Build it and they will come: The making of a Supercross track

NBC Sports

10-05-2025

The 2025 Monster Energy Supercross season is comprised of 17 rounds and like snowflakes, no two tracks have been alike.
The same pieces are there week to week, but the way they are assembled differs for each track. Riders experience rhythm sections, bowl turns, flat corners, table tops, steep jumps over a tunnel, and whoops, with occasional other surprises track builders want to toss in their path.
But one thing remains the same: the men who build the tracks and the fact that from the top of the highest jump to the base of the floor, a Supercross track is all dirt.
Supercross tracks are constructed by DirtWurx, a New York company that has been doing the heavy lifting since the 1990s. Track design is a collaborative event between builder and promoter.
Recently, when Supercross visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Acrisure Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, set up a time-lapse camera to record the building of a track in the market for the first time in more than 40 years. It was a unique view of the workings that go into transforming a football stadium into a dirt track.
The track build began with 14 trailer loads of plywood, about 7,500 sheets making two layers of protection for the stadium floor.
Then dirt is trucked in. For Pittsburgh, it took 500 truckloads, or 5,500 cubic yards.
When Supercross returns to a market, they use dirt been stored offsite since the previous season. With Pittsburgh, that option was not fully available, but Feld Entertainment has run Monster Jam races in the market, so some of the dirt was recycled. To supplement that dirt, they turned to a local contractor with a stockpile used in landscaping and construction.
Before a jump is built, the track is covered with six inches of dirt to provide a base. Fabric is placed under the dirt, above the plywood, to further protect the floor from the watering that needs to take place to maintain the jumps structural integrity.
'The guys in the loaders know how many buckets of dirt each jump is and they will place it [in the appropriate place], then we have a guy it and goes through and shapes it and packs it in,' Kenny Henry, Director of Operations Track Construction for DirtWurx. 'Then we have a guy in a skid steer who comes through and cleans everything up.'
The track is built from the outside in, generally piling up mounds that will be refined. Pittsburgh experienced rain overnight that kept
Turf to dirt 🔀
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Every jump constructed from the ground up.
In bowl turns that require netting, the posts are added after the turn is completed by cutting out a channel in back of the berm, sinking the metal tubes, and then covering them back with enough dirt to keep them from moving.
Notably, Pittsburgh's dirt is not particularly rocky despite the mountains that surround it. Should there be more rocks in the dirt than is optimal, it will be sifted between seasons.
'We can, or we will [sift the dirt] if we get to a pile that is rockier or has more debris than we would like,' Henry continued. 'During the summertime, or off-season, we will go through it, but this dirt is pretty clean.'
Dan Beaver,
And that is a luxury Supercross has that is not available to Pro Motocross tracks.
Last year, NBC Sports caught up with Greg Robinson, co-owner of Unadilla, MX Park to discuss the challenges of the rain that pelted the course, and during the course of the conversation, talk turned to the rockiness of the surrounding area.
Outdoor tracks are also forced to sift their dirt, but it is an endless process.
'The outdoor tracks have an endless supply of dirt, so the rocks bubble to the surface, where here we have a stockpile of dirt that's above ground,' Henry said.
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