Breakdown of how McGrath stayed lower

I grew up watching him. He had a very BMXy style. Soak up the face, then pump it and accelerate down the landing ramp. I eventually did some box racing and it definitely improved my moto abilities.

I'm sure him racing bmx before moto... honed him in on staying low on jumps...

If he was ‘coasting’ up the face significantly, it might not be as easy to emulate on a 4 stroke, correct?

Here you go. McGrath was an accomplished bmx racer in Cali before racing motocross. He kept his weight over the front going off the face similar to James Stewart when James was not scrubbing.

https://youtu.be/2RlLmK5WM_s

not as easy on a 4 stroke for sure. When you let off on most 4 strokes, its like hitting the brakes slightly. 2 strokes don't have engine braking.

I can’t remember the race exactly, I think it was 95 Anaheim but I have zero confidence that’s correct. Anyway, McGrath passed a guy over a triple. I think it was Lusk. I swear McGrath got barely any higher than the peak of the take off. He was a good 6-8 feet lower than the guy beside him and it was probably a full second faster. My friends and I used to watch that race and and rewind that over and over. It may have actually been a heat race and not the main.

Take everything TFS taught us about the seat bounce, and then do the opposite.

Reynard was great at staying low. He would cut the wheel hard on the face, let it come into him, and slide over the top vs jumping.

There was a magazine article years ago where they analysed a race in which McGrath beat second place by a good margin. One thing they noticed was that he would consistently land his rear wheel right on the crest of the jump landings which allowed him to get on the gas a fraction of a second earlier than the other riders. Over the course of 20 laps it was cumulatively quite a few seconds of advantage.

MC didn’t even get serious about motocross until age 14. Kinda makes sense how he was always fired up and never got burned out, even after his 7th sx title. If it wasn’t for that pos KTM and his hip injury, he could’ve gotten a couple more.

go do some bmx racing and you will learn fast. I started racing with my kids a few years ago and was like, aha, so thats what mcgrath meant and why he was so successful. starts are soaking up the jumps are what bmx is..

"He kept his weight over the front going off the face similar to James Stewart when James was not scrubbing."


He wasn't similar to James, other way around. MC laid the foundation and Stewart built off of it.

I agree 100%. I was really into bmx as a kid. If you can stay low and sort of pump in the air over bmx doubles etc, its essentially that type of technique. And I do think 4strokes do make that a little bit harder to do. I can't do modern scrubs at all over doubles, and that whole technique is out of my realm. So i guess I gotta stay with the 90s technique forever lol.

You push into the face of the jump… I bmx’d and jumped a lot when I was younger, it’s a learned technique that’s fun.. with that said..

When I say push, I do not meant pre-loading the suspension. It is done right before the lip of the jump, versus from the base of the face up. (Pre-loading).. so take a table top on a 4 stroke you gas it through the face of the jump, but right as the front wheel goes over the lip you push down and forward ( do not push with crazy force because then you’ll end up in the Josh Hansen front end dive, and may end up crashing).

Try it on the small table tops and you will feel the difference

Amazing Mc fact was that he rode almost his entire pro career with a torn ACL. He talks about it on Pulp show 500 with RC. Even Ricky didn’t know and was visibly shocked when he heard it. Those of us unfortunate to tear that have even more respect.

All in the legs. Same with modern scrubbing

I was quite tight with McGrath and his crew when he was on Yamaha and often sat in when setup was discussed. One thing that stood out was how hard his forks were set up and the rear shock was very soft.

As mentioned above, he rode over the front.

When watching old vids you can see him absorb the energy that's transefered from hitting steep jumps with his legs and body. The idea was to eliminate loading the suspension too much which is a bad thing when trying to keep it low. He was very good at doing that hence his success in SX.

The above is common knowledge amongst all good riders and suspension has come a long way since then.

100% correct with your statement.

No one rode more forward on their bike than MC back in the day. DV was able to soak up the jumps in more of a scrubbing fashion but MC was able to stay lower while more perpendicular but hanging off the front and soaking the momentum of his bike up by countering it with his body weight.

Ah, yes, the McGrath Myth. . . . perhaps this series of photos from Ake Jonsson's 1973 book The Technique of Motocross can illustrate the prehistoric origins of soaking jumps:

Watch downhill skiers…

If you compare the two bikes in the last photo, that is a clue as to how this technique disappeared over the two decades between Jonsson and McGrath: Early in 1973, Yamaha had to give Ake a pre-monoshock YZ for practice and local races because they didn't have enough of the monoshock works bikes to spare, so Ake cut & welded the frame to move the shocks up for more travel like Maico was doing. (And put on Maico forks, which did not go over well in Japan).

Longer rear travel kept the rear wheel down & driving more, while longer overall travel meant it might be faster and less strenuous to just air it out in situations where they would have had to back way off just a couple years earlier. People started doubling jumps instead of doing them separately, etc. Initially it was faster, and it was a lot more glamorous to see how high or far you could jump. Meticulously keeping the bike as low as possible fell by the wayside pretty quickly, till it was pretty much forgotten at the pro level, especially as supercross began to emphasize clearing doubles & triples.

Not everybody used Jonsson's proto-soak anyway, or used it effectively. He told everybody about it in his book, but most of us got distracted right around then by how much farther/higher we could jump as long travel came in. Gary Bailey likewise taught what he called the pushaway movement as you took off, to lower the bike's arc, and Russ Darnell taught the same principle then, too, but we mostly forgot their versions as well.

So McGrath learned it from BMX instead. He unwittingly revived a technique that was so throughly lost in a few short years that it wasn't recognized at first when he revived it.

Jonsson was pretty blunt in 1973: He went faster than most because he kept the bike low over jumps and used the front brake very hard going into corners. Easy to say, hard to do as well as he did it.

Yesterday, I saw a post where Steve Wise reacted to talk about Chase Sexton standing through corners by posting photos of Marty Tripes standing in corners a half century ago, with Tripes replying that he copied it from Joel Robert, as a technique CZ taught him when he went to a training camp of theirs around 1968, when Tripes was 13.

And a couple years ago I was reading a reprinted CZ test from around 1970, the high-pipe CZs, and it said Joel Robert was noted for riding pigeontoed. Heels out, that is.

Apologies for derailing the thread however much; I had those photos set aside for an possible off-season topic. There's nothing wrong with a timely reinvention of the wheel, more power to those who can do it.

Professor Speedman in the building. Nice post

Here's a blast from the past. ESPN had an awesome rear view of Reed soaking up a Triple on his Yamaha of Troy YZ250F identical to MC in 2002 at Minneapolis. It was on a lot of replays that year.

Found it! GO TO 11:35

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sAexbPXvI4

Lusk raced a 125 in 1995 I believe. I do remember in Charlotte that year he passed Steve Lamson over a triple, it was a really cool shot and you could see how much lower he was. The camera was in front of them.

I love that 90s moto stuff, gets my blood pumping!

Guy Cooper must have not seen this lol.

Super cool post!

It’s pretty simple.

You’re in standing attack position going up to jump, at bottom of jump you begin to slide your knees forward on the bike so that at the top of the lip your butt is as close to seat as possible. Hence you “soaked up” some of the vertical force and transmitted it through your arms and legs pushing down on the bike at the same time. You’re left with more forward energy and less vertical energy than you would have had.

These days the top guys on certain jumps do a combination of this and a traditional scrub together.

This is a great analogy, and actually skiing is the most similar in physical motion to mx. Still upper body, head pushed over tips of ski, use legs to absorb bumps, all the turning done in lower part of legs and with weight on outside ski.

This shows it at 0:27 in. I think MX Factory has a more in depth video too but I couldn't locate it quickly. AJs video shows using the same technique to learn the basics of scrubbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UuitGPq1_c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_REVMvB2BY