Stewart has to settle for second place behind Reed

Reigning supercross champion James Stewart avoided the sloppy track forecast for the season-opening race at Angel Stadium, but he ran into another problem he couldn’t overcome.

Stewart crashed as the grid’s 20 riders squeezed through the first turn Saturday night. He scrambled back to second but couldn’t catch Chad Reed, an Australian rider for Yamaha who earned his fourth Anaheim victory.

Reed, the series’ 2004 title winner, won by 21.5 seconds over Stewart, a Kawasaki rider who swept all three races in Anaheim a year ago, the first rider to do so. Stewart’s teammate Tim Ferry was third.

“It was awesome,” Reed said. “I’ve been thinking about this race since May last year” when the 2007 season ended. “I felt good and confident on the bike.”

Stewart said that even though the race was spared by the rain storm sweeping through Southern California, the track was still treacherous.

“I thought I had a pretty decent start,” he said, “but it’s so slippery I just lost the front end” in the first turn.

Stewart injured a knee in a motocross race in July and missed the remainder of the season. Supercross is the stadium version of motocross, or off-road motorcycle racing.

In the series’ second-tier class, Supercross Lites, Suzuki rider Ryan Dungey of Belle Plaine, Minn., won by eight seconds over Honda’s Jason Lawrence of Carlsbad.

The series converts Angel Stadium and its other venues to supercross layouts with tons of its own dirt that’s stored nearby each facility.

At Anaheim, the dirt would fill 600 dump trucks and is a mixture of 80% clay and 20% sand, said David Prater, supercross director for the series’ producer, Live Nation.

The mixture is safer for the riders and easier to mold into the desired layout than common dirt. Its sand content helps the dirt drain properly when it rains. The field first is covered with plastic sheeting and a layer of crushed concrete is spread over the plastic as support for the dirt and the equipment that moves the dirt around. Mechanized loaders shape it to match the track mapped out by race organizers.

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