Nine Laps.
Red Plate.

Every so often a stat comes along that tells you everything about a season in one line. This week, on PulpMX's Blair Matthes Project podcast, stats guru Nick Taylor — the man behind the MX Reference account — dropped a whole pile of them. And no class has ever been described by numbers quite like the 2026 250MX class just was.

Start here: Levi Kitchen holds the red plate with 293 points through eight rounds. In every season in the history of this championship with at least eight rounds, that is the second-lowest total a points leader has ever had at this stage. The only year lower? 2003 — the famously chaotic Mike Brown/Grant Langston season that ended with a cancelled final race, when the leader sat at 282.

The Nine-Lap Points Leader

It gets weirder. Kitchen has led nine laps all season. Nine. That works out to 3.41% of the laps run in the class — and for a points leader through eight rounds, it is not just the lowest ever recorded, it isn't even in the same zip code as the old mark. The next-closest points leader by laps-led percentage was Cooper Webb in 2016 — at 21 percent.

How does a rider lead a championship while leading almost no laps? By surviving a season where nobody else would take it. More than a third of all laps led in the 250 class this year — roughly 36% — belong to riders who are no longer in the series, headlined by Seth Hammaker, who ripped off 49 laps led early in the season before his summer ended prematurely. It's fair to wonder where Hammaker would be sitting right now if he'd simply stayed on the track. Even his bad motos were salvage jobs.

Davies Is Doing Something Historic

While Kitchen has been surviving, Cole Davies has been swallowing the class whole — 96 laps led, roughly double the next rider on the list. And Taylor's deeper cut is the one that should worry everybody: measured by career laps-led percentage, Davies has led 31% of every 250MX lap he has ever raced. Since lap data began in 2004, that's the fourth-best mark in the class's history. The three names ahead of him? James Stewart at a comical 88%, Ryan Villopoto at 46%, and Ben Townley at 35%. That is the shelf Davies is racing on, right now, as a kid still chasing his first outdoor title.

The Start-Line Story

The championship math all traces back to the gate. The best average holeshot position in the class through eight rounds belongs to Colt Nichols at 6.75. Kitchen's? 13.19 — and per the data, that's his position at the stripe out of the first turn, before any first-lap chaos can be blamed. Kitchen told anyone who'd listen earlier this summer not to worry about his starts. The stat sheet respectfully disagrees.

But here's the flip side, and it's the most Levi Kitchen stat imaginable: net positions gained from the holeshot stripe, Kitchen is at +136 — by far the most in the class, roughly 50% clear of Chance Hymas at +99. He starts 13th and finishes on the podium, over and over. Davies, who starts at the front and occasionally throws one away, sits at −4 on the same measure. Two completely opposite ways to build a title bid, separated by a handful of points with six motos left.

At the other end of that table: good starts, rough finishes. Aiden Kiefer's −108 leads the class in positions surrendered — though a round-ending bike problem at High Point and a second-moto crash at Washougal skew the picture — with Phoenix Honda's Gavin Towers right behind at −100. When your team's calling card is launching off the gate, the fall back through the pack stings twice as much.

What It Means For The Run-In

Six motos remain. Kitchen still owns the red plate, but Davies has erased a 24-point deficit at a pace that suggests he doesn't need a miracle — he needs a normal weekend. If Kitchen hangs on, he'll win one of the strangest championships in the sport's modern history: a title built on nine laps led and a hundred-plus positions made up the hard way. If Davies gets him, the laps-led ledger will say it was inevitable all along.

Either way, the 250 class has been, in the podcast's own words, gloriously drunk all summer. Three rounds to sober up.