Steve Cox | December 11, 2019
Cycle News Empire of Dirt
COLUMN
The 30s
What a difference a year makes, huh? Last year, at this time, the Red Bull KTM team had their supercross-title hopes pinned on Marvin Musquin, who played second fiddle for many years behind now-retired Ryan Dungey. The team hired Cooper Webb based mostly on Webb’s tenacity and 250cc successes, but Webb was sort of a “what if?” kind of thing. The team had a few other “what if?” racers over the years in the second (or third) spot on the team, including Trey Canard, Broc Tickle and Dean Wilson, but none of them worked out for various reasons.
Now, Webb is the defending AMA Supercross Champion, and Musquin just blew out his knee (basically finishing the job on a knee that hasn’t been great for a while). Musquin is going to be 30 years old in less than two weeks; that’s like 75 in motocross years. Very few have successfully raced, or won, past 30. Most retire before they even get to 30.
Musquin is, and was, a rare talent. He’s also funny, loyal, a hard worker, and he’s really good at speaking, which isn’t that common in our sport, even though English is his second language! He can put racing into words like very few can. Musquin’s won two MX2 World Championships, a 250cc AMASupercross title, a bunch of races, the Monster Million, and has spent over a decade at KTM making a great living and representing the team as a true professional.
But, if he was going to be a premier Supercross champion, it would’ve happened by now.
Marvin Musquin’s knee injury leaves the Red Bull KTM Team with a couple of important questions to answer: Will it fill his spot with another rider and, if so, who will that rider be?
Every year, there are dozens of racers who line up, but only one champion. This isn’t a dis, or a slight. I’m not talking trash about Musquin. It just hasn’t worked out, and his championship-winning time is probably up. He’ll likely return to action and win races, but in the end, he’ll be regarded more like Kevin Windham than Chad Reed. People love Kevin Windham (myself included), he just never quite got it all together to win a 450cc title. There’s no shame in it.
But now that he’s out for the 2020 450SX Supercross Championship with a knee injury, there’s an interesting question about what KTM will do with his motorcycle. On one hand, they could just put all their eggs in the Cooper Webb basket, since Webb, the defending SX champ, is undoubtedly the top dog on the team now. But most teams want at least two guys out on the track, and often the team sponsors actually have that sort of thing written into their contracts. If they are going to put another racer on Musquin’s motorcycle for the Supercross series, it has to be somebody who would be happy racing supercross-only. Like Chad Reed, whose name has popped up as a replacement rider for Musquin.
Speaking of “very few have raced, or won, past 30,” Reed once swore he’d retire before 30, but if he completes the 2020 season (which he says will be his last), he’ll be 38 before he hangs up his boots. His last win came, at age 32, in Atlanta, on a Kawasaki. Reed’s the only racer ever to win in the premier class on every Japanese motorcycle brand. He raced one season on the Austrian Husqvarna, on his own, but if he could convince the KTM boys to give him Musquin’s bike, and testing time, hmm. There’s no reason why he couldn’t find a way to win one more race. He wouldn’t likely contend for the championship, but it’s not smart to doubt Chad Reed. And if Reed could win one race, he’d be the oldest ever to win a 450cc supercross (a record currently held by Honda’s Justin Brayton at 34), he’d be the only racer ever to win on five different motorcycle brands, and just by lining up in a single main event in 2020, Reed will have started 250 total 450cc main events. If he finishes the whole season, and races every main event, he would end his career with 266 career premier-class main events. All of these records would likely last forever.
But there might be one problem: Cooper Webb.
When Webb made the move up to the 450cc class, he joined Chad Reed on the Monster Energy Yamaha team for the 2017 season. Yamaha went into that year hoping Reed—in his second stint with Yamaha, where he had the most success in his career—would mentor and groom Webb for a bright future at Yamaha. But that wasn’t what happened. Reed wasn’t interested in mentoring a younger racer. Reed wanted to win. The two didn’t get along, and ultimately both ended up leaving Yamaha—Reed at the end of 2017, and Webb a year later.
In a recent interview I did with Webb for the publication, which you’ll be able to read next week, it was obvious that he’s matured an amazing amount in just the last couple of years. You’ll see when you read it. But has he matured enough to let Reed join him at KTM after what they went through at Yamaha just a couple years ago? Most racers in Webb’s shoes would probably see adding Reed to the team as a distraction, and Webb’s going into his first-ever 450SX championship defense, so the last thing he wants or needs is an unnecessary distraction. But maybe Webb’s okay with it. Either way, what he wants will definitely matter to the team.
If it’s not Reed, it could be Martin Davalos, who just signed to race factory-backed KTMs out of Team Tedder, in what will be Davalos’s first full 450cc season. Davalos will be 32 by round three of the championship. If the team needs another 450cc guy on the Red Bull KTM team, Davalos might fit that bill a little bit better than Reed does. CN
