In the third and final 450SX race of the night, Jett Lawrence aggressively cut back on a sharp 180-degree left-hand turn, surprising Justin Barcia who was following closely behind. Barcia reacted by slamming on his brakes, causing his bike to lift its front wheel off the ground in a stoppie maneuver, in an attempt to avoid colliding with the #18 bike. Unfortunately, Barcia couldn’t stop in time, and his #51 Yamaha collided directly into the side of Lawrence’s Honda, causing the championship leader to crash to the ground. Lawrence, clearly in pain and holding his left arm, managed to eventually get back on his bike and finish the race, albeit a lap down. Despite his efforts, his finishes of 2-3-21 only earned him eighth place overall for the night. This result allowed Cooper Webb to narrow the gap to the championship leader from 16 points down to just eight points, with five rounds remaining.
Jett Lawrence give the latest update after the race to RacerX:
“Let’s just say we got Bam Bamed. It’s the first experience. No, it’s just a sucky situation. Just cut down under Hunter and obviously Barcia was defending his line from someone else on the inside of him and just this wrong place wrong time and just got KO’ed basically. Kinda hit my arm pretty good, I got a gnarly Charlie horse. He hit like some like nerve in my arm where like I lost kind of feeling and strength in my hands. That’s why, I was trying to get up and getting going early but I physically couldn’t, my leg was dead, I had no strength in my legs. So, I was trying to get going, but this what it is. We’re eight [overall], I think. How many points is it? Eight points? I mean, thankfully we had a bit of a buffer at the second. But, no, go heal up. We got a break, come back, come back stronger. We got five races to go. We’ll go long run home run boys. We’ll do that.”
He continued.
“We ain’t gonna pull in. We don’t give up, I don’t care. I’ll roll out there. I’ll keep rolling out there. Dude, it was painful. I couldn’t grab on. A lot of the straights, I was like let my arm rest cause my arm was getting tired, dude. So, but we ain’t gonna pull off. We don’t quit, all right.”
