The Yamaha PulpMX LCQ Challenge went down on Friday afternoon ahead of the Denver Supercross where 22 privateer riders battled it out for a purse featuring over $100,000 in winnings. The fund was generated via a raffle hosted by Steve Matthes at PulpMX in collaboration with Yamaha who offered up a 2024 Yamaha YZ450F to win in the raffle. The overall between the two-race format was won by Josh Hill who took home over $24,000.

This was the sixth year of the raffle in which Matthes, through his PulpMX Show, urged listeners to enter the raffle which was $30 per ticket. On top of the money generated from the raffle, several prop bets were also added to the purse from industry personnel and fans adding to the fun. For the past few years, Feld Motor Sports has allowed PulpMX to put on a race at one of their Monster Energy Supercross events and this year it was Denver where the festivities commenced.

Riders qualified for the race by not making the main events in the 450SX class each week with P5 every night getting assigned 25 points towards making it into the challenge. Second place would get 22, third 20, and so on. Last year’s winner Joshua Cartwright ended up in the #1 seed this year having collected 194 points through this system. A total of 17 riders qualified on points, and then Matthes selected five more wildcard riders which all happened to be 250SX class riders this year.

The race consisted of a two-race format where the first race would be a normal five minutes plus one lap race between the 22 competitors. But Matthes chose this year to stop them after that five-minute race, invert the field entirely, and staggered start them in reverse order. That meant that race 1 winner Mitchell Harrison rolled off P22 on the restart for what was another five minute plus one lap race.

Anthony Rodriguez would take the win in the second race, but the overall win would go to Josh Hill who compiled 2-10 scores. Harrison would finish in second with Tristan Lane rounding out the podium. Hill collected a total of $24,706, while Harrison walked away with $18,988 and Lane earned $12,705.

Some of the prop bets included things like the holeshot winner, hardest crash during the race, an air wheelie challenge over the finish line jump, and more. All told, a total of $131,435 was raised that went straight into the pockets of privateers.

Hill who won the race wasn’t even planning on making the trip out to Denver but learned that he ended P16 in the qualification standings after missing the main event in Philadelphia. He made the trip out, won the PulpMX race, and then skipped the Denver Supercross on Saturday in a rather funny sequence.

The raffle winner was announced last night on the PulpMX Show as well as the final tally of earnings. Another successful year of this program has completed and the privateers that left with their pockets a bit fuller were certainly happy about it.