Watching Saturday night’s AMA Supercross race in San Diego, I began to consider the peculiar situation of Chad Reed. Before the season began, many considered Reed a top title contender, and assumed he would be fighting it out with Ricky Carmichael and James Stewart every weekend. The reality, or at least what we have seen of it so far, is that Reed seems to be stuck in a kind of Supercross limbo, suspended somewhere between ‘the Ricky and Bubba show’ and the rest of the pack.
At almost every race so far, it has been clear that Reed is just fractionally slower than both Carmichael and Stewart. Those fractions, however, add up to seconds over the course of the race, and have often left him far adrift of the two Floridians. Equally wide is the gap between Reed and the rest of the field – he seems to be significantly faster than the rest of the ‘Supercross’ class, except perhaps for Carmichael’s teammate Ivan Tedesco.
Can Reed find that extra edge that he needs to get into the fight with Ricky and James? Chad has said in the past that he tends to favor the dirt found on the East Coast supercross tracks, and has often started (relatively, for him) slow in the Western rounds, only to wake up and start ripping once the series heads to the right side of the Mississippi. We wouldn’t count Reed out of the fight for first place just yet – he might just surprise us next weekend in St. Louis….
