Where the rubber meets the dirt: supercross star Ken Roczen's newest challenge

Ken Roczen is a force on two wheels, is rapidly emerging as one on four wheels, and is pretty handy with a T-shirt cannon.

The latter’s a skill he put to good use while rolling through central Crandon alongside Red Bull x Yokohama teammate Andrew Carlson on top of the Yokohama activation rig at the head of Crandon’s annual Labor Day parade – the second-most important tradition in that part of Wisconsin on that particular weekend.

Beating it out for top spot on the list is the real reason Roczen, Carlson and the rest of the Yokohama team were there: the famed Polaris World Championships at Crandon International Raceway.

For Carlson, racing off-road trucks is his day job. Roczen has also built a storied career out of sliding around on dirt, but in supercross and motorcross. This year’s Polaris World Championships marked his first visit to Crandon – if you don’t count a pre-event test – and just his second short-track off-road race ever, following on from his debut at Glen Helen last year.

“(Crandon) is pretty much motorcross on four wheels (but) in a truck,” said Roczen ahead of the event

“So, it translates very nicely. And we’re racers, and we like to play in the dirt. Even when you’re in the pits, it feels like you’re at a dirt bike race. You just have four wheels under the tent instead of two.

Roczen prepares a t-shirt for launch during the Crandon pre-event parade.

“Of course, learning to actually race and drive fast is just about seat time in the truck. When you come to these races you don’t have a lot of practice, and you don’t have a whole lot of laps in qualifying, so you’d better learn quick and get going. Every lap that I’m out on the track I learn and feel like I get more comfortable and go faster.”

It was an entirely new challenge for Roczen, who was crowned Monster Energy AMA Supercross Championship 450 champion earlier this year. But it was a very familiar one for Yokohama. As official tire partner of Crandon International Raceway and a series sponsor for Championship Off-Road, Yokohama knew exactly what it was getting into – which is why it was there in the first place. Where better to demonstrate the performance and durability of its tires than in the heat of battle at the biggest short-course off-road race in the world?

The drivers used tires straight off the shelf from Yokohama’s Geolander range: Carlson’s Pro4 truck and Roczen’s Pro2 counterpart were both wearing the dual-sidewalled Geolander X-AT, while competitors in the lighter divisions rocked the A/T4.

When the dust settled – pun fully intended – Carlson was standing on the podium, and Roczen shrugged off his inexperience to put the Red Bull/Yokohama/Ryan Beat Motorsports truck just outside the top 10.

Further proof of his accelerated learning curve came a few weeks later, when a return trip to Glen Helen for Championship Off-Road’s season finale had Roczen’s Yokohama-backed truck fighting Ronnie Anderson for a podium spot over the closing laps before ultimately crossing the line fourth.

Roczen is staying tight-lipped about whether he’ll fully embrace short-course off-road racing going forward. But when you consider that his six-year-old son has already spent some time in a simulator in preparation for getting his own career off the ground, there might still be plenty more chapters in the Roczen/Yokohama/off-road racing story waiting to be written.