Image: Octopi Media.

As the 2021 Monster Energy Supercross Championship begins to come to a close, Ken Roczen is confident that his bid for the title is still on.

The battle between Roczen and Cooper Webb [Red Bull KTM] for the 2021 450SX championship has been one for the books so far. Roczen found his form early in the season, winning all three races in Indianapolis and taking control of the championship.

After a tough stretch of races saw the Team Honda HRC rider miss the podium in three consecutive races, momentum, and subsequently, the red-plate shifted to Webb.

Roczen returned to the podium in both main events of the last two rounds in Arlington, and it seems that he’s found the form he showed early in the season.

“Cooper has been on it,” Roczen explained. “It’s difficult to make up points when he’s always second or first. Obviously, Arlington was a bit of a rough one for us, especially to start off. I guess the good thing I can hold on to is that by Arlington 3 I was a lot more like myself again and at least battling up front. So it was good to lead some laps and get good starts again.”

Roczen attributed some of his Arlington success to a return to bike settings he had established early in the season.

“The good thing is we’ve still got five rounds to go and I’m holding on to that I left Arlington feeling a lot better than I did in the first round. [I’ve] also gone back to some base settings that I had on my bike for the beginning of the year.

“I guess that’s how you try, you find something that you want to work on and you go into an off weekend and you try to always improve. Sometimes it doesn’t go the right way, so I had to kind of fall back into my base settings and I was riding a lot better again.”

With five rounds left in the series, Roczen isn’t dwelling on the negatives of his championship campaign. Instead, he’s focusing on the final rounds, knowing just how important they are as he sits 15 points behind Webb in the championship standings.

“Yes, I am behind,” he continued, “but there’s nothing I can change about it now. So there’s no need for me to pound my head into the ground and think about what I could have and should have done different. You don’t always have to try [to] reinvent the wheel just because you didn’t win.

“It’s five rounds so every single race is important, especially when you’re in a points deficit. Every time I finish behind Cooper [Webb] he creeps away and there’s less and less time to make [those points] up. So all of the races are important but at the same time, we’re going to come to Atlanta 1 and just try to put myself in a good position.”

The series is set to resume on 10 April, for the first of three rounds at Atlanta Motor Speedway, where Roczen will look to overcome a 15-point deficit to regain the points lead.