Alex Martin | Making Progress
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Although Alex Martin hasn’t had the success he may have hoped for in the 2019 Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Championship, it hasn’t been an outright disaster. Second overall in two of the last three outdoor championships (he suffered a season-ending injury in the latter stages of the 2017 season), the 250 class veteran has established himself as a contender for the title and was expected to do the same this summer. The move to the JGRMX/Yoshimura/Suzuki Factory Racing team for 2019 and 2020 raised some concerns, as the small-bore yellow bike doesn’t have as powerful of an engine as other bikes in the class, but Martin’s experience in the class and the team’s resources was viewed as an offset to the disadvantage. After a 23rd place finish in the first moto of the year at Hangtown, Martin bounced back and scored a crucial 2nd place result in the sloppy second moto and has placed within the top-15 and scored points in every moto since. This is solid, but it’s not the same string of podium finishes like years past and that has him ninth in the current season standings.
Things have taken a turn for the better recently, thanks to performance improvements the JGRMX/Yoshimura/Suzuki Factory Racing team have made on the RM-Z250 and improved communication during testing between the rider and team. “With Alex at Jacksonville, we did a new engine setting. I told him we were bringing him a new motor that was different and that we were just going with it. He said he needed something else and we gave it to him,” Team Manager Jeremy Albrecht explained during a recent interview on the PulpMX Show. “He is not a guy that likes change, he fights change, so we ended up just doing it anyway. I’m glad it helped and hopefully, he lets us do it more. He wouldn’t let us change it and every week it was the same thing, so we called and told him we did it.
“Every week we talk about what we want to change and it doesn’t happen just because they say. We have to work on things, especially engine stuff,” Albrecht continued. “You can’t just do it without testing it properly. You dyno it, put it on a bike, Suzuki wants it to be proven before it goes on, which makes sense. We gotta do things the right way. So we’re definitely getting better and he’s getting more confidence. It’s a new bike for us this year, the 250, chassis wise and the engine is a little different. It’s us getting to know it and you don’t know it until you race, no matter how much you think you are ready. He’s new to the team and the bike.”
The changes and increased confidence was on display in 250 Moto One at RedBud, when Martin grabbed the holeshot over the field, diced with points leader Adam Cianciarulo, and settled into a pace that put him in second place with only a few laps to go. As the moto wound down, a small trail of smoke started to come from the underside of the bike and Martin visibly eased his riding in an attempt to nurse it to the end of the race. Unfortunately for Martin, the engine locked up just a few turns from the checkered flag and what looked to be a runner-up result instead turned to a 19th place finish. As soon as the bike was back in the team pit area, three mechanics went to work and pulled off an engine swap and prepped the bike for the day’s second moto. It was later determined that a radiator hose came undone and the lack of coolant caused the engine to overheat. Eager to make up for the missed points, Martin got into the lead group with another solid start in 250 Moto Two and ran to a third-place finish; the 19-3 scores put him 11th overall on the day.
After the race, I spent a few minutes with Martin and discussed how the summer has gone so far. With his Supercross season (fifth overall in the 250 East Coast region, no podium finishes) and results through the first five rounds in mind, I asked if he had planned to be in the hunt for the outdoor championship or if the transition to a new bike and the early issues he had lowered his expectations. “Being that I’ve been second in the championship the last three years in a row, I feel like I had every right to think I was a championship contender because the guys that had beaten me years prior weren’t in the class anymore,” he explained. “There are always guys that step up, Adam and Ferrandis and Cooper are getting the job done, so I guess we made a mistake when we put emphasis in the offseason on Supercross. And the way we set the bike up for Supercross was phenomenal, but for outdoors it wasn’t ideal. Sometimes you don’t find those things out until you go racing and we found out the hard way. We made a lot of choices to make the bike better chassis wise and suspension wise, and now it’s paying off. The problem is we’re six rounds in and we missed the boat on that one. My mentality has always been the same and I think being sponsored by JGR Suzuki, these guys pay me to win and that’s my mentality. It has to be. With my results the last few years, I’ve earned the right to feel that way. It’s not from a lack of effort.”
With things now working in his favor, a late-season push from Martin seems likely. Down a substantial number of points to Cianciarulo/Ferrandis/Cooper, it wouldn’t be enough to push him into contention for the championship, but another name in the top-five will make the last ten motos even more interesting and will give him and the team a much better base for the 2020 season.
