In a Stacked 250SX East Division, Don't Forget About Nate Thrasher
On Friday, we heard from seven different 250SX East riders who all previewed Saturday's Tampa Supercross opener during the pre-race press conference. Both 2025 250SX Champions, Tom Vialle (East) and RJ Hampshire (West), and a handful of other factory riders gave insight on their thoughts entering the weekend. However, missing from that group was Nate Thrasher.
Even though the Tennessee native enters today in a tie second in active 250SX race wins, he was not in the pre-race press conference. Did it bother the Monster Energy Yamaha Star Racing rider not being up there on the microphone?
"I take everything as motivation and definitely that'll motivate me a little bit," he said on not being there. "But yeah, been [wrote off] a lot, so I just keep putting in it."
"Definitely underrated," he said. "I feel like I've got pretty much probably the second most wins on this gate going into this race. So yeah, I feel like we're a little bit underdog, but I like being there and I feel like we're in a good spot."
Note: stats as of February 8, 2025.
We saw Thrasher at the SMX media days at Angel Stadium in early December, but he is rather quiet on social media. How has his training gone since then?
"Just been putting in work back at the [GOAT] Farm and, yeah, just trying to get ready for the season" he said. "I feel like we're in a good spot and ready to go battle. A lot of tough guys on this coast and, yeah, I think we're gonna be right in the mix. [It's] just gonna come down to a lot of good starts this year."
Training with the 250SX West riders has been a solid litmus test for the #41.
"For sure, I trained with them all off-season pretty much and, yeah, I feel like we're right there," Thrasher said. "And then just, yeah, I feel like how good they did every round they did, the speed that they showed is, it's definitely makes us feel a little bit better going into this and knows that our speeds just right up there with the winning speed."