Jorge Prado has, amazingly, got even better in 2024 despite being world champion last year and has won the opening two rounds and four of the 6 motos to match his entire GP victory total from last season.
Stefan Everts, talking from experience back in 1992 when he rode the opening few supercross rounds, feels the aggression you get from supercross helps, telling us: “Well I remember coming back from the US, I was coming back and smoking everybody! The aggression you build up run supercross is immense and yeah, I mean, you only can get that with supercross and you can see that. But other than that, Jorge became world champion and you see that he has a big confidence. He shows that in his riding and his riding looks really easy and comfortable.”
Prado told us of the US supercross helping MXGP: ” I get this question a lot and I think it’s more about freshness. I just did something completely different this winter and it helps me to keep enjoying what I do.
“You get try to learn new things and these things that you learn you can maybe transfer into motocross, so maybe maybe it helped me I think. I mean I’m ready to go so for sure.”
Prado then explained how much bike comfort is helping him this year, when asked if he feels as good as he did in his MX2 days, saying: “Well, I think that that bike allows me to do it more now, with being a few years ago struggling a lot with the bike, I really didn’t really feel like it.
“I’m still the same rider, it’s just that the bike it’s allowing me to do what I want to do and now it’s getting to that level where it’s starting to feel like comfortable and starting to feel like know I can play with it and, when I can do that, I can do races like today. So yeah, we still have room to improve, so it’s cool.”
Room to improve? That’s a scary thought for his rivals…
Article: Jonathan McCready
Images: JPA
