By: Jeff Kardas

San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium marked the location for Round 7 of the 2009 Monster Energy AMA Supercross Series, and it marked the end of the west coast sweep for the series' first half. After a full tour of SoCal, and stints in NorCal and Arizona, this final California round held hope of being an exciting race thanks to a unique track designed by none other than local fast guy and moto legend Ricky Johnson. This round also marked Round 6 for the western regional Lites series, and the final chance for these riders to race before a 7 week break before the final two rounds. So without further ado, let's try to examine what REALLY happened in San Diego.

Attendance at the San Diego round was clearly down.

First things first, and that's the city and surrounding communities of San Diego, California. It's a beautiful and different area when compared to much of the rest of southern California. Still within the epicenter of the moto industry, Qualcomm Stadium's quite a convenient race for everyone involved, whether flying into the nearby airport or simply driving down the 15 from "up north" in Riverside and Orange county. The stadium itself is of course home to the San Diego Chargers NFL team, and sits right of the highway with just over 70,000 seats. These reasons make it hard to understand why the race wasn't even close to being sold out. Best guesstimates (since we haven't received an official count) are between 40-50,000 fine folks showed up to watch the, uh, runaway win by James Stewart in the Supercross class and the, um, commanding victory by Ryan Dungey in the Lites.

The excitement regarding this round is tempered for a few reasons. Number one: Stewart really looks unstoppable at this point, and it's hard to get excited about watching a bunch of runaway and never-challenged victories heading our way for the next 10 weeks. Number two: Chad Reed is so clearly the second fastest rider out there that, barring any truly major incidents, he's virtually locked the 2nd podium position into place without going one round deeper into the series. Number three: With these top 2 guys tied in points heading into the eastern swing, it's essentially nullified the previous 7 rounds, when we were still holding out hope that James' DNF in Round 1 might mean for a duel for the title. At this point it sure looks like Stewart has the title in hand and that it's his to lose, as he's rolling forward with a 6 race win streak and has beaten Reed without trouble every time. Is Reed broken? It sort of looks like it. Despite the great start up front this past weekend, he wasn't able to put any time on Stewart at all, although he easily outdistanced himself from Andrew Short in 3rd. In Reed's defense, he did mention several times that he never really "felt it" this weekend, but that's not the first time we've heard that this season, and we've never (?) heard it from Stewart. In a post-race interview, Reed went on record with: "I'm happy to be second and once again San Diego was good to me." Folks, interpret that how you will, but to us, that means we're in for a long season. When the defending champ is "happy to be second", he's lost the fight.

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So, what's to look forward to now? How about this: Let's hope that Ryan Villopoto, Josh Grant, Andrew Short and maybe even Mike Alessi all read that same quote and can smell blood in the water. While it may be unlikely that any of these riders can be expected to run Stewart's pace this year, the consensus in the pits is that any of these guys could get up to Reed's with a bit more luck, desire and experience. Shorty has made the podium twice this year, matching both Villopoto and Grant, and was looking great all day at San Diego. Adding to this ray of hope for excitement were the results from practice at San Diego. Reed didn't make it into the top 3, and Villopoto was outside the top 5. As if that wasn't bizarre enough, Red Bull Honda Racing's Davi Millsaps came into the night show with first gate pick in heat number one, meaning he was the second fastest in practice (Stewart was first, thereby getting 1st pick in 2nd heat). Next was Mike Alessi, then Josh Grant and only then, was Chad Reed. This made for one hell of a second heat race, as not only were Stewart and Reed face off, but so were Grant and Villopoto. Like James said after winning it easily, "man, that was the main event right there, we're done!"

That's one crazy thing about the season, for sure - ALL of the fast guys are still racing! Is there anyone out right now due to injury, and in fact a couple more were just added to the mix: Broc Hepler and Michael Byrne. Both of these guys are always fast, and both proved worthy of the moniker 'factory rider' at San Diego, although with a bit more credit must be given to Byrner since he didn't yard-sale in front of everyone during the main. B-Hep started right up front and was quite capable of holding the pace in 3rd, but Short parked him on lap 4 of the main, forcing him to play catchup before his big crash. Byrne rode solid and steady for a top 10 (8th) in the stacked class, which is really saying something.

It seems that Dirt Wurx just can't win. Despite the fact that they aren't solely responsible for the track design and that they take input from not only manufacturers and the AMA/FIM delegation, even when the track is completely designed by an outside source they get the blame when it's not right. San Diego's layout, on paper, had some great potential. Ricky Johnson, being the sado-masochistic type, he is put in a couple of gnarly and technical rhythm sections while also introducing an interesting little S turn just to the left of the starting gate and at the end of the tougher rhythm straight. This looked like it could provide some truly interesting passing and/or photo opportunities, yet in the final construction phase it was nixed. Why? We asked Norm with Dirt Wurx, who said simply "it wouldn't fit". As it turns out, the finish line structure stood about precisely where the second bowl turn should've been, so they tried to run the single outside bowl to hook into the far left corner in the first turn. That worked, a bit, for the first practice, but apparently someone complained, because it was flattened for the second session and the cool, interesting track design feature was all but a distant memory. Cutting it out also dropped the laptimes a bit, and once again we were in the mid to high 40 second range for the faster riders which, really, is more what you'd expect from a big arenacross track than an average supercross track.

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Those rhythm sections that keep coming up are doing so because, well, they kept coming up all night at the track: in the form of hard crashes and a wide variety of ways to attack them during the racing. It was well into the first practice before the fastest riders were able to get through each of them the fast way, and only much later into the race was Stewart (and, reportedy, Grant) able to speed things up in the last section by tripling in, and stepping on/off the two table tops. This probably put them at about a half second advantage over everyone else, and no doubt was partially responsible for Stewart's 8 second gap at the finish.

Of course, Josh Grant wasn't able to capitalize on his fast line since he A) went down in turn 4 and B) crashed very hard in the section before said rhythm section, launching his JGR YZ450F dramatically into the air and crashing onto the stadium floor. It was wild seeing the #33 being ghost-ridden in such a huge way, then ending up literally under a table and at the feet of the guy running the sound system for the show. What's even crazier is the guy never skipped a beat, and acted like nothing happened - in fact, you can see his legs under the table in the photo below, moments after the bike arrived.

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The Lites class was... a little bit more exciting, but not much. It's been a bit of a mystery who would win each weekend, but it's always been one of two top guys: of course we mean Jake Weimer and Ryan Dungey. This time Dungey had the upper hand all night, running away in his heat and the main event, which essentially was a mirror image of what Weimer did in the previous round. Unfortunately for Weimer, his teammate Ryan Morais got in between himself and Dungey, which means 2 additional points were lost to Dungey, such that he's now 2 behind new leader Dungey going into the long break. The silver lining to the night was that we did finally get to see Trey Canard pull off his first win of the season, easily winning heat number one in front of Weimer, which probably again indicates that Weimer just wasn't quite feeling it in San Diego. The reality of it is, Canard was 15 seconds down from Weimer in 4th in the Main event, putting him about 24 ticks behind Dungey - or roughly a half lap down.

MDK/KTM's Ryan Sipes beat his teammate Justin Brayton this weekend, which is only the 2nd time he's managed to do that all season. Neither were a threat for the podium in San Diego.

Moving on to this coming weekend and the rejuvenation of the Eastern Lites Regional series, Atlanta's Georgia Dome promises to inject some excitement into the series. While round one in Houston was effectively a preview for what's coming up, it was a much-needed one that gave hope of some great racing coming up out East. Generally considered to be a 'weaker' field of riders than on the west coast, we're going to go ahead and disagree with that. While there may not be an absolute clear-cut favorite such as there is in the west (Dungey), there are certainly just as many uber-fast guys contending for the podium out east as out west. Pourcel and Stroupe are certainly a match for Weimer and Morais, and after a few more weeks of preparation under their belts, they'll probably be even better than before, particularly when considering how little Pourcel had ridden after coming back from his injury. Lest we forget the east equivalents of Geico Honda's Canard and Reardon - Metcalfe and Wharton - who seem to almost perfectly mirror their teammates' abilities and, well, we've got a death match for supremacy reaching outside of the top 5 on each coast. MDK/KTM's offerings are arguably as good on the right coast as the left, with Martin Davalos and Wil Hahn roughly equivalent (in theory) to Brayton and Sipes on the left, although that first round may not have been their best performance. Oh and lets not forget about Nico Izzi, who may be less of a wild card for the podium than any of the other guys we've already mentioned. Beyond the top 8-10 riders, the east/west fields are pretty well equal in depth, with riders like Lemoine, Goerke, Clarke, Durham, Hewitt and Jesseman (among others) easily matching the abilities of west counterparts such as Borkenhagen, Chris Blose, Jeff Alessi, Cole Seely and Ben Evans. So in other words, we're making the argument that the east is as strong as the west yet, there's no clear-cut winner as their appeared to be out west with Dungey. Brint it on, Atlanta!

Speaking of Jesseman's Canidae/Xtreme Team Green teammate Hunter Hewitt, it was reported today that he will be out for a while with a broken femur sustained practicing today. Best of luck to Hewitt, who surprised quite a few people with a top-10 in the season opener a few weeks back in Houston.

Well that about does it for San Diego. At first, there didn't seem to be much to talk about but actually, there was, and that is a good indication of at least one thing: the series IS still interesting! With the added excitement of the east guys to mix it up, and the series truly heading out east for the first time this year, plus the fact that there's a virtual guarantee that 60,000 southeastern natives will be screaming from the stands and, well, there's a lot to look forward to. Be sure and check back here at Motocross.com to see practice and race photos, plus race coverage and What Really Happened in Atlanta.