Jason Anderson wins Supercross finale in Salt Lake City, ties Tomac with seven wins

By May 7, 2022, 11:37 PM EDT
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With the sun setting over Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City, Jason Anderson won the Monster Energy Supercross season finale as the 2022 champion Eli Tomac watched from the sidelines and nursed a knee injury sustained in Atlanta.

A spate of run-ins with Malcom Stewart and Justin Barcia left Anderson on the ground too many times, but with a run of four consecutive victories in the final races of the season, he was able to tie Tomac for the most wins on the season to share those bragging rights.

“It’s surreal to be riding this good,” Anderson told NBC Sports’ Will Christien. “It’s surreal to have this many wins after the past couple of years. I’ve been on a dry run; I haven’t had many wins and to be able to have a year like this, switch teams, and have everything come to fruition that I worked for. It’s amazing.”

Anderson’s starts in 2022 have been spectacular and he got up front quickly again, trailing the hole shot winner Justin Bogle and Chase Sexton.

Bogle fell back to 12th, but Sexton was able to cling to second in the race.

But, with Tomac already crowned champion and Anderson taking a solid lead on the track, the focus shifted to the battle for third in the points between Malcolm Stewart, Justin Barcia and Marvin Musquin.

Click here for full 450 Main results

They gave the fans their money’s worth.

Stewart was the fastest rider in the middle stage of the race. He charged through the field and made a clean pass on Barcia for third, still thinking he had time to catch the leader Anderson. Barcia cleaned him out in retaliation, riding straight into the side of Stewart’s bike without even attempting to make the turn. Stewart was pitched from the bike.

Stewart regained his seat and mounted a charge that had the crowd on their feet, screaming for him to catch Barcia. Stewart rapidly closed the distance, but lost the chance to re-pass Barcia for the final podium position when he lost time to a lapped rider.

Barcia finished third, but his aggressive move earlier in the race was not enough to take third in the points away from Stewart, who finished the race a close fourth.

“I was just putting a charge in and Justin just straight-up, t-boned me,” Stewart told NBC Sports’ Daniel Blair. “We’ve been racing clean all year long and that was dirty, I’ll be straight up.

“We’re definitely going to have a talk after this race, but overall I’m here to have fun.”

Barcia finished two points behind Stewart, fourth in the standings, but after the race he was fined and docked 10 points by Supercross. That dropped him to fifth in the standings.

“Obviously the fans are not happy,” Barcia said. “We’re racing for third in points. I was doing everything I could. It was an aggressive pass; I’m going to own that. But what am I going to say? I’m out there racing for the championship. That’s what I wanted: third. I was going for it. I’d like to think he would have done the same thing, but maybe not.

“Sorry guys, but I’m here racing for a living. This is what I do. Bring the boos, but love it or hate it, this is me since Day 1.”

The final rider in the battle for third in the standings, Musquin rounded out the top five.

Cooper Webb closed out his disappointing title defense with a sixth-place finish. This is the first winless Supercross season for Webb since 2018 when his best finish was a third at Daytona. Webb announced before the season finale, that he’s decided to skip the outdoor season following his fourth-place run last year.

In 250s Christian Craig, 30, needed to only finish 14th in the East/West Shootout to wrap up the title. And since he has swept the podium in every race this season, that seemed like a good bet. He won his heat convincingly, but perhaps in an effort to protect his advantage, he rode cautiously in the main. After winning the hole shot, he fell back in the pack.

Craig made the race interesting with an easy fall about a third of the way through the feature. He dropped to sixth, but still had a 15-second lead over the rider 15th on the track and could afford to ride a safe race. Ultimately, he slipped to eighth at the checkers, which was more than enough to wrap up the title.

Fighting back tears from the podium, Craig shared his No. 1 plate with his son.

“This feels like a dream right now,” Craig said. “It’s the people around me; the people I surround myself with, from my trainer to my wife – my kids are here to celebrate with me.

“I wrote on a white board at the start of the season, with my wife, a picture of this plate and I wrote down what it was going to take. It’s real. I got it. I couldn’t be prouder of my team.”

Nate Thrasher won the race, denying Lawrence a final win in his championship bid.

“It hasn’t been the best season for me and the team, but we put it all together tonight and I fell like that is what we’ve been missing,” Thrasher said.

Click here for full 250 Main results

Lawrence finished second in the race and the championship.

“It was a heck of a season,” Lawrence said afterward. “Definitely some ups and downs. We got three wins in a row, four altogether. It was a good season.

“I have to give it up to my team, we all work together so hard. I was second last year, Second again. It’s a bummer to fall short , but there’s progression in it. I can complain too much.”

After wrapping up his championship at Foxborough, Jett Lawrence told NBC Sports that his priority shifted to doing all he could to help his brother Hunter Lawrence win in the 250 West class. He didn’t get a chance after crashing in the first qualification session and suffering a slight sprain to his right ankle.

After falling twice in his heat and being pushed into the Last Chance Qualifier, Pierce Brown started sixth and took the final spot on the podium.

RJ Hampshire in fourth and Jo Shimoda rounded out the top five.

Hampshire’s top five kept him second in the championship by a nine-point margin over Brown.

RACE RECAPS

ROUND 1, ANAHEIM: Ken Roczen renews battle with Cooper Webb by winning the opener

ROUND 2, OAKLAND: Jason Anderson wins for first time since championship season

ROUND 3, SAN DIEGO: Chase Sexton (450s) and Michael Mosiman (250s) deliver first career wins

ROUND 4, ANAHEIM: Four races, four winners as Eli Tomac solidifies points lead

ROUND 5, GLENDALE: Tomac wins back-to-back races in Arizona Triple Crown

ROUND 6, ANAHEIM: Anderson ties Tomac with two 2022 wins

ROUND 7, MINNEAPOLIS: Anderson does it again and closes to within three of Tomac

ROUND 8, ARLINGTON: Tomac wins overall as Anderson takes two features

ROUND 9, DAYTONA: History made as Tomac sets Daytona Supercross record

ROUND 10, DETROIT: Tomac wins incident-filled, third consecutive

ROUND 11, INDIANAPOLIS: Tomac extends lead as competition falters

ROUND 12, INDIANAPOLIS: Tomac wins fifth straight and sets sights on 2022 championship

ROUND 13, ST LOUIS: Marvin Musquin scores first win of 2022 in Triple Crown format

ROUND 14, ATLANTA: Anderson keeps the pressure on with win

ROUND 15, FOXBOROUGH: Anderson’s second straight win pushes battle one more week

ROUND 16, DENVER: Anderson wins the battle; Tomac wins the war

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Roger Penske vows new downtown Detroit GP will be bigger than the Super Bowl for city

By Jun 1, 2023, 2:00 PM EDT
Roger Penske Detroit
David Rodriguez Munoz/USA TODAY Sports Images
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DETROIT – He helped spearhead bringing the town a Super Bowl 17 years ago, but Roger Penske believes the reimagined Chevrolet Detroit GP is his greatest gift to the Motor City.

“It’s bigger than the Super Bowl from an impact within the city,” Penske told NBC Sports. “Maybe not with the sponsors and TV, but for the city of Detroit, it’s bigger than the Super Bowl.

“We’ve got to give back individually and collectively, and I think we as a company in Michigan and in Detroit, it’s something we know how to do. It shows we’re committed. Someone needs to take that flag and run it down through town. And that’s what we’re trying to do as a company. We’re trying to give back to the city.”

After 30 years of being run on Belle Isle, the race course has been moved to a new nine-turn, 1.7-mile downtown layout that will be the centerpiece of an event weekend that is designed to promote a festival and community atmosphere.

There will be concerts in the adjacent Hart Plaza. Local businesses from Detroit’s seven districts have been invited to hawk their wares to new clientele. Boys and Girls Clubs from the city have designed murals that will line the track’s walls with images of diversity, inclusion and what Detroit means through the eyes of youth.

And in the biggest show of altruism, more than half the circuit will be open for free admission. The track is building 4-foot viewing platforms that can hold 150 people for watching the long Jefferson Avenue straightaway and other sections of the track.

Detroit GP chairman Bud Denker, a longtime key lieutenant across Penske’s various companies, has overseen more than $20 million invested in infrastructure.

The race is essentially Penske’s love letter to the city where he made much of his fame as one of Detroit’s most famous automotive icons, both as a captain of industry with a global dealership network and as a racing magnate (who just won his record 19th Indy 500 with Josef Newgarden breaking through for his first victory on the Brickyard oval).

During six decades in racing, Penske, 86, also has run many racetracks (most notably Indianapolis Motor Speedway but also speedways in Michigan, California and Pennsylvania), and much of that expertise has been applied in Detroit.

“And then the ability for us to reach out to our sponsor base, and then the business community, which Bud is tied in with the key executives in the city of Detroit, bringing them all together,” Penske said. “It makes a big difference.

“The Super Bowl is really about the people that fly in for the Super Bowl. It’s a big corporate event, and the tickets are expensive. And the TV is obviously the best in the world. What we’ve done is taken that same playbook but made it important to everyone in Detroit. Anyone that wants to can come to the race for free, can stand on a platform or they can buy a ticket and sit in the grandstands or be in a suite. It’s really multiple choice, but it is giving it to the city of Detroit. I think it’s important when you think of these big cities across the country today that are having a lot of these issues.”

Denker said the Detroit Grand Prix is hoping for “an amazingly attended event” but is unsure of crowd estimates with much of the track offering free viewing. The race easily could handle a crowd of at least 50,000 daily (which is what the Movement Music Festival draws in Hart Plaza) and probably tens of thousands more in a sprawling track footprint along the city’s riverwalk.

Penske is hoping for a larger crowd than Belle Isle, which was limited to about 30,000 fans daily because of off-site parking and restricted fan access at a track that was located in a public park.

The downtown course will have some unique features, including a “split” pit lane on an all-new concrete (part of $15 million spent on resurfaced roads, new barriers and catchfencing … as well as 252 manhole covers that were welded down).

A $5 million, 80,000-square-foot hospitality chalet will be located adjacent to the paddock and pit area. The two-story structure, which was imported from the 16th hole of the Waste Management Open in Phoenix, will offer 70 chalets (up from 23 suites at Belle Isle last year). It was built by InProduction, the same company that installed the popular HyVee-branded grandstands and suites at Iowa Speedway last year.

Penske said the state, city, county and General Motors each owned parts of the track, and their cooperation was needed to move streetlights and in changing apexes of corners. Denker has spent the past 18 months meeting with city council members who represent Detroit’s seven districts, along with Mayor Mike Duggan. Penske said the local support could include an appearance by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer.

Denker and Detroit GP  president Michael Montri were inspired to move the Detroit course downtown after attending the inaugural Music City Grand Prix in Nashville, Tennessee.

“We saw what an impact it made on that city in August of 2021 and we came back from there and said boy could it ever work to bring it downtown in Detroit again,” Denker said. “We’ve really involved the whole community of Detroit, and the idea of bringing our city together is what the mayor and city council and our governor are so excited about. The dream we have is now coming to fruition.

“When you see the infrastructure downtown and the bridges over the roads we’ve built and the graphics, and everything is centered around the Renaissance Center as your backdrop, it’s just amazing.”