Posted by Jason Weigandt on Monday, January 05, 2009
Ho Hum. Another JGR Josh Grant runaway season. At least we have the outdoors to look forward to.
(Thanks for the joke, Kevin Kelly).
My former webcast sound engineer, Alan Selk, is a huge Motorsports guy. Yes, he’s got a degree and all of this professional experience in the audio field, but racing is his passion—especially the high-end stuff like sports car racing, Formula 1 and MotoGP. Sometimes we’ll have good shows, sometimes we’ll have bad ones, but Alan always sticks with a simple mantra: Good racing solves all problems.
Indeed. A day ago I was lamenting losing the webcast, considering career options that were all over the map, and trying to keep my hopes up in the face of a series that was supposed to shape up as a runaway on the track, with the dark skies of a faltering economy overhead. Talk about gloom!
But then we had a crazy night, and (most) all is well again. Suddenly supercross is wild and unpredictable, and I’m more pumped for Phoenix than I was for Anaheim!
This weekend’s “Actually Said It Before The Race” Award goes to DMXS Radio’s David Izer. He accurately predicted every thing that would happen in the main event the day before the race! Amazing!!!
Well, not quite. But at dinner with David (and his lovely wife Donna) on Friday night, David couldn’t stop talking about how fast an aggressive Josh Grant looked during press day. Izer said Stewart looked the fastest, but he saw Grant as second best. At one point, Stewart ran Reed up high in a corner and JG swooped in and followed James through!
Grant kept making me a believer in practice, posting the fourth-fastest time overall. But still, speed has never been an issue for Josh Grant. I remember how fast he was going at the Atlanta Lites East opener last year, and I told everyone I could find that he was going to win that night, and he ended up in a first turn crash, and later had an infamous run-in with Villopoto coming through. In fact, I told Izer, when it was time to make my Moto X Dream Fantasy Team picks, that Josh Grant was bordering on a spot on my “do not pick” list, because he is too often fast in practice and then nowhere to be found in the final results.
Yes, Chad and James crashed into each other in the main, but give JG credit for having built a massive lead over the “rest,” so big that even that tuff block cover couldn’t cost him the win.
Honestly, in the annals of supercross history, has their ever been a bigger upset win? Maybe Ricky Ryan’s lone privateer supercross win at Daytona in ’87, but that was in the mud. This was the real deal.
And now James Stewart has been dealt a major points defecit to make up, and Chad Reed is possibly the worst rider to have to mount a comeback on, because he is as consistent as anyone to ever come down the supercross assembly line. In 2002, Ricky Carmichael crashed out of Anaheim 1, but the riders who were going fast at the beginning of that season, Travis Pastrana, Mike LaRocco and David Vuillemin, all crashed and injured themselves out of the chase, and Ricky was in the points lead before long.
Chad’s not going to give back points in bunches.
So we still don’t have peace in the middle east, we haven’t solved economic turmoil and we haven’t figured out a way to save the planet just yet. And we still don't have a webcast. But after the action we saw on Saturday, I’m in a better mood, at least.
Posted by Jason Weigandt on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 11:04 am
