekend (featuring the Lawrence brothers as top billing). Bailey believes riders like Webb were asked to sign exclusives to not race the AUS-X Open (it would have been an easy double-dip money maker for a rider to race in Australia on back-to-back weekends).
The Deegan piece is where this gets particularly interesting. You probably heard last year's story that Deegan was considering doing the AUS-X Open in 2024. Bailey confirms that he got a message from Deegan's agent a few weeks before last year's event saying Haiden was interested in racing. It was a little late for Bailey to find the funding to pay Deegan his worth, but in the end that didn't matter, because the Lawrence's ex-agent Lucas Mirtl shut that down. The Lawrences had a clause in their AUS-X Open deal to review what riders are competing on the grounds of safety. Bailey says they didn't want someone competing who might try to take them out and hurt them. What does that mean? We can only guess, but we think the clause was there to prevent someone like Anderson, who has had serious beef with the Lawrences in the past and has competed in AUS-X multiple times, from racing and turning the race into a block pass battle. Or maybe it would bar Vince Friese, who has had on-track beef with everyone at some point. Either way, Mirtl decided to deny the Deegan appearance last year, although again it might not have happened anyway because Bailey said he only had two weeks to suddenly find the funding to pay Deegan his value. However, Deegan's camp and Bailey agreed to continue talking and explore racing AUS-X in 2025. The Lawrence camp was not interfering this time, and in fact negotiations with Deegan were so far down that road that we heard posters and other marketing materials for AUS-X with the Lawrences and Deegan on them together had already been created.
Motoonline takes it from there:
AME [AUS-X Open] had targeted Deegan to ‘take on’ the Lawrences this year and had gone as far as building content of the 19-year-old American phenom announcing his appearance in Melbourne, only for it to fall flat when he instead apparently opted to make his 450 debut in Argentina and then also commit to the Australian round of WSX as a wildcard. It clearly stung Bailey at the time, and he is adamant that select riders are exclusively contracted to WSX, at least in this country.
“Affect on this event [AUSX Open], I would say, is minimal other than they’ve probably spent a shitload of money to get Haiden, and which probably cost him from coming here,” Bailey continued. “You know, I’d say that that has had an impact and ability to get riders because they’ve signed the likes of him, Christian Craig, Cooper Webb, exclusively and won’t allow them to come here, even though we’ve asked them to. It’s prevented us to be able to get riders to come and race here against [the Lawrences], which is a bummer, and they’re going to be in the country.
Anyway, the point here is it's a double weekend of races in Australia, over 1,000 miles apart. Is it bad for Australia to have the calendar hit like this or does it not really matter? Read MotoOnline's story, a very well-balanced piece charting the background of WSX and both the former and current ownership group, and how they both ended up holding races on the same weekend, this weekend.
