With the final round of the domestic AUSX Supercross Championship set for Adelaide this weekend, it’s troubling for the sport locally to have the conflicting Gold Coast round of the World Supercross Championship (WSX) being staged on the same day. Turn a blind eye to it if you will, but truth be told, the underlying effects shouldn’t be ignored.

While Dean Wilson is in line to clinch a second-career national SX1 crown, and the SX2 title is going down to the wire in a showdown between Aussie prospects Ryder Kingsford and Alex Larwood on Saturday night in the South Australian capital, it will be happening while Cooper Webb, Eli Tomac, Ken Roczen, Haiden Deegan and co. are performing as WSX’s drawcards in Queensland.

Sure, the distance between the Gold Coast to Adelaide is roughly 1600 kilometers (near 1000 miles) by air, but the fact is that attention will be divided, since fans and those in the industry are forced to choose between the two vastly similar series, whether it’s in person, via the broadcast, or through a wider lens. Nobody wins, including WSX, which could itself do with greater local support and involvement for its own benefit.

It was WSX that announced its Australian event at Cbus Super Stadium first, but by that point it was already evident to stakeholders that the final round of AUSX would again be staged at the previously-confirmed Adelaide Grand Final alongside the high-profile final round of the Supercars Championship. And, for obvious reasons, there is zero chance of moving that particular date on the schedule.

Motorcycling Australia (MA) has to approve both the AUSX and WSX events from what we understand, since it is the Australian affiliate of the Federation Internationale de Motocyclisme (FIM). An honest oversight or something more? It’s difficult to say for certain, but the fact remains, it’s the date clash that nobody needs or wants – even worse than WSX in Vancouver and the annual Paris Supercross landing on the same date just weeks earlier.

Image: Foremost Media.

“We have an exclusive agreement with MA, and so we believe that that’s been breached by doing it,” stated Adam Bailey, director of AME Group, which operates AUSX. “And so we’ve put a lot of pressure on them and making sure that can’t happen again next year and beyond. I don’t think they had intention – MA, that is – of damaging the AUSX series.

“Obviously the Australian series is their series, but I think they are a little bit naive to think that it wasn’t going to have a big impact and probably ignorant to factors. And so, I don’t want to say lesson learned, but I think that they all know that that is not acceptable not only by us, but [the] industry, manufacturers, teams… no one is happy about it.”

Of course, after making his mark in launching the international AUSX Open in 2015 and then holding the rights to the Australian Supercross Championship since 2018 in addition to an FIM Oceania regional series, Bailey later became one of the founders of SX Global (aka WSX) alongside former longtime business partner Ryan Sanderson and the polarizing ex-V8 Supercars frontman, Tony Cochrane, in 2022. History tells, it didn’t go well.

By mid-2024, following a short two-round ‘pilot’ season and an appalling 2023 campaign that saw multiple cancellations and just three races eventuate, Bailey departed his then role of SX Global CEO and has since ultimately returned to his roots in building the sport of supercross in Australia. Notably, both Cochrane and Sanderson had already quietly departed before him during the year prior.

After founding investor Mubadala Capital effectively off-loaded WSX to wealthy European-based businessmen Kyril Louis-Dreyfus and Juan Sartori in 2023, it was Bailey who was supposed to guide the series back into relevance, but by then confidence in the product was all but gone. Within our In Brief podcast on the eve of the weekend’s AUSX Open in Melbourne, Bailey spoke on the record in detail for the first time about why he couldn’t make WSX work. And why he doesn’t believe it will work in its existing format.

“I know where I think it went wrong,” Bailey reflected. “I mean, I think, it started from a leadership perspective at the start. And what I would do [differently] in its simplest form would be, I would never agree to go into it – because it was my idea in the first place, and I contacted Tony and Ryan and obviously then the others, and we brought the whole thing together – but I would not, knowing what I know now, allow myself to be pushed to the side like I was.

Image: Foremost Media.

“But it was a confidence thing, and at the time, Tony was the one bringing in the investment and all those things. They wanted him because of his experience, and I understand that, but I still felt like I knew how it should be done, and it wasn’t done that way. I felt like we should have been, you know, more humble, grown more incrementally, taken a bit more time. But instead, the management of money and the way it was set up is fundamentally wrong, which I believe is still the issue now.

“It’s set up in a way that is not sustainable. And so now, unfortunately, the current owners will just continue to burn money, and I don’t think it’ll turn into much, personally. I think it’ll just keep burning money because, fundamentally, it’s set up wrong. So if you go right back to the start, now knowing all of that, to answer your question would be to set it up completely differently. It would be an add-on to this domestic series, grow it into international markets, do it a bit more systematically over time, be a bit more, well, be a lot more humble.

“Don’t be trying to come out like we’re going to take over the world and we’re going to be bigger and better than everyone. It wasn’t my style and it isn’t my style. And hence, you know why I left. I tried, I did a lot to try and backpedal from some of those things when I was moved into the CEO role after a year. I tried my best to sort of redirect the ship, I guess, but a lot of the damage had been done.”

Behind closed doors, it’s obvious there has been a sense of friction between Bailey and those now in control at SX Global, which is still an Australian company itself, albeit under Louis-Dreyfus and Sartori’s BIA Sports Group investment portfolio. It was only more recently that Bailey has directly rejoined the AME leadership team after initially acting as a consultant at arm’s length, and their headline act has been bringing the Lawrence brothers home for the AUSX Open in both 2024 and 2025.

AME had targeted Deegan to ‘take on’ the Lawrences this year and had gone as far as building content of the 19-year-old American phenom announcing his appearance in Melbourne, only for it to fall flat when he instead apparently opted to make his 450 debut in Argentina and then also commit to the Australian round of WSX as a wildcard. It clearly stung Bailey at the time, and he is adamant that select riders are exclusively contracted to WSX, at least in this country.

Image: Supplied.

“Affect on this event [AUSX Open], I would say, is minimal other than they’ve probably spent a shitload of money to get Haiden, and which probably cost him from coming here,” he continued. “You know, I’d say that that has had an impact and ability to get riders because they’ve signed the likes of him, Christian Craig, Cooper Webb, exclusively and won’t allow them to come here, even though we’ve asked them to. It’s prevented us to be able to get riders to come and race here against [the Lawrences], which is a bummer, and they’re going to be in the country.

“They come this year to intentionally, in my opinion, impact our series. Going on the same date [as Adelaide] is clearly an attempt to do that, which I think is disappointing. I think it’s disappointing that we weren’t protected from that by MA… My opinion is that [it’s] bully tactics by them [SX Global].”

Why the extended backstory? Because it is these circumstances that make you question whether or not there is a deeper motive at play from SX Global in relation to this weekend’s conflict between the WSX Australian GP and AUSX’s season finale. After what had been an immensely popular debut in Perth last year, SX Global has brought the world championship back east and at a stadium that Bailey, too, had been aiming to take the domestic series. That said, you win some, you lose some.

And credit where it’s due, because on the watch of current CEO Tom Burwell, WSX has been successful in regaining some form of momentum and its wildcard-driven structure of attracting an A-list of SMX’s superstars makes more sense than in year’s past, but it still needs more. And whether or not it can genuinely become viable quickly enough – before losing the belief of Louis-Dreyfus and Sartori – is up for debate.

Either way, for the sake of the sport authentically building in markets outside of the United States and Monster Energy Supercross, communication between these opposing start-up type series is critical – better for all, rather than to be at odds. And despite a packed international calendar year-round that makes clashes increasingly difficult to avoid, they certainly should not be between the domestic championship and WSX on the same date, in the same country. Not ever.

For what it’s worth, we’d been in ongoing discussions with SX Global’s PR team to interview Burwell again since May, but it’s been apparent that upon being transparent in advance and suggesting that we address the WSX and AUSX conflicts, interest appeared to fade. Maybe this weekend, in person, the matter can finally be addressed once and for all? It is only then that we may get a clearer picture on WSX’s actual stance, because as of now, it’s Bailey and AUSX who have finally had their say.