Columbus SMX | Playoff 1 | Saturday, September 12th, 2026 (Free Practice on Friday, September 11th, 2026)
For those that plan on keeping up with today's Free Practice sessions, the first session is scheduled to start in 30 minutes!
Bench Racing | Columbus SMX Free Practice
Fine, I'll take the holeshot. 😄
Cmon in hot 🔥
Going for a podium
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Why is Lux Turner in Unseeded Practice? He finished in top 20.
Edit: they got it corrected
2 minute laps inside a soccer stadium??
Pretty lame they decided against the big elevated sweeper behind the start. Seems like the SMX tracks are always worse versions of the original track maps.
Soccer fields are larger than football fields.
I think they are probably just rolling around the first practice.
Also a lot of people incorrectly assume that football fields are bigger than other fields. Baseball field is bigger than soccer field and soccer field is bigger than a football field. Many people think the football footprint is the largest when really they aren’t.
Need some cricket fields. I think they're bigger than all of those.
Football fields use ton more room for sideline so the floor space ends up being the same. They've had full size soccer fields in a ton of the football stadiums sx uses. Still end up with 6 lanes at both. They're lying when they use this as the soccer stadium excuse.
Pit Row
Did they have fresh track or how b-group is faster than top guys?
The seeded times were faster in all 4 instances. However, times don’t mean anything at all today. It was just practice time. Timed qualifying is tomorrow morning.
Ando will have a crap gate coming in from the LCQ, but his lap times are top 5. Will be interesting to see how he does.
Shane on the Beta looks decent.
AT&T Stadium (Dallas Cowboys) has plenty of sideline room and had to undergo major construction to fit the field in for World Cup last summer. I still have friends that absolutely won’t believe that baseball stadiums have more floor space even though the measurements and lap times don’t agree with their “it just looks smaller” reasoning.
They had to do a massive renovation to bring in natural grass in place of the turf. They got rid of field level suites because they put the grass on top of a raised platform to support growing grass. 6 lanes is 6 lanes.
Part of it was to raise it, yes. But also because the FIFA dimensions wouldn’t fit in the current confines. I didn’t mean to derail this into an argument. But football footprints (including the sidelines) are smaller than soccer footprints (which also have sidelines). Looking at the lanes from practice today they appeared to be wider than a typical SX football stadium layout.
I don’t really care much that they went away from the original track map that crossed the start gate. Although, I was very curious how they were going to make that work. We kind of get whoops with the rollers they built. It’s pretty much a wider SX track. The long straight in the middle of the track needs a radar gun with a display for fans to see MPH because they are going to be hauling ass there tomorrow, assuming it’s not muddy.
This track has a lot of flat bottomed transitions with deep ruts and a few really high speed sections. The riders didn't really look comfortable/didn't have great flow on this track. It'll be interesting to see whether the track changes/the riders adapt. Seems like some guys will be searching for settings.
Are they running that whole straight on the start? If so, the first corner is going to be really really sketchy. Wouldn't be surprised to see some serious carnage in the first turn when a full gate charges that corner at speed.
What section is the MX part ?
The start straight.
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