Image: Octopi Media.

After posting 6-1 moto scores at the opening round of the Lucas Oil Pro Motocross series, Ken Roczen looks to continue to grab good results despite the depth of the 450 class as he makes a bid for the 2021 championship.

After missing all of the 2020 Pro Motocross season, Roczen was unsure where he’d stack up ahead of the opening round at Fox Raceway when speaking to the press last week.

Though the Team Honda HRC rider admitted he was feeling a bit of ‘a disconnect with motocross’, Roczen came managed to grab second overall and sits third in the championship.

“Grabbed a really good start with Aaron [Plessinger] together [in moto two] and like he said we just kind of laid it down,” Roczen explained. “I felt like I had some really good lines throughout the entire track.

“The tracks really gnarly you know, you have these ruts that are super soft but a lot of the track that we ride is hardpack underneath it and it gets some really sketchy ruts and square edge bumps at the bottom of some of the jumps.

So I was really just riding as hard as I could for as long as I could and tried to keep the focus and not make any mistakes.”

When asked if he was feeling more confident going into round two after his resurgence at Fox Raceway, Roczen says he’s continuing to take things one race at a time before addressing why he was feeling a ‘disconnect with motocross’ ahead of the season.

“I’m kind of just taking it day by day and weekend by weekend,” he continued. “I want to continue working on myself, I feel like I’ve got more in the tank, so I don’t think I’m quite where I want to be.

“When you jump on the bike from Supercross to Outdoors, there’s quite a difference especially when it comes to speed and finding a flow on the track. I was just really slow honestly compared to some of the other riders.

“I didn’t let that discourage me by any means but I just knew I had a lot of work ahead of me and I didn’t want to go into the season saying ‘I just want to get this overall and go 1-1,’ when realistically I feel like it would take me a little bit of time to get there.

“We have a couple of cool tracks coming up where I feel like I’ve done really good and [ones] that I enjoy, especially Colorado. So I’m honestly just trying to enjoy myself and I feel like with that kind of fun comes good results.

“As everybody else has said, the field is so stacked. You could win one weekend and then be off the podium no problem the next weekend. So we’ve got to continue getting good starts and put ourselves in some good positions and be mistake-free.”