09/21/2026
FEAR AND METHANOL: The SMX Circus Rolls Into Playoff 2 and Somebody Forgot to Bring Sanity. There is a particular strain of madness that settles over Southern California when the sun comes out after a week of biblical rain, and I found it Saturday night inside a stadium full of dirt, two-stroke ghosts, and thirty thousand people who had paid good money to watch grown men throw two-hundred-pound machines sideways through a man-made desert. Last weekend's opener had been a mud-caked fever dream. This one was dry, brutal, and lit up like a Vegas casino — which is to say, it was exactly the kind of night where a man's whole championship could evaporate between one whoop section and the next.
Double points. That was the deal on the table. Double points and a stadium full of blood-hungry believers, and by the time it was over, Jorge Prado had walked out of the carnage with the overall in the 450 class and Julien Beaumer had completed a full Austrian sweep for KTM in the 250s — a sweep so clean you'd think the Red Bull cans themselves were steering the bikes.
450SMX: Four Men, One Trophy, and a Whole Lot of Sand
Prado grabbed the holeshot in moto one like a man who owed money and needed a head start, with Cooper Webb and Haiden Deegan tucked in behind him and Ken Roczen — the German with ice water where his nerves should be — lurking in fourth before knifing his way past both Yamahas into second. For a while it looked like a clean two-man break, Prado and Roczen trading fast laps back and forth like gunslingers pacing off distance, the gap never wider than a second or two.
Then, right around the midpoint, Roczen did what Roczen does: he simply decided the lead belonged to him and went and took it. No hesitation, no drama — just violence, controlled and precise, and suddenly he was gone by two seconds. Prado clawed his way back through traffic in the final five minutes, Deegan charging from third like the whole thing was personal, and the last lap came down to under a second separating the two leaders. Roczen held on by 1.3 seconds. Deegan took third. Hunter Lawrence, the reigning Pro Motocross king, rounded out fourth, with Webb fifth — a man who started the night with intentions and ended it as an afterthought.
Moto two is where the wheels came off — literally, for at least two of them. Lawrence stole the holeshot, lost it briefly to a Prado surge, then reclaimed it after the Spaniard bobbled like a drunk on a barstool. From there Lawrence simply rode away from the field, stretching his lead past three seconds while behind him a four-way demolition derby was unfolding with a championship hanging in the balance.
Prado went down in the sand at the midpoint — a crash that should have ended his night but instead just rearranged the furniture. Deegan pounced on Roczen for second. Prado remounted, furious, and hunted both of them down again. Then, with three minutes on the clock, the whole circus tipped over: Deegan crashed battling Prado for second, got tangled with Roczen on the re-entry, Webb slipped through the wreckage like a pickpocket in a riot, and then Deegan clipped his own teammate Webb on a pass attempt and put him on the ground too. This is a sport where the fastest way to lose a position is to be standing near someone else who's losing theirs.
Lawrence, immune to all of it, cruised to a 14.9-second moto win. Prado salvaged second. Deegan held third despite the demolition derby. Roczen settled for fourth.
When the dust and the blood and the number-plate confetti finally cleared, Prado's 2-2 card was good enough for the overall by a single point over a tie between Lawrence (4-1) and Roczen (1-4) — Lawrence taking the tiebreaker on his moto win, bumping Roczen to third. Deegan, despite two moto podiums, sat just off the box in fourth (3-3).
The championship math now reads like a ransom note: Prado leads by 16 over both Deegan and Lawrence, Roczen sits 18 back, Webb — fifth overall on the night (5-5) — trails by 20. Triple points await at the Final. Somebody's going to need a stiff drink before that one.
250SMX: Beaumer's Redemption Tour Rolls On
If the 450 class was a bar fight, the 250s were a horror movie with a happy ending for exactly one man.
Beaumer holeshot moto one and simply rode off into the sunset, unbothered, wire-to-wire, while behind him the field turned into a pileup: a multi-rider collision early on scrambled the running order, letting Pro Circuit Kawasaki's Drew Adams and points leader Levi Kitchen up into third and fourth. Kitchen, in a plot twist nobody asked for, then crashed out of fifth and dropped to 11th — a genuinely bad night compounding itself in real time.
Up front, Cole Davies carved his way past both Kawasakis to chase Ryder DiFrancesco for second, closing the gap to under a second and a half with five minutes left, only to crash himself trying to complete the pass. Beaumer never flinched, taking his first postseason moto win by 5.6 seconds over DiFrancesco, with Adams third, Davies fourth, and Kitchen clawing back to seventh out of the wreckage of his own making.
Moto two started the same way — Beaumer holeshot, DiFrancesco and Davies in tow — and then descended into pure chaos. Davies passed DiFrancesco for second, then crashed hard trying to run down Beaumer, and DiFrancesco, unable to avoid the wreckage, went down too. DiFrancesco got shuffled outside the top ten. Davies eventually remounted and simply retired, done for the night.
Out of that wreckage rose Levi Kitchen, of all people — the same man who'd crashed his way to 11th an hour earlier — now charging into second, then hunting down Beaumer and taking the lead with under 13 minutes to go. He never looked back, opening three seconds in a hurry. Reigning SMX World Champion Jo Shimoda made his own charge, dispatching Landen Gordon for third and then running down Beaumer for second with barely a minute left. Meanwhile DiFrancesco, refusing to let one crash define his night, sliced his way back into the top five — a recovery that would matter more than anyone in the stadium realized in the moment.
Kitchen took the moto win by 5.7 seconds over Shimoda, Beaumer third.
But it was Beaumer's night regardless — a 1-3 card handing him his first-ever Playoff overall win, a genuinely remarkable turn for a rider who was in a back brace with a broken spine one year ago. DiFrancesco's late scramble to fifth in moto two was worth its weight in gold, vaulting him from fourth to second overall (2-5) — eight championship points salvaged from the jaws of a first-lap pileup. Kitchen's 7-1 card rounded out the overall podium in third, proof that this sport forgives almost nothing except sheer bloody-minded speed.
Kitchen keeps the points lead into the Final, but it's a three-point margin over DiFrancesco now — nothing, a rounding error, a bad start away from disaster. Beaumer's win rocketed him seven spots up the standings into third, 16 points back. Triple points are on deck. Three riders, one trophy, and by the sound of it, absolutely nobody in that stadium is going to sleep well between now and green light.
