Charlotte’s zMAX Dragway will make history this weekend in inaugural dirt bike event

Several months ago, Mike Muye stood in the tower of Charlotte Motor Speedway’s zMAX Dragway and saw possibility.

“There was just so much opportunity,” Muye said, noting the size and openness and uniqueness of the facility.

Muye is the director of operations for Feld Motorsports, the company that runs the sport of Supercross. He’s used to coming into baseball stadiums or football stadiums and building dirt bike tracks from scratch there.

But he was tasked with doing something slightly different this time around in Concord, North Carolina — and that was building a track that combines the two most popular dirt bike racing disciplines and making something new.

At zMAX, he had a vision.

“The creativity was right there,” he said.

The zMAX Dragway, which sits just across the street from the Charlotte Motor Speedway oval, will be the site of some pretty significant dirt bike racing history this weekend. It’ll be home to the first round of the inaugural SuperMotocross World Championship Playoffs — a three-round postseason in which the top riders from the AMA Supercross Championship and the top riders from the Pro Motocross Championship compete for an ultimate title.

The main event begins at 3 p.m. Saturday on USA Network, with live coverage starting on Peacock at 9:30 a.m.

Tickets are still available on the Charlotte Motor Speedway website.

“This will be the first-ever SuperMotocross Race,” said Dave Prater, vice president of Supercross. “So it’ll bring elements of Supercross and elements of Motocross together for the first time, and we think we’ve done a really good job of trying to make it 50-50 as far as the actual track.”

Prater continued that the goal is to have Charlotte — as well as the other two playoff venues, Chicagoland Speedway and the LA Coliseum — fuse the two styles of racing into a memorable show.

“You got tracks that showcase Supercross skills, which is precise, you gotta jump 40 feet through the air, and you gotta land, and 10 feet later jump another 20 feet, and it measures that precision with how these guys move the bike around,” Prater said. “And then also there is the all-out speed and endurance of Motocross and what those tracks offer.

“It’s going to be incredible.”

How the event came to be

So, what exactly is this event? And how did it come to be?

Pose that question to Davey Coombs, the president of MX Sports who has had familial and personal ties for his whole life, and that answer begins ... a long time ago.

Say, 50 years.

“1972 was a very important year for our sport,” he said.

The year 1972, after all, is the year ’On Any Sunday,’ a movie that popularized the sport of dirt bike racing, was surging in popularity. It was a year after Jeremy McGrath, one of the most popular American dirt bike riders, was born.

It’s around the same time when Supercross, which had started a few decades before, had its “arrival moment” of sorts — the “Super Bowl of Supercross” in the Los Angeles Coliseum — and it was also the year AMA Pro Motocross officially started.

For the 50 years that followed, Motocross and Supercross grew in popularity — but they did so separately.

And that largely made sense. Supercross’s season always ran from January to mid-May, and Motocross ran from mid-May through the summer. They had their own championships. There was some cross-pollination of sponsors, and they shared the same athletes, but rarely did they have a reason to work together.

Then, in 2020, the pandemic slowed the world to a halt. Schedules needed to be reworked. The two entities then started communicating more and working more closely together, officials from both series said. And when the two had to renegotiate a media rights deal and took their product to market, they learned that their racing product was much more valuable when their efforts were combined.

The end result? Two separate seasons still — Chase Sexton won the 2023 Supercross championship in May, and Jett Lawrence was crowned as the Motocross champion a few weeks ago — but also an end-of-year playoff event.

It has taken remarkable logistical planning. Muye, the aforementioned director of operations, mentioned that they’re building a track “three times” the size of a normal Supercross track — which means “three times the staffing, three times the number of trucks (of dirt), three times everything.”

Three times of possibility, perhaps, too.

“Since 1972, we have not had a new, major championship come along that the entire industry — the manufacturers, the athletes, the sponsors, the fans, NBC — we’ve never had something that everyone has gotten behind,” Coombs said. “So this is the first time that this collaboration has allowed a new championship to emerge after five decades.”

He added: “It’s happening quickly, it seems, but this whole thing has been five decades in the making.”

SuperMotocross World Championship Playoffs

When: Friday to Sunday. SMX Free Practice on Friday from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. Opening ceremonies for the main event is Saturday at 2:30 p.m. For a full schedule, visit the Charlotte Motor Speedway website.

Where: zMAX Dragway, Concord, N.C.

Tickets: Tickets to the main event start at $30. Fans can also check out other things.

Watch: USA Network at 3 p.m. Saturday