Slaw Dog
In case you missed Detroit, there was A LOT of talk surrounding the Haiden Deegan/Jordon Smith heat race.
Slaw is not here to provide my opinion on this heat race. I think there are 5,000,000 of those out there already. You can go read those.
As a 2023 AMA Media Member Award nominee I do feel it is needed to provide what was said by Deegan following the race in the post-race press conference about that heat race.
You can read much of the PC below.
Question: Congrats again on your second career podium. However, going back to the storyline of the night, it was kind of you and Jordon [Smith] in the heat race. Can you walk us through from your perspective and at the end of it being able to review and look back on it, does it still fall as a racing incident for you or…
Deegan: I don’t even know what happened. I wasn’t paying attention really. No, I’m just playing [laughs]. It was good racing. It was fun so I don’t know. Yeah, I just had some fun doing it.
Did afterward you get back to the hauler have you guys discussed it at all internally from a team standpoint and was there anything from management that they pointed out or was it pretty much… have you guys even done to that point.
Yeah, it was all cool. It’s just racing.
Do you have no regrets on that aggressive racing in a heat race with no points available and knocking your teammate out of a championship battle?
Uh, yeah, I think he’s like fifth in points, he’s out little out of it, but uh besides that it was good. I don’t know. I’m not sure. I wasn’t really paying attention.
If you want to watch in full, it starts around the 26 minute mark:
Main image: Yamaha
This kids needs some media training asap. Not from his old man though.
Jordan tried to knock Haiden out of a championship battle as well. If you want to look at it like that time Haiden is third in points and Jordan is the one who made the most violent contact. He tried to clean his clock and everybody’s just trying to blame Haiden on this.
So if Hayden was in 1st and Jordon was in 2nd Maybe he was Faster who was the aggressor who put themselves in that position? Hayden held his ground . Jordon held his ground. In my eyes file that under good Racing. Everybody’s all wound up because The rookie didn’t do what Everybody thought the Rookie would do . what he said after the race was exactly what I would have said when I was 17 He’s a kid you all need to relax
Deegan an idiot , rookie was slower than Jordan, its a heat race now it screwed Smith points,
i find it funny people say Haden screwed Smith out of points. Smith could have not made contact, could have not fallen, could have not messed up his LCQ by a bad start and crashing multiple times. Haden was being a racer like he is trained and paid to do. Smith should have been a smart veteran rider and just taken a safe spot into the main instead of bulldozing and bullying Deegan.
Don’t love Deegan’s responses here, but the situation made for some exciting racing