Welcome back to Mud Series live from San Diego California, also known as Monster Energy AMA Supercross! This is your favorite Motosport.com Gear Head Ryan Roberts back at it again with lukewarm takes and wild accusations! After last weeks extreme mudder everyone was hoping for a dry race this weekend, and to everyone's disappointment this was also a half mudder. But what an epic night of racing this turned out to be!
Jumping right into the history made this evening, this was the first win for Aaron Plessinger and after his Detroit disaster last year, everyone is super pumped for AP getting the win. It was a huge redemption arc for our sport and showing that AP could get it done essentially twice. I think a lot of people, possibly myself included, thought Detroit was more of a fluke than anything and that AP may never get another chance at winning a race again. These races are extremely hard to win for 99.99% of guys out there and getting more than one opportunity to win a race may never happen for any of these guys. AP won this race after Ken Roczen went down early so it wasn’t like he won this by chance, he was fairly dominant this race and showed he can compete in this class. He also takes the Red Plate from his teammate Chase Sexton going into Anaheim 2 next weekend!
Jett Lawrence wasn't in the picture at all this weekend until the end of the race where he got into a helmet grabbing incident post-race with Jason Anderson. Jett finished fourth and Jason finished fifth as Jett had to come through the pack to get that fourth-place finish. They weren't shown on the broadcast much so I don't know if there was some hard racing between them, but Jett was not happy about something Jason did and got into a screaming match and grabbed his helmet after the race. I have no idea who's fault it is and who was in the right, but I will tell Jett that he needs to go talk to some other riders about how it goes starting beef with Jason Anderson. Malcolm Stewart got into it with him a couple years ago and it did not go well for either of them. Jason will not forget these things and if he comes across you in a main and he can put you on the ground, he will and take all your championship hopes with him. In this sport today, making enemies will end your championship hopes and Jett will have to learn from this. You won't see Eli Tomac or Chase Sexton mixing it up with some of the riders who are known to ride rough because they know it only ends poorly for them. Jett did issue an apology afterwards, so someone was definitely in his ear telling his to squash it immediately so good for his team.
One weird note about this race was how there were so many factory guys getting lapped and you had privateer guys running towards the front of the pack. I don't enjoy mud races, but it does make for some interesting racing and is really an equalizer amongst the racers.
The 250 race was exciting and went down to the wire with Nate Thrasher winning and Garrett Marchbanks getting second. R.J. Hampshire gave us the full R.J. experience and went down going for second place/lead on the last lap and ended up sixth place overall. I really like R.J. and he is probably the toughest rider in either class, but this is the type of thing you cannot do if you want to have a serious shot at winning this championship. You must take what the field and track is giving you and collect as many points as you can. Sure, winning would have been nice, but now he is 13 points back and has a large hill to climb to get back in this championship.
That is it for San Diego and we are heading back to Anaheim for a Triple Crown race. It is supposed to be dry so please weather gods, make that a reality so we can actually see where all the riders stand up against each other! If you ever need anything, please hit up one of our amazing MotoSport.com Gear heads and we will get you hooked it with whatever you need!
