In a candid session with Feld Motor Sport’s Mike Muye during the recent SMX Media Days at Angel Stadium, media had the opportunity to quiz the senior director of operations at Monster Energy Supercross on all kinds of topics, which we’ve pieced together in our latest Industry interview.

Image: Foremost Media.

To begin with, is there anything new for this year in terms of track designs?

Yeah, so we’ve worked closely with Dirt Wurx. Obviously, put a pretty big emphasis on racing passing. And you’ll notice in a lot of the track designs, long lanes, full turns, things like that. Alex [Gillespie] has done a great job designing those. We’re excited about it. I think that we’re going to see good results from what’s been built.

Does the SuperMotocross finals, the last three races, impact the track builds whatsoever?

No. The SuperMotocross playoffs don’t affect the Supercross track designs that we’re integrating. Of course, if we learn something that might translate well to Supercross, we’ll incorporate that, but really, SuperMotocross Playoffs are what they are. They’re hybrid tracks and we’ll continue to build those. Supercross is what we’ve come to know and love, and we’ll continue to build those. A lot of cool ideas, obviously. We haven’t released the SuperMotocross Playoff schedule yet. That’ll be coming soon, but we got a lot of great ideas and unique tracks that are in development now for that.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face personally taking on this role?

I’ve actually had the opportunity to do some version of this job for about 20 years now, but I guess, I grew up loving the sport. Jeremy McGrath was kind of my era, watching him. Challenges are daily but it’s a pleasure to work through them, and it’s exciting. The best thing about it is we’re putting dirt tracks inside of a baseball field as we sit here at Angel Stadium, so we can build the same track next year with all of the same ideas going into it, and it’s going to be different. And that’s what’s cool about it is you’re never going in every day with the same set of challenges ahead of you. It’s always something that you got to work through, and that’s what’s cool about it.

There’s a big emphasis on the Northeast market this year. What was the decision behind that?

So, we’ve seen a lot of growth. It’s been successful racing in East Rutherford and Foxborough. We’ve done that tandem. We moved into Philadelphia this year. That was an incredibly successful event, there’s a lot of opportunity there. The Northeast is where the large majority of the US population is. There appears to be an affinity to Supercross, so we want to continue to build upon that. Pittsburgh coming online has long been a goal and a market that we’ve looked. And from the early onset, it has proven to be successful. A lot of people are engaged with that being a new ground.

Supercross is such a refined product now that I’m guessing every improvement you can make is marginal because all of the massive improvements have been done in the past. Does that make your job more difficult because you’re searching for these little gains in maybe places you never even considered before?

Yeah, I guess it could go both ways on that. Sure, Supercross is refined, but we don’t want to become stagnant either. We’re making small tweaks here and there, but we’re also focusing on the bigger picture and progressing the sport in a lot of different ways. You saw that at the SuperMotocross Playoffs last year, we introduced a new timing system that has more expansion capabilities that we want to start dabbling in, bringing more and more technology into the sport. That’s really a data-driven focus. I think it’s good for you guys in the media to be able to have that. It’s good for the teams, it’s good in a lot of different areas. That’s a pretty monumental and major shift. You’ve seen it in our broadcast package and some of the things that we’ve introduced there. There’s big initiatives too, that we’re working on. Meanwhile, focusing on those little tweaks to always be better. We have a little bit of a mantra around our office that we get to make Supercross and SuperMotocross better every single day. It’s a constant focus.

Do you feel like your position at the top is thankless in some instances? Like maybe, sometimes you can’t do anything right, or maybe those improvements you do make, you don’t get a recognition that they deserve?

No. I mean, me personally, I don’t do this for the recognition per se. I don’t think our organization does it for recognition. We really feel that growing the sport is the goal, and seeing the growth is probably the only recognition that we really need for it. So whether we make the change or you guys make a change or whomever it is, the teams do something different, doesn’t matter. It grows the sport, and that’s really the recognition that we work towards. We’re laser-focused on the growth, and anything that promotes that and pushes that forward is beneficial in our eyes.

Speaking of tweaks, the nine whoops…

Listen, the nine whoops obviously is a large part of the conversation, both internally, obviously externally. Our goal is to produce a challenging and safe racetrack. Hands down, that’s the most important thing to us. We are in the process of developing data to be able to tell us… I think sitting in this room, we probably all have our own opinions on what’s good, what’s bad on the race track, but data’s king and it’s going to tell you the facts, so we spent a year with the nine whoops. Obviously, it came with its challenges, but we will look to expand on that in the future as we continue to develop more and more. To say, right now sitting here, that we’re going to have 10 today? No. Are we going to have 14, five years from now? I don’t know. Maybe. Our goal is to keep athletes safe first and foremost and we’ll do whatever we need to on the track while still maintaining, while still keeping them challenging. So you have a single year, and it’s hard to take the data from a single year with a single set of whoops. Really, last year was spent around being 100 percent sure that we’re getting the right information. Now, next year we’ll start to introduce additional whoops and see, ‘Okay, does the data change anymore now that we’ve done this? And it’s a three-to-five-year process to really get a good base of any type of information that you can use, and we will just continue to go from there. Obviously, the rider feedback, the team’s feedback is important to us. We understand that there’s a desire to go to more. But also on the same token, we want to make sure that while yes, additional whoops does create some challenges, are we doing it the right way? Over the years, we’ve played with the different types of whoops, so building them with loaders versus dozers. We’re trying to now make them bigger and fatter on top as opposed to, if you remember, five, six years ago, they’re real peaky. Sometimes, they almost look like they were built backwards. We’ve taken a lot of those incremental steps to get to the point that we’re at. The nine whoops has become noisy, but we did all of those other things to get here. Even spacing… Well, not even across the whoops, but even spacing around from round to round. We’ve been between 13 and 14 now for a while. So, this isn’t new that we’re looking at these types of things. It’s just this was probably the one that got the most attention.

Image: Octopi Media.

You guys have 17 rounds of Supercross every year. You try to do unique tracks for every round. Is there any idea, like maybe bringing back tracks from yesteryear that had close racing, and I guess reincorporating older layouts with maybe new elements or resurfacing even tracks from a couple of years ago?

Yeah. So our Feld team along with Alex and DirtWurx and that team, always looking back at that type of stuff. And we get a lot of input, too. Riders have a steel trap of a memory of things that worked and things that didn’t work. So, we get feedback from the Ricky [Carmichael]’s and the [Ryan] Villopoto’s and those guys of the world on, ‘Hey, we had this. Can you try that?’ So yeah, bringing back a full retro track, we’ve toyed with ideas on that. Predominantly, it’s been the different sections that we’ll incorporate into different areas. Alex goes back to some of Rich Winkler and that era’s maps – he has access to all of them. Just randomly looking through stuff and is like, ‘Oh, we should try this again and bring it back.’ So to answer your question, constantly looking forward and looking back, because a lot’s been done over 51 years.

We see across the off-season, different national championships/off-season races, experiment with different types of race formats. In Monster Energy Supercross, there’s the traditional main events, there’s the Triple Crown rounds… Is that something that you see the sport staying with in America? And also, I wanted to get your opinion on Superpole as well, that type of single lap, qualifying concept.

So for the foreseeable future, yes. I think the Triple Crowns are great. They come with mixed reviews, but by and large, they’re an interesting point for the riders and for the fans, and we try to strategically place them in a multitude of ways. One, we try to break up the season a little bit so that there’s some variation in there. Also, we understand that it’s three races. It’s a lot of races, so we try to look to domes or places that hopefully, knock on wood, don’t rain and stuff like that. But for the foreseeable future, I think we’re comfortable with where we’re at and we’re always looking at new things. To your question about the Superpole, we actually used to do them. We did them at the US Open and they’re awesome – there’s no doubt about it that they’re awesome. It has been something that we’ve discussed, nothing we’re prepared to move forward with at this moment, but they are, they’re fun and they’re cool to watch. Especially when they’re done right and they’re quick and they move along, it can be pretty interesting.

In the bigger picture of SuperMotocross, the world championship, two years into that concept now, are you satisfied with where it’s at? Because I think that the response and the results of it have probably exceeded expectations.

Yeah, we’re super-positive on the progression of it, for sure. I think I’ll look back two years ago coming into this, I don’t think anybody knew what to expect. I remember when we first announced the world championship, we were cautiously optimistic on what it was going to be, even at that point when we sat at the LA Coliseum. And I think we’ve learned a lot each year that we’ve gone and we’re sitting in a great place, but to my point earlier, we’re not just going to sit back and say, ‘Oh, you know what? It’s great. Let’s just keep doing the same thing.’ We’re always going to keep trying to progress. I think there’s a lot to build on there. I think we have a long ways to go to make it even better and we’re going to continue to do that.

The future as a world championship [internationally]…

I think right now, we’re confident and comfortable in this calendar that we’re racing in. Obviously, we’re continuing to grow worldwide with our SuperMotocross Video Pass amongst a host of other things. But for the foreseeable future, the calendar that we’re at is great.

What are you guys looking at with tuff blocks? Is there any kind of progression that we can do to make them a little bit safer or stay in where they’re supposed to be without catching riders’ footpegs?

No. But to your point, it’s not something right now that we have data on. It is something that we’ve discussed. Back to the whoops, it’s like, ‘Okay, this person seems to think that they cause more harm than good. This person thinks that they do more good than harm.’ You know what I mean? With that data, it will be able to make much more educated decisions. We have had discussions on different structures of the tuff blocks. We’ve looked into the European style, the more arched. There’s pros and cons to all of it, and it’s just like one of them things that we haven’t found this is going to fix a problem that exists. You have to be able to line the track somehow. I think it’s something that we are continuously looking at and would be open to any and all suggestions, as we have been.

Are there any updates to flagging or medical lights or anything like that for 2025?

I don’t think so, no. We will still utilize the caution lights, the red lights on the triple faces and those different elements. We are looking at, I guess from the Supercross standpoint, we have a pretty solid team of people that work the events. A gentleman by the name of John Tillman is our flagging coordinator, and he has done a phenomenal job in working with the group on development and training and those types of things. And really, that’s a initiative that we have going into 25 and beyond. It’s continuing developing our internal resources with training and consistency across all 31 events. So if there’s going to be changes, it would probably be incremental changes, but that affect all of the championships.

Obviously, it’s a big discussion you guys are probably having, but what is Feld’s current stance on electric bikes and incorporating them or not incorporating them?

We actually have a couple of different working committees that include the OEMs, the AMA, and we’re having discussions. Right now, there is no intention to put them in racing with the combustion bikes, but we are working to find alternatives for them to race in. Feld is a huge supporter of electric bikes because it’s great. Longterm for the sport, it’s going to be beneficial. If and when the opportunity comes to put a Supercross track in the middle of an urban area, that’s pretty good for our sport. It opens it up to a whole new category, so we are supportive of it. It’s going to come in time, but it’s going to be a definite crawl, walk, run type of a timeline.

Image: Octopi Media.

Do you see any other challenges with a quiet race going on inside of the stadium?

I think you always have to adapt to the change. It would definitely be unique. We have DJs, we have hosts… Unfortunately, sometimes you can’t hear them, but it will be different, right? I think we all realize that. Some of the reason that you come to SuperMotocross is the sounds, the smells, all of those things. I think we’re quite a ways off from having real models and plans around that, but there’s a lot of different things we could do. You could mic up the bike, so now it’s a different sound but you still have that sound. It’s coming through the speakers so that you still have it with an underbed of music. There’s a lot of different things that we could do, but we’ll have to see where we get.

Las Vegas was the final for the SuperMotocross. Do you think Las Vegas would be the final for the regular season, the Supercross series?

We’ve spent a lot of years in Las Vegas. We saw the finals last year was there and it was hugely successful. We’ll continue to try and play there. A little bit challenging in that market, finding a location, but as of right now, it will continue to try and play there.

In the last couple of years, you guys have added VIP programs – how has it been for you guys to initiate that? To see how the crowd response has been to it?

The goal is to give people unique experiences. Any major sport nowadays has some type of unique experience. I think with SMX, it’s pretty unique for people to be able to have the level of access that we can give them in a VIP experience. So, it’s been very well-received. I think probably all either know somebody or we brought somebody to the events where you bring them down to the floor and they see how big everything is, how fast these guys are doing, and how athletic they are, it’s eye-opening. Obviously, we can’t let 60,000 people down another floor, so we have to minimize it, but it’s been very well-received to have that level of access.

Do you want to talk real quick about changes with SMX Next?

Yeah, so SMX Next, we started, I think you guys with Moto Combines. MX Sports team put that together as a developmental platform for that gap between racing Loretta’s and racing Pro Motocross. And it was successful. We liked it. We began to move that direction with Futures, which has been very successful. Futures is four rounds plus the national championship. And then MX Sports, I think they had two rounds last year moving into this year trying to umbrella everything into a common name and a more consistent platform. We’ll be rebranding everything as SMX Next. There will be a total of 10 rounds. So there’ll be five Supercross rounds, three Pro Motocross Moto Combines, and then two events at the world championship finals. Those final two rounds will replace the 65s and the Superminis, and we’ll have the 250 guys race twice at those back-to-back weekends. And then the last race would be the KTM Juniors. The effort and the goal here is to further develop the pros before they become pros in the 250 Class, and give them an opportunity to race under the lights with the fans before they get to the next level.

I think that’s awesome to invest in those guys and give them more opportunities to grow and build the base of our pro riders…

Yeah, it’s progressed so much, and the OEMs are heavily involved in supporting the program and telling us what they need, what their riders need. It was designed to be an opportunity not just for the riders that already signed with OEMs or factories or teams in general. But also, if there’s some up and coming talent that one of them wants to see, they give us suggestions and say, ‘Hey, bring over Cole Davies.’ That happened a couple of years ago and you see the success that he’s had, so it’s really worked well in not only giving them the opportunity to race on the track, but also giving the OEMs and the other teams an opportunity to see talent that they might not have seen before or would add, travel a long ways too.