Steve Cox | June 30, 2017
We’re nearing the halfway point of the 2017 Lucas Oil/AMA National Motocross 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 champion. 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 another season. He was small even for the 250cc class. When Baggett won his 250MX National Championship 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 Suzuki Factory Racing to be James Stewart’s teammate for the 2015 and 2016 seasons, to be honest, I just hoped he wouldn’t hurt himself. 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 championship. Pretty good! He stated throughout the year that his main goal was to get through healthy, and he did. Look up the list of 450cc rookies who score points in every single race in their rookie seasons. It’s a very short list.
But it all came apart in 2016, starting with a massive crash in the whoops at the supercross test track about three weeks before Anaheim I that left the diminutive star with a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken scapula and a myriad of internal injuries/bruising. He came back during Supercross, still struggled, but eventually put in a couple top-fives before the outdoors picked up.
Outdoors wasn’t much better, either. Baggett grabbed third in the first moto of the season, behind eventual champ Ken Roczen and defending champ Ryan Dungey, but that was it. He put up a lot of zeroes riding through injuries, and didn’t show up to a bunch of the races, ending the season 22nd in points.
It’s as if all the hurdles Baggett leapt in 2015 came back at him and crushed him a year later. His first two seasons in the class, he honestly looked like he was “surviving” out on the track more than he looked like he was “racing.”
And then he signed with the Butler Brothers to race on their Rocky Mountain ATV-MC KTM team for 2017. Immediately, as of Anaheim I, Baggett looked like a whole new guy. This is no joke. Although the results weren’t immediate, you could see it in how he was riding at the very first round. Even in practice. The riding style we were accustomed to seeing as “Blake Baggett,” where he was nearly motionless on the bike, looking like he was along for the ride. Gone. Like magic, Baggett was active on the bike, whipping it around, scrubbing it over obstacles, and generally looking like he was trying to will it to go faster. At round one, he was sixth-fastest in qualifying, less than 4/10ths slower than Ken Roczen.
I brought this “new” Blake Baggett up to his team manager JR Boyd at round two in San Diego. He immediately just pointed over to Michael Byrne and said, “That’s all him.”
Baggett got on the box in Atlanta, and spent most of the last half of the series duking it out inside the top five. But again, results or not, Baggett just looked better. He looked like he was racing his 450, not riding it. And this is a very key distinction.
Byrne is also the guy Baggett has directly credited with helping to teach him how to test his motorcycles. Byrne has been working as a test rider since he quit racing, and it’s a subject he definitely understands. And it’s the key to understanding Baggett leading the points now.
When I saw Baggett in Las Vegas, I mentioned how much better he looks now on his KTM than he ever did on his Suzuki, then I assumed he was “ready to go” for the outdoors. I asked him how that was going, and he said, “Eh… Don’t know yet.” I was kind of puzzled, but didn’t push it.
At Hangtown, Baggett went 6-8, but seemed fine. I expected more, but it wasn’t bad. Between Hangtown and Glen Helen, Baggett got some testing done and changed basically everything: Suspension settings, engine parts and even his engine mounts. He went on to go 8-2 at Glen Helen. Then he tested more, and that’s when he caught fire at Colorado. Since moto two at Glen Helen, Baggett has gone 2-3-1-1-2-3-3 despite crashing in the first turn twice. His line choices outdoors have always been creative, and they still are. He’s clearly the fastest guy on the track when Eli Tomac isn’t, but Tomac’s bad races are worse than Baggett’s.
There are seven races left in this championship now, which means there are 14 more motos that represent opportunities to make up or lose points for both Baggett and Tomac. If Baggett wins this title, it will be one of the most remarkable underdog performances in a long time.
But if he does pull this off, the question then becomes: Does he stay where he is? Or does he fill that big void that was recently created at Red Bull KTM? CN