It’s another jam-packed weekend on the calendar, with two separate races taking place Australia and a whole bunch of superstar riders competing in them. If you’re in America trying to follow it all, it will feel similar to what we wrote about a few weeks ago when the Paris Supercross and the Canadian [Vancouver] Grand Prix of the FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX) took place on the same weekend.
If you’re in Australia, though, this might feel a bit different. WSX is hosting its Australian GP this weekend in Queensland, while meanwhile the Boost Mobile AUSX Supercross Championship is holding its series’ finale over in Adelaide. The Adelaide event, which will crown this year’s Australian Supercross Champions, runs in conjunction with the final round of the Australian Supercars Championship. This would be kind of like holding the final race of an American championship within the final round of the NASCAR Championship here. So, it’s a big deal.
But so is the WSX race over in Queensland! In a press release, WSX promised the most stacked group of talent ever to race supercross on Australian soil, and the WSX lineup this weekend does make a great case for that: Ken Roczen, Eli Tomac, Cooper Webb, and Haiden Deegan are all lining up on 450s, to name a few. This weekend’s WSX race will be a huge test for Deegan against established champions like Kenny, Eli, and Coop. For Australian racing, though, the championship finale (over a 1,000 miles away) is important, also. Yes, the two events aren’t close to each other, geographically, but there will be a split in interest, viewing, media attention, and more.
So much so that Australia-based media source MotoOnline.com has put together a well-written story on the conflict “that can’t be ignored.” It’s a good read that goes much deeper than just having two races in a smaller country (by population) at the same time.
For example, MotoOnline explains the background of WSX. When the series launched a few years ago, it was operated by some of the the same folks, led by Adam Bailey, that are back to running the Australian Supercross Championship and the AUS-X Open. For example, the AUS-X Open morphed into the Australian GP within WSX series while Bailey’s group was running the WSX series. That WSX run was not successful, though, and the series has transferred to new ownership. Bailey has left to return to focusing only on races in Australia. Bailey, in this MotoOnline story, believes WSX put an event on the same weekend as the Australian Supercross final on purpose. He’s disappointed that sanctioning body Motorcycling Australia [MA] didn’t work to prevent that from happening.
“They come this year to intentionally, in my opinion, impact our series,” said Bailey to MotoOnline’s Nic Still. “Going on the same date [as Adelaide] is clearly an attempt to do that, which I think is disappointing. I think it’s disappointing that we weren’t protected from that by MA… My opinion is that [it’s] bully tactics by them [SX Global].”
