Mike Muye, Sr. Director of Operations for Supercross, noted the big change to the race day program for 2026 Monster Energy AMA Supercross during the SMX Media Days last week in California.
That’s right, free practice sessions will go away, and instead of two ten-minute qualifying sessions like there were in 2025, there will now be no free practice sessions and just two 12-minute qualifying sessions. Steve Matthes has mentioned this previously, but now we have it confirmed directly from Muye.
Here is Muye explaining the change:
“I think the big thing this year that we focused on was the amount of track maintenance that we want to incorporate in. So, we’ve made the decision to remove free practices, and we’ll be running two qualifying sessions at 12 minute[s] each. We use the majority of that extra time for track maintenance and rebuilding portions of the rhythm lanes and those types of things. Whoops are always challenging just because of the time that it takes to build them, but hopefully, with the reduced amount of traffic over the whoops, they won’t break down as much.”
With free practice not counting for overall qualifying sessions, eliminating these sessions does remove the risk factor for riders pushing it in a session that has no result on qualifying position. This change makes it so that each time riders are on track, it counts for something.
Muye noted the emphasis on rider safety too, especially when it comes to the whoops. Previously, the decision was made to go to nine whoops at each round, with hopes to cut down on the number of crashes in the dangerous and tricky obstacle. However, Muye said we will see a few races in ’26 with varying numbers of whoops, as a few tracks with ten or eleven whoops are in the plan. The whoops section has been a talking point the last few years as Feld and the AMA continue to navigate the fine line of allowing a tricky track that separates riders but also creates good racing while also maintaining a safe racetrack.
