Haiden Deegan came close to winning his first 450 title at SMX but Jorge Prado held strong in the final moto leaving Deegan having to settle for the overall win and he knows what he has to work on for 2027.
Deegan also admitted he was in a full sprint for 20 minutes in a bid to beat Prado! “I damn near did everything I could because these guys are going so fast. We’re almost, it’s probably going as fast as you can on a dirt bike, so it was like every landing, every turn, you’re trying to just get it perfect, and towards the end, he made a couple of mistakes, and I was trying to pressure him as hard as I could but he hung on strong.
“After that first race, I was like, I have a chance to win this. We’ll see how the start goes. I know he’s usually pretty good at starts, ripped the start, and I mean, I took one shot, but again, not trying to do what I did last year, so, I’m going to try to ride it pretty clean, not make it too dangerous, and unfortunately, we ended up second, but fortunately, with this SMX series, you could still make some good money.
“To be honest, from start to finish, we were going at it the whole time. It was a sprint for 20 minutes. And I was just like, come on, fade a little, fade a little. He hung on. He really did. He made a couple of mistakes, but he hung on strong. So we sprinted that race 20 minutes. There was no pacing at all. I had one shot to try and make a pass and I took it and he was good. Squared it up. So props to him. But again, we are going at it for 20 minutes. There’s no pacing at all.”
“I feel like I made a lot of progression. Didn’t get to win an Outdoors, came into SMX, won two out of three. I mean, like I said, it doesn’t really matter now, but I didn’t biff it in that last round, we had the red plate. It’s like, progression’s going well. I’m stoked on it. I mean, yeah, it was just going uphill and we’ll have a good off season now. I mean, I’ll be able to work on the 450 for an off season, which last year I didn’t get out of the 250 and get ready for Supercross. So give me some more time to build. And now I could switch my training over, do some more strength training, get build up for this 450.”
“I think I just focused on me. I feel like in the past it’s worked, but it’s a lot of eyes everywhere. And it’s kind of just, I really need to get a team together, which I have done. I mean, as we can see, it’s helped a bunch. I want two out of these three SMX series, multiple fast laps, fast qualifiers. So for how quick we switched everything over, it’s worked well, but now a whole preseason with our group, it’s going to be good.
“I had a lot of goals. I checked off a bunch. I actually checked off every single one besides, you know, I wrote one that was pretty big. I was like, we’ll see if we can get a championship. And we missed it barely, like barely. So I’m not going to get them all the time, but we did. We checked off a lot. I’m super proud of that. I think that’s a good thing for me. I got to give something to keep me driven and write that down and it keeps me hungry.”
“This 450 class, it’s literally every, but the top five is almost exactly the same. It just depends on that start and how hard you want to send it for the race. And you got to be fit too, because it comes down to the end. And as much as these guys don’t fade, like the 250 guys, you know, you get a little weak towards the end and you can kind of adapt to it and get them. But honestly, it’s just going to take a lot of pre-season work to get me dialled in so I can, you know, consistently try and beat these guys.”