Late in the main event, Ken Roczen attempted to thread between two lapped riders entering the sand section but collided with Jeremy Hand. Both went down hard, and while Roczen got up quickly, his chain derailed in the crash, forcing him out of the race. He was classified 21st, earning a single championship point.
After the race, Cooper Webb and Jason Anderson talked about the situation with lappers in the main event.
Cooper Webb – “In the heat of the moment, I probably said some stuff,” said Webb who finished second in the main event. “I mean the bottom line is, we saw what happened to Kenny [Roczen] and it ruins a championship riders’ night. It’s plain and simple, it really is. I get they are going for their positions. They are going for paychecks. I have a lot of respect for anybody that’s on the track but it’s the age-old question: what is the right or wrong thing? I personally feel like there should be penalties enforced. Whether its points or money. And that’s my personal opinion. In every other form of motorsport, the lapper always moves over… in my opinion that’s how it should be here at this level. We just costed Kenny, you know, one his health potentially and two, a championship potentially.
“I think it should be as simple, if the blue flag is out, in my opinion… these guys are racing the guys behind them,” he added. “You should not be allowed to gain time or position if you’re a lap rider. You have to make way, no one can pass you, you can’t pass anybody until the race of the leaders get by you and then you race on. And I think if you don’t abide by that, there should be a penalty, whether it’s a position penalty or a time penalty… something along those lines.”
Anderson – “I just feel whenever I have a bad night and I’m getting lapped, I’m going dam near off the side of the track because I know the situation that we’re in. Like Coop said, I completely respect when they are on the track and stuff like that, but you catch up to some guys and you see them trying to make time up on the other guy when the blue flags are out. Like they are using it to their advantage. It’s just tough when the main race is going on right there with them. So it’s hard to knock them for it because obviously they are making a living what they are doing, but at the same time we are threading the needle these guys to win the race and when they are trying to cut off the guy in front of them and we are trying to pass them and we are lapping them it’s just… two different races and it can cause havoc. You know it sucks for Kenny because I was right behind him, and he literally did nothing wrong. You know, it was just a crappy situation.”
Larry Brooks – team manager for the Twisted Tea/H.E.P. Motorsports/Suzuki presented by Progressive Insurance Team, sounded off on the incident. You can read his comments below:
“It would have been a great night. We kind of struggled during the day, even struggled in the heat races, then we kind of got it together in the main event. But a lapped rider jumped on top of Ken Roczen and bent the rear sprocket. The AMA does not do anything to penalize the riders that are being lapped; they only give them a blue flag and let them kind of dictate what they want to do. And it hasn’t worked. It’s been this way for years and years and now we just got 18 points taken away from us because of a lapped rider and a DNF. It’s super disappointing. Ken Roczen was riding really good, and for him to have a rider jump on him – it’s just really disappointing. It is the sanctioning body’s job to take care of the lapped riders and all the officiating, and it just seems like we have not been taken care of. They are here to keep the riders safe, and I don’t think that happened tonight. It put our rider in danger, that’s for sure. But we’ll come back next week stronger and better. We still have a lot of racing left.”
