Suzuki privateer rider Ken Roczen just keep rolling on, and despite not being considered a big favourite for the 2025 AMA 450 Supercross Championship, he remains a serious contender. A victory in Daytona, his first and closing the points gap on series leader Cooper Webb and second placed man Chase Sexton are his big goals as we head into the second part of the series in a couple of weeks. He spoke with the World media and this is what he told us.

On Winning Daytona

Eleventh year of racing Daytona and my first win in the books. I am still a little shocked with the emotions last night and how many moving parts have to be working in place to pull of a memorable moment for me and my whole crew like that. Never give up, kids. I said it on the podium, this is definitely up there on the best single main event wins. I’ve been wanting to do this for 10 years and never been able to pull it off. I don’t know, this is it’s a little bit surreal, honestly, just because I’ve been pretty far away from getting a win here. So to finally pull it off is just an absolute dream come true. The team and I, we’ve really excelled today making bike changes, and they were all spot on, then we just put our head down.

Hard To Believe

I honestly still can’t believe it… I had some really good lines. When you make those passes you have to put your head down or else they’ll retaliate and come back. I was just charging the whole time, trying to get a gap. Coming out of these turns it was really rutty, and very easy to make a mistake, but I just kept my head down and charged the whole way. I seriously cannot believe that this finally happened… This is a dream come true.

On Not Cracking Under Pressure

I stayed calm, and I really took it section by section. Like in the beginning, everybody was going really fast, and kind of yo-yoing a little bit here and there, you know? Also, you had to be really on somebody to make a pass, unless somebody made a mistake. Once I made the passes happen, I knew that I had to go, because these guys retaliate really quickly, so I just had to keep putting my head down. I had some really good lines, and I knew that I had to speed to stay up front, so I just kind of trusted and believed that I could pull it off.

Staying Calm

Once it comes to later stages, I mean, the nice thing is even when you have quite a bit of time to go, it’s not that many laps because it is such a long lap time, so I really just took it section by section. Some of out of these bowl turns and the ruts to triple out were a little tricky at times, so I knew that those were spots that we could mess up, I think we all made a couple of mistakes here and there. So yeah, I just really kept my focus and felt really good throughout the whole main event. That was really important to pull it off.

Sand Section and Triple

I wasn’t too stressed about it, as you can come back from it, but that was one time after, before we get to the whole straightaway by the finish, like that rhythm section before out of that tight left hander, where I really made a big mistake. I doubled my way through the whole thing and kind of bounced off that. It was fairly early in the race, and I didn’t like that, but that was really the only big mistake that I made. Other than that, you can kind of make a mistake and then usually triple your way out of it into the turn and stuff, so it was doable.

Closing The Gap On Webb

I mean, anytime, you know, once the gap goes to 19 points, you don’t want to see that gap get any bigger. So not that I made up a lot of points, but it’s very important just to keep it at to a minimum. We can see that things can just happen so quickly and we have a lot of racing to go. So it’s just really fun for me to be in it, and then this win just came at the right time and it feels really good. Yeah, if we don’t talk about points, like no matter what this win is, it’s different than winning in a normal stadium and everybody always talks about how special this one is. So yeah, all this aside, it’s truly special, any win for me nowadays is really special. I feel like when I win now, they feel better than they used to just because there are less, at least as of right now. So yeah, I need to go back and be by myself a little bit and just sit down for a couple of minutes and let it sink in.