Houston marked the first win of the year for defending 450SX champion Cooper Webb and Monster Energy Yamaha Star Racing, the first step in getting their 2026 Monster Energy Supercross title defense back on track. In this Industry interview, 450 class team manager Rich Simmons reflects on Webb’s tough opening three rounds and his breakout Triple Crown result.

Image: Supplied.

Let’s talk about this from the whole team perspective – your mechanics, crew chief, personnel, everything. What does this win tonight mean to them?

I mean, it’s much needed for the whole team. Congratulations to Coop, obviously. And like he said, we’ve all worked hard. I mean, every team does. We’ve worked hard in the off-season. We’ve worked hard every week since the season started. It’s just things haven’t really seemed to go our way, so yeah, we put a lot of pressure on the riders and ourselves this week to get something like this done. So it’s a big accomplishment, and I’m happy for the guys.

As a team manager, we know every dog has his day. And when you have a talent like Cooper, how do you keep him inspired to keep showing up every day, because you know it’s just a matter of time before he shows his talent?

They’re all a little different, but I mean, you just kind of got to challenge him. I think he hit on it. We’ve had a few talks with him about the whoops and just committing to it, and you hit him with that challenge of – not to say he can’t do it – but it’s more, ‘You can, but you’re not.’ And you put that pressure on him to go show you, and a little bit like, ‘Prove that you can. I’ll show you guys.’ So we had a good conversation with him and Justin Cooper yesterday here. And when we showed up this morning, the look he had on his face was determination. I had a feeling this could happen, so congrats to him.

Image: Octopi Media.

We’ve always seen Cooper be gritty, especially at the end of the races and he proved it again tonight. Sometimes he gets counted out and he always proves people wrong, so how often does he impress you daily with that kind of mentality?

I don’t want to say I’m not impressed, because at this point I don’t count him out. So I was a little surprised he had that mistake and landed on the backside of the finish, which was scary to watch. For him to regroup and come through that quickly with that pressure – I mean, it’s just Cooper Webb. It’s kind of expected at this point. So it’s not a surprise, I guess. I don’t really know what to say to that question besides it’s kind of expected at this point from a guy like him. So I like to hear – I hope you guys keep counting him out because it’s motivation for him.

With these riders that are becoming more veteran, how much input do they accept from the team versus kind of what they know and what they prefer to do? How does that dynamic work where you’re not having a conflict, but able to kind of move forward with good results like today?

A lot of guys I’ve worked with in the past and still work with now, I think as a team, you just have to learn each guy and how they are with their personality. But Coop’s always been very open and he wants information from us and our opinion. And so we’re very open with him, and we expect him to be very open with us. And yeah, maybe sometimes we’ll hit on some things that he doesn’t like to hear, but on our side too, we expect – if he’s not comfortable with the bike – we want to know. And we don’t take it to heart. We don’t have an ego about it, and neither does he. So that’s why I think our working relationship is as good as it is.

Image: Octopi Media.

The question is, can one race turn around a season? And the context is, I think last year round four was another Triple Crown at Glendale. Cooper had his best finish of the season and then rattled off six second or first-place finishes.

Can it change the championship? It’s hard to say. I mean, at this point, we’ve just got to take it race by race. And we made up a lot of points tonight, which is nice, but obviously you saw how the first three races went. So we just have to keep going forward, move on to the next one. We can’t get complacent – not that we do – but yeah, we got to expect that these guys that we’re racing are going to show up every weekend and be competitive. So we have to put ourselves in a good position off the start and yeah, just don’t get complacent.

We know Coop’s not a guy that chases bike settings, so how did you all resist trying to reinvent the wheel, even though obviously the results weren’t what you wanted across those first three rounds?

Yeah. I mean, it’s not really tough, I guess, from my side of things. Maybe from the outside looking in, you would expect that, but we see how he’s riding at home. We see how he’s riding at the races. He’s had some bad luck, put himself in bad positions on the starts, but the riding wasn’t that bad. There wasn’t really any complaints about the bike. We just wanted to see him improve in different areas. And then we always have that ability to change the bike if we want to, and he wants to. Even though he is that creature of habit, he’s comfortable. So yeah, I mean, I’ve been on other teams where riders want to change stuff – they think it is the bike – or Coop’s not that guy. He kind of takes the accountability, and we might have to push him sometimes. But yeah, I mean, we’ve all been doing it a long time. We know that one weekend like this can turn things around. So you just have to be careful.