After tremendous championship battles in the supercross championship this year, you look at the motocross championship and now we’re going to start all over again. Whether it’s the 250 or the 450 class, the field is just so deep and so talented and you have so many different riders that have won races before. When you compare that to the Ricky Carmichael era, where there were so few winners because he won so much.
So it just builds the excitement and if you watched the AMA Preview Show on Fuel you see the dirt flying and it takes you back to last year. Then you see all the highlights from what happened last year, and then you figure out, for 2011, just how the field will be so stacked. Very few guys are coming in with injuries, and with the guys coming back it makes it very exciting.
Ryan Dungey
I made a prediction before the supercross championships started that Ryan Dungey would be the champion, and he came pretty close. What I did not expect was for Ryan Villopoto to come off of the injury he had in 2010 to come back and be as dominant as early as he was.
Villopoto has just impressed me so much this year with his determination and his desire, his work ethic, and the heart of a champion that he’s shown. He’s coming off the Monster Energy Supercross title so he is definitely the guy to beat. He’s won a championship every year that he’s raced a full season of motorcross, which is three in the life, so he’s won three championships. He rode the 450 class two years ago, won one in the first race, hurt his knee and then didn’t race again. So if you look at his win percentage, he’s pretty damn good when it comes to motocross also. Maybe even exceptional at this point. So, is he the favorite? I think that he is the favorite at this point.
"Villopoto has just impressed me so much this year with his determination and his desire, his work ethic, and the heart of a champion that he’s shown."
We could talk about the 450 all day. Chad Reed is coming back, Kevin Windham is going to ride some races, what’s going to happen with Christophe Pourcel, is James Stewart going to ride? I mean, this class you’ve got Andrew Short and the guys on KTM. It’s just so deep.
Chad Reed
From everything that I’m hearing Pourcel will be riding the Motoconcepts Yamaha, so it will be a change for him. I know that moving to that Yamaha with the design of the motorcycle being quite a bit different than anything that’s ever been made for motocross. It should be a big change, and if he likes it and he gels with the bike instantly, Pourcel is a guy that can go out and win a moto no problem. He’s just as good as anybody out there.
I definitely think that Dungey and Villopoto are your favorites coming in. I think that Dungey will have something to prove and I think that Villopoto is basically as fine tuned as it gets right now. But 2011 so far has been so unpredictable that I just don’t see us going in to the AMA motocross championship here and having it be any different.
Then you take a look at the 250 class and once again there are so many talented, hungry riders that are going to battle for this championship. And I don’t think at this point you can say there’s an odds-on favorite, but once again, watching the season preview show just really fired me up. There’s just such a difference between supercross and motocross and they complement each other, but supercross is done, and now it’s time to race motocross.
Ryan Villopoto
The temperature is going to rise, the weather is certainly going to become a factor whether it rains or it’s super hot. You get up in the element and you get all the rock and mud flying up and that’s what is so special about this championship. And like I said in the season preview show is the great thing about the 250 class, which used the be the 125cc back in the day, is this is where you’ve got all of the young guys, the rookies, the second and third-year pros and for the most part these guys are under 20 years old and they’re trying to make a name for themselves.
They’re trying to do whatever they can to get to get on top of the box and at times, a little bit of ego gets in the way, and they make some mistakes and they ride the guy a little rough. When as you get older, maybe you respect the guy a little more, where you know that type of riding is only going to get sent back in return. These guys are not afraid to bang bars with each other and it never gets boring, that’s for sure. In this class, I would say there’s 10 guys that can win a race.
We are going into a season where there has never been this much TV coverage for the championships. We’ve got NBC, Speed and now Fuel added to the list, so that the fans of motocross are able to watch every lap of racing. From the fall of the starting gate to the final checkered flag of the season, they’ll get it all. That’s pretty cool that all of the different networks have stepped up, and I think it’s really fitting because I believe this is going to be a banner year for the sport.
