The stars of motocross will be lining up in Taranaki this weekend to find out who will be the Alpinestars King of the Mountain for 2017.

With major national titles on the line in the coming weeks, the annual King of the Mountain (KoM) motocross in Taranaki again becomes a litmus test to see who has the acid to win when the New Zealand Motocross Grand Prix at Woodville lights up just a week later and when the four-round national championships series kicks off in Timaru only seven days after that.

The main contenders to win the senior races at the Barrett Road Motorcycle Park, on the outskirts of New Plymouth, on Sunday are again expected to come from the country’s elite MX1 (450cc) class riders.

Racing on this challenging circuit in the shadow of Mount Taranaki is always fierce and this weekend will be no exception with some heavyweight hitters among those entered for the two-day event, juniors on Saturday and seniors on Sunday.

Taupo’s Brad Groombridge is a two-time KoM winner, winning in the mud in 2012 and again in 2014, but Queenstown’s Scott Columb was the main man in 2015, taking the key trophy ahead of Waitakere’s Ethan Martens and Mount Maunganui’s Rhys Carter.

Last year it was national MX1 champion Cody Cooper who took the top honours, so it’s really anybody’s guess as to who will prevail this time around, although Cooper would have to be heavily favoured to make it two victories in a row.

Cooper was simply too powerful for his rivals at the KoM last year, celebrating  four wins from four starts, winning the MX1 class outright and also winning the all-important King of the Mountain all-capacities feature race from which the event gets its name.

Fresh from winning the MX1 class at the Waikato Motocross Championships in November, the Auckland Motocross Championships in early December and then the Honda Summercross, in Whakatane just after Christmas, Cooper certainly has momentum on his side.

It was a truly international line-up that blessed the KoM event last year.

Such was the depth of talent that the top six finishers in the feature race had all previously represented New Zealand internationally at the biggest motocross in the world, the annual Motocross of Nations (MXoN).

Cooper, who raced for New Zealand in Italy last September and has been a Kiwi team member on seven other occasions as well, used all of that experience to successfully fend off the attacks by Columb (who raced for New Zealand in England in 2008, in Italy in 2009 and Latvia in 2014), Groombridge (a team NZ rider in the USA in 2010), Mangakino’s Kayne Lamont (Belgium in 2010, Germany in 2013 and France in 2015), Hawera’s Daryl Hurley (Belgium in 2001, Netherlands in 2004 and USA in 2007) and Elsthorpe’s Kieran Scheele (France in 2011).

Meanwhile, Inglewood trio Larry Blair, Leslie Longstaff and Braeden Christian, Eltham’s Nick Hornby, Opunake’s Liam Read, Hawera’s Kieran Baker and Stratford’s Sam Cleland are among the local riders with a good chance also of featuring on Sunday.

Cleland (pictured, main photo, above) won the junior King of the Mountain title last year.

Cleland, a student at Francis Douglas Memorial College in New Plymouth, finished the day third overall in the 14-16 years’ 250cc class and also managed to finish runner-up to 450cc rider Brendon Mcaskie in the all-capacities senior MX3 class.

But he really turned it on in the feature race to take the chequered flag by just a bike length from Dunedin’s Grason Veitch.

Others to watch out for this weekend include Ngatea’s national 125cc champion Ben Broad, Sanson’s Max Hefferen, Masterton’s Camden Butler, Taupo’s Cohen Chase, Opunake’s Taylar Rampton, Tauranga’s Josh Tredinnick, Te Puke’s Tyler Steiner and Rotorua’s John Phillips, to name a few.

For the nation’s motocross elite, the early weeks of summer can mean only one thing – lots of hard work. This is the time of year when national title contenders should start to see their weeks of training and testing begin to bear fruit, while, for others, lazy habits over winter may be starting to bite.

Questions are therefore now being asked – Who has prepared best? Who is strongest? Who is fastest? Who will rate among the favourites for a national or international title in 2017?

Perhaps those questions, and others, will be answered when the start gates drop at the KOM this weekend.

© Words and photos by Andy McGechan, www.BikesportNZ.com

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