Courtesy of RacerX
April 10, 2019 11:40am
by Steve Matthes
It’s good to go to a new city in the Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship. And it’s always cool going to a rad city like Nashville as opposed to St. Louis (sorry, Anton). First time the championship has had a SX in Nashville and the people were jazzed for it.
The stadium was pretty full, it appeared the crowd was into it and having a great time. The press box was a gong show, though. I’m not going to be some sort of elitist guy here and say these people shouldn’t be in there but sweet Jesus, it was a little much with crying babies and the yelling. I know, first world media problems but we are there to work.
Okay, hey, the track. Generally we’ve seen some better tracks this year on the circuit. We haven’t had too many duds this year and I attribute it to the phone call between Feld Entertainment, Dirt Wurx, and some retired riders before the season where the riders (Ryan Dungey, Trey Canard, Tim Ferry, and Nick Wey) offered some suggestions about track design and obstacles. I don’t know what they talked about specifically but it’s been a good year for tracks and Nashville was more of that. It had good-sized whoops and different rhythms that worked out about the same. Somehow, Nashville was hard packed though? Who knew? They did some good work to make it much better for night show but most of the day it looked like the Vegas SX out there.
Heartbreak for Austin Forkner as a knee injury suffered in practice kept him out of the race and might cause him to lose championship. It looked pretty grim as he put it down in the third practice and had to be carted off. Forkner’s been amazing this SX season but has shown a tendency to crash in practice. He pushes it hard every lap he’s out there and it bit him… or we think it did. Hard to see how he’s going to be ready to go in two weeks but stranger things have happened. And even if he is ready, his lead is down to three points so that means he doesn’t just have to show up, he’s got to actually beat those guys with a bad knee. Bummer for him and the Monster Energy/Pro Circuit Kawasaki guys.
Let’s take a look at the results, shall we?
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RacerX 2019 Nashville SX Observations