Is the sport of Motocross past its prime?

It'll be alright, although I'm not convinced we'll be able to race a '23 YZ125 in a super-duper-evo class at vintage races in 20 years... I hope we can though.

The four strokes have done their damage here in the UK I'm sure. Being louder and the sound carrying further plus bumping the cost for the he average dude, it can't help. Saying that, people complaines enough about noise/dust/whatever else when it was still (almost) all two stroke.

No.

In the schoolboys in the UK back in the seventies there were five classes: 50cc, 80cc, 100cc, 125cc seniors, and 125cc expert. All were based on age.  I remember being at races in 1978 where the 100cc class was split into three groups as there were 100+ entries in that class alone.  The senior 125cc class sometimes had two for the same reason.

Exactly, I had 3 practice tracks within an hour, and open land to ride 10 minutes away.

Nowdays there is one track an hour, and the others are 3 hours away.

I feel for the young today.

Bikes, gear, fuel, campers (hotels) are more expensive than ever. More tracks seem to close than new ones being opened. Many tracks seem to think getting their clientele hurt by not splitting practice, having good flaggers, or huge hits is a great business model. Kids are content to sit on their butts staring at screens and parents let them. I said to a friend a few weeks ago racing is now just for the ones who are lunatics that absolutely love it and still willing to burn money to do it. I’m thankful my son and I are still in that category (so far). If it gets too ridiculous we’ll go back to being professional practice riders again. 

That's easy to explain. With the largest chunk of earnings since WW2 taken by a government that gives it away to their mates, the remainder going to the same mates paying for bloated and price gouging services from former public owned service providers, house prices at 9x an average salary, the upside down mess Thatcher created with regards to income inequality, and 12 years of wage stagnation that has made an average household £10k a year worse off, no one under 40 has any money to spend on bikes.

You'd have classes full of entries even without the wage stagnation part. You would be at 1970s levels with 1970s house prices at 2x salary, or cheap social housing, and more disposable income. As that's the problem. No one has the disposable income to do it.

This right here. Didn’t have 20 different little bikes, limited/mod, A/B split for age classes, etc. And then number of practice tracks. In the 80s-90s you wanted a prepped track you had to go to the races. Now there are options on weekends to go to prepped tracks, pay your $30 and get your riding in in 3-4 hours instead of 10-12 hours for twice the cost. 

LTM in Casey IL gets over 600 entries about every race. With full gates in many classes. He's even limiting sign ups, and racing some classes on Saturday.

The days were getting too long and the motos were getting shortened before he did that. He actually gets too many riders, a good problem to have.

Is mx as popular as it was in the 90's and early 2000's no, probably never will be. But it still seems to be going strong in certain places.

Btw, hare scrambles get huge turnouts around, here and the GNCC series seems to be doing very well. 

100% agree with this. I know I'll get flamed, but LL's has killed the local series races. Tracks shut down in May and June because of regionals and people getting ready for them. 

Casey is my favorite track (or tracks I should say with the Bomber). 978 at their last race because they build a fun track for everyone and not just A riders. 

This shit jumped the shark in the late 80's - early 90's.  

I think it's a geographical thing. It is declining in California which is/was a huge epicenter of the sport. But now you're seeing other areas like Florida, North Carolina and Texas explode with tracks, riders, and facilities. 
 

The biggest thing is the state of the Economy. Then if people DO have money, How expensive are the bikes to go racing? Then, how expensive is the rest of the gear and parts just to do some racing. Then if you have money for all of that, the sport can thrive. BUT in this sport, you should be able to get a decent used 2 stroke for $2500. Get a set of gear, and small parts and go racing. The problem is a decent, cheap, used bike is about $4000. Then if the engine isn't roached out, the fork seals are probably leaking and you need a new clutch. So it adds up quick.

I think that part of any sort of decline in racing numbers is sort of in your post. 
 

The biggest class being the C class is something I noticed quite a while ago (but admittedly I don’t attend a lot of ‘local’ races). 
 

It seems like people want to race the lowest class forever. If a new rider comes out to watch a race before deciding to enter, they see how fast the front runners of the C class are going and that they are pretty much able to jump everything on the track and decide to stay as practice track warriors instead of feeling embarrassed about getting lapped twice in a 5 lap race. 
 

The last local race I attended was 5-6 years ago and there were 30+ guys in the C class, maybe 10 in the B class, and 3 in the A/Pro class. There was no way that the bulk of the C riders were brand new racers and a couple of them definitely wouldn’t have been embarrassing if they were put in with the A class. The A and B raced together and 3 of the B riders finished 2-3-4 both motos. 
 

I looked up the results for the race in question, they actually had a nice turnout. A big part of the problem is those "x" number of entries are now spread over 35 classes instead of 20 which makes the gate numbers smaller.

I think most people believe the time when they were in their teens was the prime of the sport. For me it was mid-80's to mid-90's. Then off to college, grad school, marriage, kids, and the sport just didn't seem as "cool" when I came back to racing.

Another thing I noticed, Oklahoma really needs to come up with and/or enforce advancement rules. lol

Entries:

250D - 27

250C - 30

250B - 5

450D - 16

450C - 23

450B - 3

Check results from round 2 at the wick decent turnout but way down from being jam packed like other times

Matt Burkeen posted a video last week from a race at Muddy Creek recently.  Nothing against Matt...he's a great rider and a great YouTube follow.  But, I was surprised to see there were only 4 guys in his 450 race and 3 in 250.  This was a Spring race at a national track where you would think entries would be pretty high.  I guess you can make a few bucks, but that isn't too much fun.

The 3 wheeler craze put MX on the map imo. That was such a huge moment. They were popular overnight like YETI Coolers. That placed a lot more spotlight on the sport of motocross I believe. Like with all trends, they usually fade, as was the case with ATV’s. MX got such a huge visibility boost from it, the sport reached critical mass and has enjoyed that wave ever since, but I agree the excitement has waned since (though McGrath single handedly grew it in the 90’s). At the same time it’s become so much more professional and prime time now, so I think it will continue to do well, perhaps just not with the same surge like in the 1980’s. When electric bikes come into play, I could see a resurgence.

Yeah, I don't think that what I described is exactly "THE" answer because there is no one, single answer to an area's declining race participation, but it certainly doesn't help.  But this has been going on for quite a while.  

I’m afraid I have to disagree about people under 40 not having money to spend. 
 

my cousin’s lad, just turned 21, does a bit of general building/labouring, still loves with parents, got finance on a nearly new VW polo GTI. £26k. Pays £350 per month, with £6k balloon payment at the end. 
 

They’ve got the money, they’re just not choosing to spend it on Moto! 
 

IMO , modern day Moto is too inaccessible to make it an appealing pastime people can do regularly with ease.

I moved away from MX racing as the tracks became more technical, and I started losing my confidence as I got older.  A combo effect for me.  
 

I still race hare scrambles.  And love to hit the SEVMX vintage races with my modern bikes in the modern classes, on easier tracks.  
 

Racing is a blast to me, but not on most modern Mx tracks.  
Some guys never lost their balls, but mine shrank.  Haha.  

We did have a track re-open for racing————ECHECONNEE!   Thank you Stalker.

Now it’s got me in a dilemma about which multipurpose bike to get to return to racing it, and hare scrambles.  Might start a thread.  

It's the 4Ts. It's always the 4Ts.

This really got put into perspective for me this weekend. Saw some friends that I used to race with every weekend that I haven’t seen in a few years. We talked about old time racing and riding. Now I’m 32 and they are 28-31. I haven’t really been on a bike in almost a year and sadly I’m the only one that even somewhat consistently still rides. One tried the dual sport route but couldn’t do it consistently and the bike was just too expensive to hang on to. Another hadn’t touched a bike in years. For all of us it just got too expensive with everything else going on in life. Some of the others don’t even touch tracks anymore because of the cost and the assholes they run into so they just stick with desert tracks and trail riding when they do pull the bike out.

They don't have the money. £350 a month isn't going to get you very far when it comes to Motocross. If they still live at home they should have far more than £350 a month to play with, but what are they going to do if they're trying to save for a deposit for a house that's value has bloated beyond affordability for most people, and once they buy something are paying off a 35+ year mortgage.

The days of paying equivalent to £25k for a council house are long gone, as it's those generations that were filling classes. Every other part of the economy is paying the price for it as there is less and less money to move around, and average wages have stood still for over a decade. Wage stagnation has robbed them of another £3-4k a year.

Just my twin pennies, but 90s to early 2k when when I could see it on ESPN, was my favorite time. Maybe it's because I started riding, or when I started motorcycle school. But, it did seem less cost-prohibitive back then. By late 90s, the 2t were at pinnacle of development in the Japanese brands, with some just having bng during later model runs. I noticed more mainstream commercials with mx riders as well. 

I think it still has yet to reach it's prime.  Local races have been good in District 17.  We have a good combo of stadium races and day races.  I'm seeing some new blood coming in.  It's easy to buy a used bike and immediately be competitive.  The bikes are pretty equal so the advantage of spending a ton of money to make the bike faster has gone away.