I don’t know what’s going on with Chase Sexton; this race was a little better than the last couple, I think, but he still got sixth. And he still got a garbage start. Once he got clear of some guys, he was doing 49-second lap times, but that was just the same as the leaders; it wasn’t faster. And we’ve seen him go faster than everyone else many, many times.

ICYWW, I don’t believe this quote in the Kawasaki PR from Chase:

“I felt more comfortable going into this weekend, and the bike was working great with the adjustments the team has made.”—Chase Sexton

The Partzilla Blaster PRMX Racing guys ride with Chase at Jack Chambers‘ place in Florida, and they had Kyle Chisholm out there to do some testing for them (don’t be surprised to see Chiz racing again with PRMX; like death and taxes, Chiz is eternal), which then factory Kawasaki asked Chiz to ride Sexton’s bike setup. Can’t hurt to have someone that helped Ken Roczen develop his bike and also rode Eli Tomac‘s Yamaha a bunch weigh in on what a bike is doing.

I wrote this last week:

“By the way, something I was talking to Oscar Wirdeman over there at Kawasaki (Garrett Marchbanks‘ crew chief) about was that at some point at RCH with Ken Roczen, they literally had Kenny ride a stock RM-Z450 (when he was struggling to get a setup) and slowly added parts to it to address what he wanted the bike to do. Sometimes you go down rabbit holes and get lost, forget where you started from, and forget that you’ve taken whatever characteristics the stock bike was designed to have by the engineers and tried to make it do something else. Starting from a stock platform (because each bike DOES have a “feel”) gets you back to center, and you don’t take a bike that is a franken-bike of feelings, you know? Maybe that’s something Kawasaki is doing this week in Florida?”

And that’s what Kawasaki apparently did last week with Chase! They took a stocker and started adding parts to it. Almost sort of a refresh for Sexton to start again. (Editor’s note: Wait for Steve to take credit for Sexton’s turnaround because of this article!) We saw the radical bike changes he made for round two, which was pretty amazing considering he had chosen something else and rode with it for months. Anyway, props to Kawasaki for trying to get this right, getting Chiz to ride the bike, getting a stocker going for Chase, and everything else.

It didn’t really pay off in Texas, but nothing will work until Sexton gets some better starts.