Just some bench racing here. Eli Tomac won Anaheim 1 and San Diego. He got third, straight up, at Anaheim 2. He might have been the fastest guy at the next two races, Glendale and Houston, but crashes ruined his chances. Now he’s won Seattle. So that’s three wins in six races, two others where he was fast enough to win, and one where he just got beat. For five out of six, he’s been… the guy to beat, really.
This takes you back to 2024, when Tomac returned to the races following his ruptured Achilles tendon. The farewell tours have sounded nice, but Eli is still racing because he believes he can still win, not just to sign autographs and hear the cheers. His standards have not changed. Early in his comeback, in ’24, he maintained that he thought he could still be “the guy” in the sport.
In that 2024 season he was a bit diminished following that injury, and Jett Lawrence had arrived on the scene to elevate the game. Tomac wasn’t back to being “the guy” in 2024, but he was better in 2025. Now? Through six races in 2026, he very likely is back to being “the guy” in Monster Energy AMA Supercross. Hunter Lawrence still leads the standings, and Jett is out injured, but hey, no one knows the downsides of injury lately any better than Tomac. Jett being out, well, it just is what it is. Eli is still digging.
Even after those two rough races, the Tomac crew wasn’t doubting.
“Well, we really didn’t have to rebuild a lot, just try to correct the results,” said Eli’s father John Tomac on the SMX Insider Post-Race Show from Seattle. “The Triple Crown in Houston was a riding mistake, you really don’t want to do those, and the first turn crash last weekend was just unfortunate. But those two tracks and races are good for him, they’re what I consider aces, and if you have aces you need to throw them on the table, but they turned out not so well. So, it was important to get it turned back around.”
Houston and Glendale could have been good for Eli, but Seattle had been taken by Cooper Webb the last two years, and John Tomac knew that.
“Cooper Webb rides well at this track, and it’s important to remind him he doesn’t own Seattle, and maybe Dallas next week!” said the elder Tomac, with a laugh.
Webb has won seven times in Dallas.
Seattle didn’t look like a Tomac track for much of the event. He was decent in qualifying but in his heat race he was third and didn’t look as “beastly” as usual. Turns out he tried a bike change for the heat that didn’t work.
“He tried a change in the heat race, and it didn’t work well,” John Tomac explained. “You have to take your lumps when that happens and then go back to the truck and hopefully make the right move, which they did tonight. He’s in a good spot, he’s riding really well, but you have to be patient and smart. It’s tough to get through a 17-round series.”
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His setup was better in the main, but he still had to contend to Webb, who is indeed a bad dude in these conditions. Cooper took off and for a few laps and it looked like he might just dominate in the ruts that same way he did at Indianapolis last year. Eli had some trick lines up his sleeve, though.
“So, yeah, he [Webb] had really good sprint laps in the beginning,” Eli said. “Of course, it’s a long race, and I noticed I was making good time in the whoops, and then once I was able to get the triple onto the table I knew I could run with him. Then it was just a battle over who was going to not miss a rhythm section. Cooper did open up with some good laps there.”
The triple onto the table was a huge one for Tomac, and then late, as the track got even worse, he pulled out a wild move my going inside in a bowl turn and rolling a single into the final rhythm lane, a move straight out of 1991.
“I was saving that for the main event,” said Eli with a laugh. “I looked at it today and after seeing everyone enter with a double, sometimes there’s so much room in those bowl turns that you can actually go inside but no one really looks at it. I was like, 'Okay I’ve had enough of stressing this rhythm, trying to hit it perfect.' If you hang up at all on one of those landings and then you’re headed one of those next rutted ramps, and they have hooks in them, the suspension unloads and it can turn bad. The inside line got me off the ruts. That was key. It allowed me to take a breath somewhere on the track.”
Seattle was just gnarly, and Tomac and Webb gritted it out.
“Really had to focus on getting that triple onto the tabletop," Tomac said. "If you missed it, that was probably three quarters of a second. There were tough lappers, too, but that’s just the way it goes. This place is tough.”
What’s impressive is how this is another test passed for Eli on his KTM. From slick hard pack to tacky ruts, they haven’t missed much so far.
“Of course, it’s polar opposite than last week,” Eli said. “We made a few small adjustments but nothing crazy. I was happy with what we were working with in the main.”
A big part of Tomac’s continual evolution as a racer is that he seems to be enjoying his time at the track more with each passing year. At Seattle, though, he was a little more serious, noted Adam Enticknap of the Track Talkers Podcast. When Enticknap asked Eli about it, Eli didn’t deny that it was time to bear down on this title.
“It’s the typical mid-season stuff and I don’t have the red plate, I’m not happy about that. That’s it,” Eli said. “It’s mid-season and it’s game time. Of course, I want to have fun and smile, but I lost the red plate and I didn’t want to have something happen again. It’s game time.”
