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Red Bull KTM Factory Racing's Jorge Prado rode his late-season momentum and withstood added pressure he put on himself with a disappointing finish in the first moto to nail down the 450SMX World Championship at the Hunter Ridge Nature Arena Saturday night.
Meanwhile, Monster Energy Pro Circuit Kawasaki's Levi Kitchen finally made his breakthrough and won his first national championship, taking the 250SMX title with solid second-place finishes in both motos, enough to give him the title by 24 points over Ryder DiFrancesco.
Former MXGP champion Prado, from Spain, won the title in his second year of racing in the United States. And he didn't make it easy on himself.
Prado came into the night with a 16-point lead, but with the final round paying triple points, several riders were within striking distance. Prado needed a third-place overall finish at Hunter Ridge to ensure the title. But an uncharacteristic bad start in the first moto put him back in ninth place. He was able to move up to fifth during the course of the moto but his four title rivals all finished in front of him, gaining points. That included class rookie Haiden Deegan, who won by more than three seconds on his Monster Energy Star Racing Yamaha ahead of Progressive Insurance/Cycle Gear/ECSTAR Suzuki's Ken Roczen.
To make things more complicated, rain began falling during the second 250-class moto, and while it tapered off during the second 450 moto, the riders faced a different and more slippery track for the deciding race. But this time Prado got the holeshot and held off steady pressure from Deegan. Prado's fifth- and first-place finishes put him in second place overall for the evening and gained him the title over Deegan, whose second- and first-place finishes gave him the overall win for the night.
For Prado, it was not just a comeback from a suboptimal first moto, but also from last season, when a soured relationship with his former team forced him to sit out the SMX Playoffs.
"That's what champions do, right? They bounce back, so super-happy about this title," said Prado. "It's my first championship here in the states. I'm a four-time world champion for a reason, and I think I showed that in this last moto where it mattered the most."
| Playoff 3 | Final points | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jorge Prado | 5-1, 2nd overall | 158 |
| 2 | Haiden Deegan | 1-2, 1st overall | 151 |
| 3 | Hunter Lawrence | 3-3, 3rd overall | 136 |
| 4 | Ken Roczen | 2-5, 4th overall | 128 |
| 5 | Cooper Webb | 4-4, 5th overall | 123 |
Unlike the controversial bar-banging action of Playoff 2, the 450 motos at Hunters Ridge were strangely free of racing action. Once riders sorted themselves out at the start, there were no passes for position among the top three during the entirety of either moto. The only tension came not from whether a rider was going to be able to pull off a pass at the front — because no one got close enough to try a pass — but whether anyone would make a mistake and go down, especially in the trickier wet conditions of the second moto.
A word about the champions who won more than Prado
Prado has been consistently competitive all season on his KTM, so he's worthy of the SMX World Championship title. But it's also true that the points structure of the SMX Playoffs could reward a rider who comes up with one or two good performances at the right time after a season of not winning.
So while Prado gets the big payout and the "world championship" title, let's take a moment to remember the other two champions who won more races in this long season that started in early January in Anaheim, California. Between them, Progressive Insurance/Cycle Gear/ECSTAR Suzuki's Ken Roczen, who won the Supercross championhip, and Honda HRC Progressive's Hunter Lawrence, who won the outdoor Pro Motocross title, showed staying power that lasted longer than a three-round playoffs. The two won 11 Supercross main events and then Lawrence also won 10 motos in the outdoor season.
In Supercross, Roczen completed his comeback from nearly career-ending injuries and won one of the closest Supercross battles ever by just three points over Hunter Lawrence. It was a popular and emotional victory that put Roczen, at age 32, in the record books as the oldest rider to win a Supercross title in a sport known for short careers.
Then, in the 11 rounds of the outdoor Pro Motocross season, Hunter Lawrence beat the toughest competition of all, his brother and Honda teammate, Jett, by just two points.
SuperMotocross has intentionally created a system that focuses the most attention on a few final races in a very long season and also pays the most money to the winner of those Playoffs. Worthy as Prado is, I argue that Roczen's and Hunter Lawrence's accomplishments were more impressive: winning a title at an age when most are shuffling off to retirement and holding off a season-long challenge from the most dominant motocross rider of recent years.
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