Image: Octopi Media.

With a crash in the whoops costing him dearly in the 450SX main event at Atlanta 3, Ken Roczen later reflected on the crash and just how difficult the section was during the final race of the Monster Energy Supercross residency in Atlanta.

The Team Honda HRC rider jumped out to a 12 second lead over the competition during the final race of the night and looked poised to win his fifth main event of the season.

A crash in the whoops late in the race cut his lead in half, eventually allowing championship rival Cooper Webb (Red Bull KTM) to get by and take the win. Roczen detailed the crash following the main event.

“It was weird, I hit the whoops really good pretty much almost every lap. Once I started swapping sideways like that it started getting so bad in that V right there that I really had nowhere to go, so I went down.

“Even though it wasn’t a high-speed crash at all, I dumped it straight on the handlebars so they were a little bit tweaked and it definitely took me some getting used to.

“It kind of just took the wind out of my sails a little bit and I had to regroup and after that, I wasn’t even skimming the whoops anymore because they were so gnarly like cooper said. I didn’t really want to move to a different side of them and try to skim them. So I stuck to what was safer and it was obviously slow as heck.”

Throughout the day it looked as though these were the toughest whoops we’ve seen in Supercross in quite some time, Roczen later confirmed just how difficult they were.

“I liked them better in the main than in practice. But at the same time, I think those are probably some of the gnarliest whoops we’ve ever seen, especially with how many there were and then there’s just no room for error as you can see and I feel like they collected a lot of people today.

“When they built them, it’s all fun and games when you have to hit them once in qualifying practice or whatever, but once you get to the heat race you’ve gotta hit them for 20 minutes straight so.

“It separates [the pack], but at the same time I feel like they can bite you big too. I feel like there are maybe other ways of doing the whoops where they’d have been a bit more racey, yet difficult, but I mean, in the end, everyone has to deal with them.”

The 2021 championship now has just two rounds left with the penultimate round kicking off this Saturday from Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City.