America does off-road right
By TMX Archives on 26th May 11
The AMA does Supercross and it does Motocross - meanwhile the World Champs basically does Supercross in a field...
By total fluke I managed to hit on the opening round of the AMA outdoor MX Nationals which were staged at Hangtown and televised LIVE last Saturday night/Sunday morning. I was watching something else at the time, probably Scottish Legends or Scottish Minis from Knockhill around midnight (I know, how sad is that?) on Motors TV when it flashed-up on screen "On Next - AMA Nationals.”
After a few seconds - I am a bit slow (pause for your inevitable and pinpoint accurate puns) after a few beers - it dawned on me that it must actually mean the opening round of the 2011 AMA Nationals was actually being broadcast live! I know, isn't modern technology amazing, there was me swigging Stella (other beers are of course available) and watching Jock McJock thrash some Ford Fiesta-powered backyard special around a windy hillside, instead of doing the sensible thing and going to bed and suddenly I was transported to the west coast of the USA for a live dose of genuine MX.
So, another can of beverage was duly cracked and I settled back into some serious research on the state of American MX, still in awe of the magic pictures appearing in my living room in the early hours of Sunday morning.
I don't wish to bore you with the corner by corner action here, even if I could remember what happened, I was much more interested in taking an overall view of American MX, as experienced from my front room. And in the main I can't help but be impressed.
The Hangtown track was basically a proper, genuine, MX track. Of course like all tracks it had been ‘enhanced' by the hand of man but in the main it was a warts and all hillside track with a lap time in excess of two minutes. This, from what I have seen of American tracks (again, TV-based research, my back-pocket money sadly doesn't run to trips to the US of A) is fairly typical. Their outdoor tracks are big, long genuine MX circuits. Yes, America is the home of Supercross and they do indeed do this better than anyone. The winter AMA (and World of course, mustn't forget that the FIM muscled in on the AMA series to claim their own Championship by proxy) is one of the success stories of motorcycle sport and the totally man-made SX tracks have evolved noticeably over the last few years.
So what am I getting at here? Obviously that on the MX front America is clearly getting things very much right. There is SX, which is staged in mighty arenas and which plays weekly to immense crowds for three winter months. Then they have the outdoor Nationals which feature genuine natural outdoor MX circuits.
In contrast ‘we' have a European-based World Championship which takes place predominantly on man-made SX-type tracks outdoors, effectively the worst of both worlds. It is a recurring topic that the British MXGP has little to do with MX in Britain as played-out in countless club events for the benefit of thousands of riders (you!). Our traditional much loved tracks like Hawkstone Park, Farleigh Castle, Canada Heights, Foxhill (need I go on) are cast aside in favour of whichever big field, wherever it is, that can be ploughed-up into a tight, man-made SX replica of a track that can be filmed with ‘X' number of cameras.
Now, I'm not getting at the long line of promoters who have sought to deliver MXGPs in Britain over the last dozen years or so, the truth is our courts are littered with the remains of their financial failure, despite huge amounts of faith - some would say blind faith - by those promoters.
Given that we are not allowed a proper MX track for the GP I am almost in favour of going the whole hog and doing the exact opposite. If we are going to have a man-made SX-type track for the British MXGP why not stop pretending it is genuine MX and bung the whole show into a stadium! The Millennium stadium would do nicely. It fulfils all the requirements of the series organiser and the teams, i.e acres of tarmac to park the circus, loads of hospitality space and impressive VIP areas for whichever VIPs you will be entertaining, A media centre, a medical centre, and any other kind of centre that a major international sporting occasion could possibly need. And stadiums are purpose-built to look after the requirements of tens of thousands of spectators who descend for the day and need feeding, watering, toilet facilities (without resorting to temporary bogs that would make conditions in WW2 look primitive).
You could forget trying to make the show last for three days in the hope that you can rake-in a few extra bob from the faithful, committed few (us!) through camping fees or worse than that, temporary lap-dancing facilities, you can just just charge people the going rate so they can watch their day's sport from the comfort of a Grandstand seat just like it were a football match or a pop concert. A lot more people can be tempted to a shiny stadium than to a random muddy field...
