MA Junior Cup Rumors for 2025?

So excited about this. Long overdue!!! The bike is such a better platform than the Ninja.

 

From scratch and a new bike yes

 

The buy in is harsh and until this announcement I didn’t give a single fuck about this class but all this has me interested.

motor size had me confused until I remembered all the people complaining about supercross and the push for 350cc as the premier class (since 450cc are too fast for stadiums).

pretty fuckin’ cool!

 

What he said! ^^ Ive read the same thing.The 64$ question is which country puts these engines together for this series? Not knocking it,but I wouldn't buy another KTM unless it was built in Austria,or came with one helluva warranty,including these race bikes.
I'm betting it also brings in a ton of kids from other countries trying to get a leg up. The off season should be a great time to poach on some now irrelevant 4oo's for club racing .

 

I don't think Honda has the infrastructure to support a program like this.

 

I wonder if that's a change, you used to be able to ride up until age 28?

 

Sounds like they will have a "for the poors" version for non-talent cup riders at some point. Should be announced next week.

 

I'm wondering if they will let the current spec Ninjas / R3 compete alongside the Kramers for the first season?

 

So the top 5 riders will be invited to the Redbull Rookies selection event where they'll ride a real GP bike costing $90k but I guess the Kramer is better than a ninja 400. Still no idea why they didnt just make the Honda NSF250r the bike for this but I guess Kramer is paying more money for marketing.

 

Interesting. I haven’t heard any talks of anything but the motoamerica cup.

 

It's on Kramer's socials with Jensen hinting heavily at it.

 

So $22.5 for the bike and a few other questions but that doesn’t seem like a big deal if parents are looking for their kid to make it in racing.

Big questions I have surround the motors and what happens race-2-race. If sealed, does KTM take engines after the race, refresh them and bring back at certain intervals and can you put a stock motor in to practice between races?

I think it’s great they’re providing an option for kids to ride an actual gp chassis versus a beginner street bike. I know, I know - costs and track time, etc and these guys build awesome little bikes but if you want to go compete against the world, grooming kids on proper equipment early is worth more than a few grand difference in bike cost.

Just my opinion which is worth nothing.

 

Honda America you mean? Others in this thread seem to think NSF parts are just falling from the trees all over the world. Just not here.

 

They are becoming very difficult to get in a timely manner.

 

Well things are moving faster than I expected. Just got the email to put the deposit down.

 

All I wanna know is where's Hank "Spank Bank" Miller? If you're out there Buddy....read this...F...U...C...K...YOU! Matt Chapin's leading Jr Cup. I TOLD you he was comin' shitheel! And where did Matt start? NEW JERSEY MINIGP!


OH and my kid...Won North Central D SuperStock Novice last year...and he's in 3rd place in two 300cc classes in the Mid Atlantic this year, and he's beast on the football field.

Suck balls you Simple Simon idiot.

Back to our regularly scheduled program. .....

 

I understand the frustration of some of the parents, you can't buy a salvage Ninja and slowly build it to spec while your kid works his way up the club ranks. But regardless of the complaints about MA, it is PRO RACING and just like almost all racing in the US, it's pay to play. So is Moto3, Moto2, etc. It's not a beginner series that every kid gets to try their hand at.

The Kramer is a proper race bike that will better prepare these kids for real racing motorcycle. Getting them to Europe to compete is a whole other argument, but if they do at least they'll be better off than if they'd been riding a noodle framed street bike.

 

So, I keep hearing that young riders 'need to be on a GP bike'...

A) What makes a bike a 'gp bike' these days? Is it the fact that the Kramer is limited production? It's based on an OEM engine from another discipline, and if it's like other Kramers will lean heavily into KTM's OEM parts catalog for suspension, etc. Most orgs let the other Kramers cosplay as production bikes... When people say 'GP bike' in this context what exactly are they referring to?

B) Why does being on a 'gp bike' have that big an impact on rider growth? What do riders learn on one that they don't get from pushing other bikes on the track? In the past many of the great riders from the US came up from Flat Track, many schools (Supercamp) purposely put riders on objectively bad setups to force riders to learn to maximize what's there, and I'm watching our current crop of Jr riders pushing these bikes WAY past lap times you'd expect their budget specs to support?

 

I was wondering the same. Just how will riding this production bike help prepare kids to ride an actual prototype GP bike in something like Moto3 or Moto2?
Different engines, different frames, different tires, etc.
If the point of the class is to prepare kids to ride those bikes, why not use actual GP bikes like the rest of the world uses?

 

GP/true road race chassis are much stiffer and handle differently than the commuter bike that the 400 is built as. It's been a consistent complaint from American riders going to Moto2, for example, that they can't get the feel out of the stiffer GP chassis like they can out of a street chassis like a 400/R6, etc.

The idea is getting the kids used to that feel before shipping them off to Moto3 or CEV or whatever.

Time will tell if it works out. I still think the move is sending your kid to Yurup very early if you actually want a shot at GP.