| December 26, 2022
Kody Kopp dominated this year’s AFT Singles Championship and the future looks bright for one of the sport’s up-and-coming stars.
Kody Kopp claimed his first AFT Singles Championship and at 17 years of age. He’ll be back next year to defend the number-one plate.
By Chris Martin | Photography by Tim Lester
Even before his pivotal 2022 Progressive American Flat Track campaign kicked off in earnest, Kody Kopp was viewed as something of a known commodity to the vast majority of the dirt track community.
Despite having just a single professional season under his belt at the time, his progress had been closely tracked for years and expectations rose ever higher as the data points continued to pour in.
The son of a Grand National Champion—2000 king Joe Kopp—and an ascendant talent in the amateur ranks that firmly placed him on a Dallas Daniels-like trajectory, Kopp’s immense potential came into sharp focus in successive years. In 2020, he was named the Nicky Hayden AMA Flat Track Horizon Award recipient. The very next year, he earned Progressive AFT Rookie of the Year honors.
But for as much as we all thought we knew, 2022 still proved illuminating and Kopp still managed to be a revelation.
Kopp is growing up as fast as he rides. He’s now one of the taller riders in the Singles class.
In some ways, Kopp’s epic Parts Unlimited AFT Singles Championship run began with the narrow defeat that concluded his ’21 campaign—a defeat that sent him into the off-season more focused and motivated than ever before.
“The last round of 2021, we were close,” Kopp said. “We led a decent amount of Charlotte and went back and forth with Max [Whale]. But I ended up coming up short. Getting second was cool; it was the closest we came to a win all year long, and it’s pretty rare for a privateer to even be up on the podium. So, in that sense it was good. But obviously I want to win. I’m a racer.
“That just fired me up for the off-season. It made me hungry.”
To transform the results, Kody decided first he needed to transform his body.
“I didn’t take my training seriously at all going into my rookie season, transferring from amateurs. As a result, we just didn’t have the stamina. I just kept fading and fading, and the other guys up front were just more physically fit than I was.
Kody hopes to follow in his father’s footsteps, Joe Kopp, and eventually win a SuperTwins title. But first, he still has unfinished business on the singles.
“But after last season, my training was pretty hardcore. I had the goal—once we got that win taken by Max—the goal was to come out and win the season opener. So, we worked all off-season just for Volusia, and it kept rolling from there.”
He was further spurred forward by joining Whale at the Red Bull KTM Factory Racing crew and witnessing firsthand the collective work ethic that had made the squad such a formidable force in Parts Unlimited AFT competition.
“Seeing the effort the Red Bull KTM team was putting in pushed me to be a better person and rider. Everyone worked every day to get better.”
When Kopp finally made his Red Bull KTM Factory Racing debut at the ’22 opener, it was immediately clear he had leveled up. He was in crushing form all evening long at Volusia Speedway Park, dominating qualifying, his semi, the Al Lamb’s Dallas Honda Singles Challenge, and ultimately, the main event.
Earning a KTM factory ride meant taking Kopp’s craft to a new level.
“To come out and get that win was cool. In a way, it was the proper way to reward the team for all their hard work in the off-season and set the stage for the year.”
The stage was most certainly set, and Kopp continued to monopolize the spotlight in a class more typically lauded both for its depth and parity.
Over the season’s opening nine rounds, Kopp won six times, finished second twice, and took a solitary fourth for good measure. Not surprisingly, that remarkable run allowed him to assemble a mammoth 55-point advantage, stripping control of his opponents’ destiny with eight races still remaining.
“[The run] was pretty insane. A few days I didn’t feel like I was even a podium guy, but I just put myself in the right place at the right time and it worked out.”
Kopp started the ’22 season off strong and never looked back, winning round one and six others. At one point, he won four straight.
While flat track observers learned much about Kopp’s sky-high ceiling during that absurd opening half, he learned more about himself in the races that followed. In the next five races, Kopp failed to even podium, let alone win. However, Kody continued to march toward the number-one plate, collecting a series of fourths and fifths along the way.
Still, he’d raised the bar so high that outsiders openly questioned just what had gone wrong.
How dominant was Kopp? He clinched the Singles title two rounds early.
In hindsight, he chalks up his downturn to a strange brew of overconfidence, tentativeness, pressure, and, frankly, doing exactly what he should have done in his position as the caretaker of a huge championship advantage.
“It was tough. We had a big points lead—well over a round’s worth of points. Then to get fourth, fifth, be running good at Castle Rock and still get 10th after crashing…there was a bunch of talk on social media and the broadcasts, ‘What’s happening with Kody Kopp?’ I’m like, ‘I’m still here. I’m human, too.’
“Honestly, as much as you want to say you aren’t thinking about the points, it was in the back of my head the whole time. Obviously, you want to win a championship, and when you put six out of the first nine races together, it starts to make the dream feel like a reality.
“But you’ve got to keep connecting the dots. It was tough to swallow when I finished fourth or fifth, and I felt like I should have easily been on the podium. It sucks on payday, too. But, the points are crucial and at the end of the day—even though those fourth- and fifth-place finishes didn’t show our true potential, it ended up working out.”
Taking training seriously for the first time prior to the 2022 season proved to be a smart move.
That approach saw Kopp lock up the first championship of his professional career a full two rounds early when he held the number-one plate above his head following yet another calculated fourth-place ride at the Cedar Lake Short Track.
That development allowed room for a statement performance at the Volusia Half-Mile doubleheader finale. While his rivals had gotten in some licks when they were desperate and Kody was effectively the only rider on track with something tangible to lose, Kopp was eager for a return to level ground.
“Even at [Cedar Lake] Wisconsin, the day we actually locked up the championship, I felt like I was back in my form. ‘Man, we could win this thing and win the championship.’ But I got a little bit of a bad start and just played it safe. I probably could have forced the issue and got by [Trevor] Brunner, but you never know. Throw it down and break a leg and your championship is over. Instead, I played it smart, and it worked out.
“But then we went to Volusia with the pressure fully off. We were just a racer again, ready to fight back.”
Prior to the main event on the opening night at Volusia, there was little evidence for what was to come. After Kopp had earned just the eighth pick on the grid, Antti Kallonen, KTM North America’s Director of Off-Road Racing, approached him and asked him, “Are we here to ride or are we here to win?”
After an early race red flag and restart, Kopp answered by quickly knifing his way up from eighth into second. Once into position, he then executed an aggressive strike on Brunner—the same maneuver he’d elected against at the previous round—to steal away the lead and storm off with his seventh victory of the season.
The race served as a strong reminder to the AFT Singles field exactly who was boss.
“I got a killer restart and found myself in second on the first lap. I felt comfortable enough and didn’t have anything to risk, so I went for the pass on Brunner and got it. I wasn’t the fastest guy out there. I was just back to having no pressure and riding like we did the first four or five rounds.”
Kopp, who turned 18 in November, recently spent a month down at KTM North America’s Murrieta, California, HQ testing his 2023 machine in preparation of his upcoming Parts Unlimited AFT Singles title defense, even if an eventual career in the Mission SuperTwins class seems to be his destiny.
While his lineage, natural talent, and extensive early career accomplishments all point toward a sooner-rather-than-later premier-class graduation, his lanky, 160-pound frame is now making the argument as loudly as any other factor.
“These Singles are small,” Kopp said. “They’re nimble—that’s nice, but I’m almost feeling a little big for them now. It wasn’t an issue when I was younger as an amateur. Even my rookie year, I wasn’t above six-foot yet. And now we’re like 6’2 and put on some muscle. ‘I think we’re losing horsepower on these things.’ And then you have kids like Tom Drane from Australia come over who are like 110 pounds soaking wet. Obviously, they are good riders, but man, you basically lose one horsepower for every seven pounds. That’s a lot.
“And it’s not just weight. It’s tuck, it’s aerodynamics, it’s all that. It’s crucial to be a small body on a single. On a twin, it doesn’t matter much. I think on the twin, so much of it is about being smooth, and smooth throttle pick-up is something I feel I developed at a young age. That’s one of my strengths.”
Kopp already boasts significant experience and confidence aboard a twin following a 2020 season in which Indian Motorcycle blessed him with one of the much-vaunted FTR750s to campaign at various amateur outlaw races.
Kopp recently signed a two-year contract extension with Red Bull KTM. He’ll be on orange through the 2024 season.
But his professional Twin debut remains somewhere down the road, and he understands there is still much to learn before he’s truly ready to make that giant leap.
“While my throttle control will be big in the Twin class, one thing I know I’m going to struggle with, as of right now, is just being a well-rounded rider. I’ve got to continue improving my all-around skills before we make the transition. I’ll just straight-up say it—those top guys in SuperTwins are animals. On a TT, even with my size actually working in my favor, there’s no way we could hang.”
The next step toward that end goal is successfully defending his Parts Unlimited AFT Singles Championship. That’s a feat only one rider—Dallas Daniels—has previously accomplished, and even Daniels found holding onto the number-one plate significantly more challenging than earning it in the first place.
Kopp is properly motivated for the task ahead, thanks in part to the 2022 class runner-up Dalton Gauthier, who started Kody’s off-season on the right foot.
Following Kopp’s aforementioned cathartic return to the top of the podium at the season’s penultimate round, he hoped to sweep the finale but was instead tracked down and beaten to the checkered flag by rival Gauthier.
It was a tough pill to swallow, but, at the same time, the right medicine.
“We were close in the finale but ended up second again, just like in ’21. Dalton got me. He was riding good.
“I almost think it was for the best. Nothing against him, but he’ll go into the off-season feeling like he’s got the upper hand on everyone by winning the last round.
“But it just forces me to work harder. It provides that extra motivation. I didn’t go out on top, and I feel that’s a good thing. It makes me hungrier for next year.” CN
