Championship Off-Road Race Preview: Crandon Brush Run

When it comes to multi-class supremacy in the 2021 Championship Off-Road season, all signs point to CJ Greaves and Brock Heger as this year’s likely combatants.

Masters of their respective Pro Truck classes in the season opener from Antigo Lions Roaring Raceway, with Greaves the racer to beat in Pro 4 as he looks to unseat defending champion Kyle LeDuc and Heger storming to dual Pro Lite wins after making the switch to the Midwest for 2021, the duo split the Pro Stock SXS victories in the first event of the year. They’ll renew their battle, not only with each other but also some of the strongest short course fields in recent memory, at this weekend’s Forest County Potawatomi Brush Run from Crandon International Raceway. The traditional June event returns to its normal weekend after the COVID-19 pandemic pushed last year’s race to the end of September and the season finale.

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves in any of those classes. LeDuc certainly will be eager to put Antigo in the distant past after missing both podiums, while Doug Mittag joined Greaves on both podiums and is hungry for a Pro 4 win. Pro Lite is one of the classes that benefitted greatly from the west coast invasion, with Heger and defending COR champion Kyle Greaves’ dual podiums joined by second place finishes by Madix Bailey and Cole Mamer in the opener. Even the Pro Stock SXS division has plenty of competitive foil for the duo, with more than 20 racers signed up for the opener and Scott Wasz scoring two podium finishes of his own.

Pro 2, meanwhile, was just like the other truck divisions in Antigo, boasting a talented field but only one winner. Although there wasn’t much home track advantage to be had on a course that hadn’t even been raced at the sportsman levels in nearly ten years, Crandon’s own Keegan Kincaid withstood not only the surge of west coast converts like Jerett Brooks, Brian Deegan, and Ricky Gutierrez, but also defending COR Pro 2 champion Kyle Kleiman and fellow COR returnees Mickey Thomas, Cory Winner, and Ryan Beat, among others, on the way to doubling his 2020 win count in the first event of the year. That meant that only Pro Mod SXS produced unique winners in the opener, with Andrew Carlson and Kyle Chaney picking up the torch with victories as CJ Greaves abandoned the class for this season.

Now, the field returns to Crandon, where return winners weren’t quite so common in last year’s Brush Run. LeDuc and Greaves split the Pro 4 races, while Thomas and Kleiman did the same in Pro 2, Zach Szymik and John Holtger took the Pro Lite wins, and Greaves had to split the Pro SXS wins with Rodney VanEperen in Pro Mod and Jack LeTourneau in Pro Stock. Kleiman’s second win of the victory came in the Potawatomi Cup race, as part of the Pro 2 sweep of the podium that also featured Beat and Winner. Beyond that list of names, the already deep COR entry lists get even deeper this weekend with former Crandon World Cup winner RJ Anderson making his return to Pro 4 and brother Ronnie joining the Pro Lite field.

The Forest County Potawatomi Brush Run from Crandon International Raceway will stream live all weekend at champoffroad.com and on the Championship Off-Road Livestream page. TV coverage will air on the CBS Sports Network on August 1, but if you missed Antigo, that makes its television debut on CBSSN on Sunday at 7PM ET/4PM PT.