Chad Reed will come out of retirement to race the 2022 Supercross World Championship later this year, and Melbourne has been announced as the host city for round two of the season.
The FIM World Supercross Championship has undergone changes for 2022 after the split of the FIM from the AMA Supercross Championship ahead of the 2022 season.
Previously, we wrote that Ken Roczen and Eli Tomac had been confirmed to be competing in the 2022 World Championship, that the series would be promoted by the former promoters of the Aus X Open, SX Global, and that the first round will take place at the beginning of October in Cardiff.
Tickets for that season-opening British Grand Prix at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium are now on-sale, and it was also announced in the early hours of Wednesday (20 July 2022) morning (UK time) that Chad Reed will be racing the whole three-round championship for MDK Motorsport.
Reed is Australia’s greatest export to American motocross and supercross racing, with two premier class AMA Supercross titles (as well as a single AMA 450MX title in 2009) won during a period of time where he faced off against two of the most formidable riders in the history of the sport: Ricky Carmichael and James Stewart.
Reed was a rarity in motocross, his career unique for its longevity. Having stepped up to the premier class in the US in 2003, Reed did not stop racing until the end of the 2020 AMA Supercross season. In a similar way to Valentino Rossi in MotoGP, his career can be seen in two parts, or chapters .
First, Reed was a serial winner, but in the second part - after the turn of the decade into the 2010s - he won less, but perhaps became more appreciated as a person, in addition to the respect he gained as a rider.
"Opportunities like WSX don’t come along every day," Reed said. "Growing up in Australia, I have always enjoyed an opportunity to grab my passport, travel the world, and ride my dirt bike.
"I haven’t raced in Melbourne since 2019, so it’ll be an unbelievable experience to get back here in October and go up against the best current riders in the world. It’s going to be an epic experience competing for an FIM-sanctioned world championship."
Since his final AMA race in Salt Lake City in 2020, Reed raced the Paris Supercross last year, where he went up against stars of the MXGP paddock like Antonio Cairoli and Romain Febvre, as well as 10-time AMA 450SX winner Marvin Musquin, who was announced yesterday to be returning to the Red Bull KTM Factory Racing team for the 2023 AMA 450SX season after some uncertainty surrounding his own future.
Reed joins Ken Roczen, Eli Tomac, Justin Brayton, Cole Seely, Dean Wilson, Max Anstie, and Vince Friese as a major name to be racing the 2022 World Supercross Championship who has previously raced the AMA series. At 40-years-old and after two years of no racing at the top level, it is difficult to see Reed mixing it with the likes of Roczen, Tomac, Wilson, Brayton and Anstie.
Roczen won the opening round of the AMA Supercross Championship this year, Tomac won seven races and the title, and Wilson is a solid top 10 rider, as are Brayton and Anstie, in AMA 450SX. It is unlikely that Reed will fight for the title, therefore, but, especially in Melbourne, his presence on the gate will no doubt be greatly appreciated by the fans.
Reed’s status as the greatest Australian supercross (and motocross) racer of all time makes the synchronisation of his announcement with the unveiling of Melbourne as the host city for round two of the season an understandable decision by the series promoters, SX Global.
Furthermore, Melbourne is a location that makes sense for SX Global, as an Australian-based company with a history of working in Australian supercross. The Australian Grand Prix will take place on 21-22 October.
The third and final round for this 2022 ‘pilot season’, as SX Global have referred to it, is expected to take place in Indonesia, but final confirmation on that is still awaited.
