Runs like this end eventually don’t they? Hopefully for their opposition they do as Red Bull KTM won cleaned up the 250/450 race double in Indianapolis as Ryan Dungey and Marvin Musquin carried on their tradition of always winning their main events together.
450 main event time and yet another great start for Andrew Short, very short lived though as the form man of this years supercross season Ryan Dungey quickly got himself to the front and made an attempt to build a cushion. Like last week in Daytona though Cole Seely on the HRC Honda was right in there, quickly past Short too and hoping to hold on to the series leader.
With early season paceman Ken Roczen now sidelined through injury the main challengers to Dungey are Trey Canard, Seely’s team-mate at Honda and perhaps the fastest but also most on the edge rider of this season Eli Tomac for Geico Honda, and yet again Tomac made a mistake early on he race while just behind Seely that dropped him away from the leaders and gave him a lot of work to do.
Looking good again was Weston Peick on the JGR Yamaha, consistently now running up front, the recovering from injury man won a heat race earlier and was hoping to stay up front for longer before his lack of fitness due to those injuries started to take an inevitable toll.
Approaching half distance Dungey had a couple of seconds lead over Seely, the Honda rookie doing a great job to keep the Red Bull KTM in sight. Short and Peick were still in there but rapidly caught and passed by Trey Canard. Again the Honda man suffering from a poor start, seemingly the bane of a lot of riders this year with the exception of Dungey who seems capable of getting top 3 starts every week.
The only point of note in the latter stages of the race was Tomac latching on to Dungey as he was lapped by him, then taking the lap back to try and squeeze maybe another position, but the contract there was remarkable. And also after suffering from illness for most of the year the Monster Kawasaki of Davi Millsaps finished in the top 6, a better result for a team so used to winning with Ryan Villopoto.
Seely consolidated his position in second and right now is perhaps the form man in the series behind Dungey, and considering he was bettered by the much fancied Jason Anderson in the early part of the season, this has been a superb run of recent results for Seely, and here he beat his slow starting team-mate Canard, who sees the points lead to Dungey now grow to 40 points.
Sadly for the fans the 250 East series is turning into almost as much of a one man show with Red Bull KTM’s Marvin Musquin totally dominating proceedings in Indianapolis and now taking a healthy lead into the rest of his season.
The Frenchman, surely destined to be on a bigger capacity bike next year was in dominant form in qualifying, setting times over half a second faster than his rivals.
His cause was helped by perhaps his toughest rival Jeremy Martin on the Star Racing Yamaha having a terrible night. A crash in the whoop section in his heat race meant he had to qualify from the Last Chance Qualifier, a real helter skelter race only 4 laps long in which only the first few are promoted into the main event. Martin led comfortably in the first running but that race was red flagged due to an injury and in the second run Martin was doing OK but got out of phase in the notorious whoop section again and went down, leaving himself too much to do to qualify.
The main challenger now to Musquin is reigning champion Justin Bogle on the Geico Honda, but in reality he could not hold a candle to the KTM and finished over 20 seconds behind. Martin just holds on to second in the series but Musquin is now 12 points away in the lead.
