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/842139
P146 CN III EMPIRE OF DIRT BY STEVE COX W e're nearing the halfway point of the 2017 Lucas Oil/AMA National Moto- cross Championship, and quite a few things have come to pass that very few, if any, analysts would've predicted. Number one on this list has to be Blake Baggett, 450MX National Points Leader. To be clear, all of us pundits are well aware of what Blake Baggett is capable of. Baggett is a cham- pion. He's an outdoor champion. A 250MX National Champion. To win one championship at the top level means you have something inside you that 99% of anybody else who has ever raced doesn't have. But here's where Baggett threw all of us "experts" off his trail: Blake Baggett could've stayed down in the 250cc class following the 2014 season if he wanted to. He hadn't "pointed out" of the class yet, and frankly, most of us expected him to stay in the 250cc class for at least anoth- er season. He was small even for the 250cc class. When Baggett won his 250MX National Cham- pionship in 2012, he weighed about 130 pounds, and he hadn't exactly been putting on weight in the years following that. So, when he signed with Yoshimura Su- zuki Factory Racing to be James Stewart's teammate for the 2015 and 2016 seasons, to be honest, I just hoped he wouldn't hurt him- self. Riding a 450 is one thing, racing a 450 is another thing, and racing a 450 in a stadium is yet another thing altogether. I was honestly worried about the guy. I've been around the sport long enough to see people move up before they're ready and pay a price for it. For that matter, I've seen plenty of guys—especially in the 450 era we're in now—who were actually ready to move up still pay a price for it. The other thing that worried me was that Baggett was never a fantastic supercross racer in the first place. In five years of racing 250cc supercross, Baggett has won just four AMA Supercross main events. Certainly, that's four more than me, and four more than almost anybody who has ever raced a dirt bike, but it should be noted that half of those wins came at Daytona. Daytona is the outdoor racer's supercross. The other two wins? Arlington in 2010, his rookie year, racing for the Rockstar Energy Suzuki team (which is now the Rockstar Energy Husqvarna team), and the Las Vegas Supercross in 2011 when the main events were kind of the heat races, and he won the East main. These are not normally the stats that say, "Hey, get a factory 450 and you'll do awesome!" To his credit, though, Baggett took a very methodical approach to racing in the 450cc class. In his first full season of Supercross, he made every single main event, got a podium (in Daytona, of course), and a couple of fourth- place finishes (Arlington and New Jersey), and ended up fifth in the points standings. Outdoors, he got on the box in a few motos and a couple of times overall, and he ended up fourth in the champi- onship. Pretty good! He stated WHAT ABOUT BAGGETT? Should we be surprised that Blake Baggett is leading the 450MX Championship?