USA Insider No.145: New Colours

Welcome to our weekly web-exclusive column, Transmoto’s USA Insider presented by Ipone. Penned each week by our man on the ground, Transmoto’s US Correspondent, Jason Weigandt, the USA Insider presents the story-behind-the-stories of the AMA supercross and motocross scene.

A few pending deals for next year have fallen into place, and while you won’t hear about them officially until the usual October 1 day one for new contracts, they’re starting to impact the talk around the Pro pits. It’s likely you’ll see Justin Barcia on a Toyota/JGR/Yamaha and Ken Roczen on a Soaring Eagle Casino RCH Suzuki next year, and there are strong rumours Davi Millsaps could be on Monster Energy Kawasaki. That’s three big names making three big team switches, but all three are in totally different positions.

With Roczen, the switch seems shocking because his KTM life has pretty much been bliss. His rookie 450 supercross season was superb, and he’s making a strong case for himself in this year’s 450 National Motocross Championship. Hard to imagine thinking his current bike is an issue when he’s riding it this well. He gets along quite well with the team, too. I hung out with the KTM folks for the last two days while hosting their 2015 North American Dealer Show and Kenny was there, smiling as always, and loving every minute of it. He even competed in the bizarre rider/dealer team race, where teams of three dealers and two factory riders relayed off of bikes each lap to determine a winner. Kenny was not only ridiculous fast, but quite the team cheerleader, also. Especially when you consider the German’s ties with KTM go all the way over to Europe, the switch seems strange. That’s the business of professional sports, though, and even though he’s going, I’m sure he’ll be emotional when the move finally comes.

You’d have thought the same thing of Barcia just two years ago, as he’s been a Honda man since he was a kid (even Kenny is technically just going back to where he started with Suzuki). Justin has done a masterful job of not coming straight out and saying he doesn’t like his current bike, yet also making it fairly clear that he doesn’t. The idea that someone would want to leave factory Honda to ride a Yamaha 450 would have been totally ridiculous two years ago, but that’s where we are. Now we know Justin might have ridden his last race on the CRF, because he’s going in for ankle surgery and is expected to be out for the rest of the season. You can park your conspiracy theories because the always-fired-up Barcia would have loved to stay in the fight and push the Roczen/Dungey duo around some this season — regardless of impending team deals, he wants to race, but surgery is needed. It’s not the way anyone thought his time on red bikes would end.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for Millsaps’ time on orange to even begin. He’s still out with a nagging foot injury and the whole situation just makes zero sense to me. Perhaps Davi will be back after Lucas Oil AMA Pro Motocross takes its next weekend off. Perhaps. We’ve had a lot of false starts about Davi’s return, and we’ve heard plenty about him not feeling as comfortable on the KTM 450 as he was on a Suzuki last year (when the Rockstar team tested KTMs for a potential switch, Millsaps was coming off of knee surgery and couldn’t ride). Davi maintains that he’s been hurt so much that he hasn’t logged enough riding to get comfortable on the new bike. That fact is true, but it now seems somehow possible that he could miss the entire season. The layoff is so long that Davi posted an Instagram video yesterday saying he’s retiring, only to post another a few minutes later explaining that he was only kidding, and he’ll definitely be back. When? Who knows?

We only really know this: in this sport, riders and teams always believe the grass is greener on the other side. It might not be so, but when a rider gets an idea in his head, that’s pretty much all that matters in a sport that’s this mental. We’ll see if any of these guys are any happier — or better — a year from now.

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