Image: Octopi Media.

450SX rookie Chase Sexton is coming into the final stop of his rookie campaign in the premier class of Supercross ‘banged up’ from a slew of crashes in the back half of the 2021 season, including one in the penultimate round at Salt Lake City.

After missing much of the middle part of the season due to an injury sustained while leading the main event at Houston 2, Sexton recovered to return to action at Daytona and has since grabbed to podiums on his Team Honda HRC CRF450.

Along with those podiums has come some massive crashes, the most recent being in qualifying practice at Salt Lake City 1 last Saturday. While he escaped major injury, Sexton is admittedly coming into the final round of the series at less than 100%.

“Round one here in Salt Lake City started off rough,” Sexton explained. “I had a big crash in qualifying, which could’ve ended my night; it was pretty gnarly. After the crash, I was really sore and my heel, left shoulder and right hip were pretty banged up. We did some work and we got myself to where I was able to race.”

As the gate dropped on the main event, Sexton managed to work his way into the top five, eventually taking fifth place on the night.

“I didn’t get a good start in the main event, but like the heat race, I just tried to fight my way up,” he continued. “I feel like I was riding pretty good, but kind of lost it with about five minutes to go and got passed by [Dylan] Ferrandis.

“It was a good top-five after what could’ve been no race at all. It’s something to build off of and we have another race to go, so we’ll just try and get better.”

Sexton now has one more opportunity to grab a victory in his maiden season in the 450SX class this weekend at Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City.