17-10-2024	MXGP News
KAY DE WOLF : A JOURNEY TO MX2 WORLD CHAMPION GLORY

The tale of the 2024 FIM MX2 World Championship was one of two teammates in an almighty tussle for supremacy.  The Nestaan Husqvarna Factory Racing duo, Dutchman Kay De Wolf and Belgian Lucas Coenen, dominated the season with 16 of the 20 GP wins going in their direction. Even though Lucas won more races, it was Kay who had the burden of the red plate from immediately after the opening round in Argentina, winning the opening three rounds to establish a lead and holding his nerve to manage that lead all the way to the end.

Kay’s natural talent has been evident from his early years on minibikes as a kid.  Living across the road from the Eersel circuit near the Dutch border with Belgium, he honed his skills on their specialist small bike track and grew to become a master in the sand. Racing with the number 14 as a Youth in tribute to his local hero Marc de Reuver, he won the 85cc Dutch Masters titles in 2017 and ’18, before stepping up and winning again on a 125 in 2019, the year he first started to move further afield.  “I didn’t even see a hard-pack circuit until I started going to EMX! I would just go and survive until I started practising on them in 2019.” His debut year in EMX would see him finish 18th in the EMX85 finale at Loket, two places ahead of fellow 2024 factory rider Thibault Benistant, in a meeting dominated by the late Rene Hofer. 

Kay quickly caught on though, winning the North-West EMX85 qualifiers in 2017, including the overall win in Germany ahead of a certain Suzuki rider named Jett Lawrence. He won the 2018 North-West Qualifiers again, a point ahead of Liam Everts, but finished 2nd at the Loket finale to Camden McLellan.  He was also second to American Caden Braswell at the World Junior Championships in Australia.

His move to the EMX classes saw him training more on hard tracks in order to compete, as he went through both seasons with consistent finishes, but no race wins.  His first EMX podium at Trentino, showing his progress on the hard pack with 4-4 finishes behind eventual Champion Mattia Guadagnini and Frenchman Tom Guyon. His hopes of success in the sand of Lommel were cut short, as his fuel tap had been switched off before the first race, and not switched back on again! He ultimately came home 6th in that series, his first under the factory Husqvarna umbrella.

In 2020, a season dominated by the Champion, Thibault Benistant, and Guadagnini, Kay got a best of 2-2 in Latvia behind the Frenchman’s 1-3, and consistency kept him in the top three until a disaster at the final round at Lommel once again! “I was fastest in the Free Practice at Lommel, and I was feeling really good. The first lap of Time Practice I got cross-jumped by another rider, and I landed face down. Before I could get up another rider jumped on to the back of my helmet, so it was a big concussion, and it broke my nose in five places! I wanted to race because it cost me top three in the series, but I wasn’t allowed because of the concussion.”

In 2021 he moved up to MX2, and the ghost of issues gone past was exorcised at Lommel, with his first race win at Grand Prix level putting him second overall between Jago Geerts and Maxime Renaux.  A consistent season was rewarded with 7th in the series, two behind his senior teammate Beaton, who had held his number 14 and forced Kay to switch to a number suggested by long-time sponsors Fox – 74, the year they first went into business.

2022 saw Kay running top five in the series at the beginning of the year, until a bizarre accident put a serious dent in his campaign after seven rounds. “Before Sardinia, we had finished practicing for the day, and I took my E-Bike across to the team HQ to pack my stuff for the GP, but a car came across the cycle lane that I was in and wiped me out!  He didn’t see me and hit me as he was going into his house, so that broke my arm which put me out of the next three GPs.  I came back too early as well, in Teutschenthal I was sick because I pushed too hard on Saturday, then in my first trip to Indonesia I really found out what food poisoning was all about, I was really badly sick there!”  A return to Lommel turned his fortunes around, and he was able to win the first race, just losing the overall to Jago, as the older rider had that little bit more energy to beat the 17-year-old to the second race win and the GP victory.

Immediately fast in 2023, he won race one in Sardinia at round two, again just losing the overall to a determined Geerts, but from that race until the Latvian round he didn’t finish outside the top five in any GP races. A perfect weekend at Kegums, where he took his first Grand Prix victory, even winning the RAM Qualifying Race on Saturday, saw the Dutchman fix the red plate onto his Nestaan Husqvarna.  Sadly, he crashed whilst testing before the MXGP of Germany.  With an ankle so swollen that x-rays could not pick up the break, he tried to race on and actually got back to finish on the podium at Loket a month later. 

A mechanical issue in testing then saw him go over the bars in the week before the MXGP of Flanders.  Picking up a 6th place at Lommel with a compression fracture in his back was “the most painful thing I have ever done”, and he had to concede that the title was gone, missing another four GPs while he got the problem fixed.

“My team and I have set our target on getting to the podium every weekend,” said the Dutchman at the start of the 2024 season, “With so many fast riders we know that being consistent is so important, so when Adamo passed me in Spain, I knew I was still gonna get the podium, and the same in Sardinia when Lucas passed me in race one. I didn’t panic, and I knew that I would need to save some strength for the second race at Riola Sardo.”

Kay has displayed a coolness under pressure in 2024, visibly relaxed on the start-line, he has been seen grooving along to the trackside music on the start line before most GP races, and it is that coolness that has made the difference in the races. Analysing the results from both him and his teammate, it’s amazing to note that although the top two have achieved almost equal podium finishes – 13 to Coenen and 12 to De Wolf – and the points scored on Saturdays have been slightly more for the Belgian, it is the ‘off’ weekends that have made the difference.

Kay finished fourth or fifth overall a grand total of seven times, leaving just one result – seventh overall at Maggiora – outside the top five on a GP day, and the only time he scored less than 30 points on a Sunday. In comparison, Coenen finished outside of the top five six times, and on five of those occasions he scored less than 30 on a Sunday.  The old saying goes “you win it on your bad days”, and this year’s MX2 Championship has been solid gold proof of that philosophy.

With superbly controlled riding at the final MXGP at Cozar in Spain, Kay de Wolf was crowned as MX2 World Champion on the very day that he turned 20 years old.  Despite massive  celebrations in the paddock and beyond, a week later he raced to a brilliant individual victory in the MX2 class at the Monster Energy FIM Motocross of Nations, battling against such esteemed 450 pilots as Hunter Lawrence, Jeremy Seewer, and Aaron Plessinger, and helping Team Netherlands back up to a podium finish.

Wherever he races in the near future, the first Dutch World Champion after the mighty Jeffrey Herlings looks to have a massively bright future ahead of him, and his cool name and exciting riding style should make him a crowd favourite for many years to come.

 

 

Online: Stefan Uhlmann