Desert Heat: Rider #15 Delivers Career-Best Performance at the RedRock Desert Classic

MOAB, UT — There are tracks that test your fitness. There are tracks that test your technique. And then there are tracks like RedRock Desert Classic — the kind that test everything you have, all at once, in 104-degree heat on terrain that looks like another planet and rides like one too.

Sunday's Desert Classic was all of that. And in the middle of it, somehow thriving, was #15 — Tyler Mace — putting together the kind of race that makes people in the paddock stop what they're doing and watch.

The Track

RedRock doesn't apologize for what it is.

Carved into the high desert outside Moab, the circuit runs through sandy washes, over compressed red dirt berms, and across a series of off-camber hillside sections that punish the overconfident and reward the patient. The soil, loose on top and hard-packed beneath, changes character by the hour as the sun moves — what was grippy at 8am becomes treacherous by noon, and the riders who adapt fastest are almost always the ones still standing at the end.

By the time Moto One dropped the gate on Sunday afternoon, the track had been baking for six hours. The ruts were deep. The berms were marbled. The inside line through the canyon section — the fast line, the line everyone wanted — was so chewed up it had effectively ceased to exist.

Perfect conditions, in other words, for someone willing to find a different way through.

Moto One: Finding the Line Nobody Else Wanted

Tyler Mace qualified fifth. He started Moto One in seventh after a mid-pack first turn and spent the opening two laps finding his feet on a track that was already eating people alive.

Two riders went down in the first four laps — one in the canyon section, one on the off-camber hillside that the locals call The Shelf. The caution didn't fly; this wasn't that kind of race. The track just kept asking questions.

Mace's answer was to go wide.

While the front runners fought over the deteriorating inside line through the canyon, Mace began threading the exterior — a longer arc, more exposure, but significantly more consistent grip. It cost him a half-second per lap in raw distance. It gave him back more than that in stability and confidence.

By lap six he was fourth. By lap ten he was third, with second-place Riley Cross clearly within range.

"I saw what was happening on the inside line," Mace said post-race, goggles pushed up, dust still heavy on his jersey. "Guys were fighting it, getting squirrelly, losing time trying to hold something that wasn't there anymore. I just went wide and trusted it."

He held third to the finish. His best Moto One result of the season.

Moto Two: The Move at The Shelf

If Moto One was about patience, Moto Two was about timing.

Mace got a better start — slotting into fourth through the first turn, clean and controlled — and immediately set about establishing rhythm on a track that had deteriorated further during the break. The surface in the canyon was now almost entirely bermed out on both sides, the inside line simply gone. Everyone was going wide. It had become the standard line.

Which meant the inside — abandoned, rough, unfamiliar — was open.

On lap seven, with Cross sitting three seconds ahead in third and the gap stubbornly refusing to close on the standard line, Mace went back inside through the canyon for the first time all day.

It was rough. It was unpredictable. It cost him in the first corner.

He came out of the section a second faster than he'd been going all race.

"I figured I had nothing to lose," he said. "The gap wasn't closing on the outside. I needed something different. The inside was terrible but it was also — nobody had ridden it in two hours. There was grip in there that nobody else had touched."

Three laps later he had Cross. Two laps after that he had second, with race leader Dom Farris still eight seconds ahead and the checkered flag four laps away.

He didn't catch Farris. He didn't need to.

Tyler Mace crossed the line in second, took the Moto Two runner-up, and walked away with his first overall podium of the 2026 season.

Overall Results — Desert Classic

Post-Race

Farris was dominant — two moto wins, no drama, the kind of race that reminds you why he's sitting first in the desert series standings. But the story of the day, in the paddock at least, was Mace.

"He found lines nobody else was willing to try," said veteran crew chief Brad Tolliver, watching the replay on a laptop near the tech area. "That inside canyon move in Moto Two — that's the kind of read you can't coach. You either see it or you don't."

Mace, for his part, was already thinking about the next round.

"Podium's good," he said. "First overall would've been better. We'll get there."

What's Next

The desert series continues in three weeks at the Iron Valley Invitational in Nevada — a faster, more open track that should suit Mace's growing confidence. With three rounds remaining and a first overall well within reach, #15 is riding like someone who has figured something out.

Watch this space.

Full desert series standings available at ProMX Desert Series official website.