Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1037465
MOTOCROSS FIM MOTOCROSS OF NATIONS MOTOCROSS OF NATIONS / OCTOBER 6-7, 2018 REDBUD RACEWAY / BUCHANAN, MICHIGAN P60 USA's captain Eli Tomac started decently but was having trouble moving forward in the wet condi- tions. Still, he sat fifth at the half- way point, which would've been solid for Team USA's qualifying points. With three laps to go, Tomac had a tip-over and then couldn't restart his motorcycle, resulting in a DNF, which would prove to be the throwaway moto score for Team USA. Italy's Antonio Cairoli dominat- ed the qualifier from start to fin- ish over Germany's Ken Roczen and an amazing performance from The Netherlands' MXGP World champ Jeffrey Herlings, who went down with Belgium's art's former number 7 for the rest of his career, as he moves up to the 450cc class in 2019 as a teammate to Justin Barcia on the Monster En- ergy Yamaha team. Ryan Dungey's number five was also available, but Plessinger preferred seven. "I think 7's just a lucky number," Plessinger says. "Three 7's on the bike: lucky. I could've used some of that this weekend!" SPARE BIKES FIM rules allow for two bikes to go through tech inspection for each racer, which potentially makes the job for the team a lot easier in case of a mechanical problem, but Team France's Dylan Ferrandis used this rule to his advantage by choosing to ride one bike for his parade laps and then switching to the other bike for the actual races, which allowed him to keep his race bike's tires (and the rest of the machine) relatively clean for the actual races. B MAIN HEROISM One of the best feel-good stories of the weekend was Team Puerto Rico, consisting of 31-year-old Ryan Sipes, 34-year-old Travis Pastrana, and 40-year-old Kevin Windham. Af- ter failing to qualify through their in- dividual-class qualifiers on Saturday, it seemed unlikely that they'd make the main event on Sunday, but that was before retired Windham nearly grabbed the holeshot in the B Main with Sipes not far behind. Sipes ended up moving past Windham and taking second in the race. Windham rode sitting down for nearly the entire final three laps of the race to finish fourth, holding off GP com- petitor Rui Goncalves from Portugal until the last couple laps and beating Japanese champions Toshiki Tomita and Taiki Koga in order to put Team Puerto Rico into the final. "I was just at home, not really thinking about racing much anymore, and then Tra- vis [Pastrana] called me to do this, and I didn't want to," Windham said. "Racing has really done well for me and my family, so I'm usually busy doing, you know, whatever I feel like doing. I do miss it tremendously, but it's not like I ever think about return- ing to it. It was truly an amazing ex- perience and I'm so happy that I did it. I don't know what it looked like, but I'm telling you it was a fair bit of work and a fair bit of pain. I cussed Travis Pastrana very often for calling me and having me do it but I'm so thankful that he did and that we had an opportunity to do what we did." Briefly... Between Jeffrey Herlings (left) and Glenn Coldenhoff, The Netherlands won all three races but finished third overall.