Most Impressive: SMX Playoff 1
450 Class: Haiden Deegan
Deegan get’s it done! He’s a 450 winner! It seemed easy for him too… ~20 second lead in both motos; dominant. A couple sketchy moments aside, Deegan looked like he was riding a different track than most of the other guys: he was doubling, sometimes tripling through the rhythms. Somehow even during the sketchy moments he’s in control. Deegan’s performance in Columbus needs to be noted as an excellent mud ride. No one was close to him.
Deegan showed speed all summer but when it came down to it was a tad off the pace and definitely faded in the later stretches of the motos. We wondered if on a hybrid track with shorter motos he would perform better… well, turns out he does! Muddy conditions can bring weird results, but we think Haiden is a real contender for this champsionship. No doubt he has a lot more confidence after this win now too.
Haiden seems locked in for the championship:
“Your goal's always to win a championship, but I feel like I've been good at through my career, taking it race by race and week by week and making the goal, let's show up to every round and put the hardest work in when we get to the race and fight every lap, not give up has kind of been my big thing is that's how I feel like I've progressed is I've fought every single lap I've been on the track. So just continue to do that. And if a championship's there, that's nice, a lot of money and a 450 championship, against a lot of good dudes, but again, we still got, I think, four motos left and just take it race by race and hopefully keep ticking these of”
“I feel like the trend in my career is kind of slow but steady and it really paid off, right? Even though it was a mud race today, we're still going against the best guys to ever do it, especially a lot of guys heading towards the end of their careers too. So. we're getting a lot of 450 champions that I'm able to battle and learn from and definitely some weight off the shoulders. It was really nice to get it done”
250 Class: Cole Davies
At this point we really shouldn’t be impressed anymore… Davies has proven himself in most disciplines. Perhaps a muddy SMX hybrid track was all he had left to checkoff? Unfortunately the first moto results won’t show it, but Davies was in a league of his own on Saturday; no one was close to him. I fear we’re about to enter a reign of dominance by him in the 250 class.
It was gutting to watch him sit on the top of the jump for the remainder of 250 Moto 1.