Honda last won a premier-class GNCC title when Bill Clinton was in his first term. Today at the Buckwheat 100 in Newburg, West Virginia, Jordan Ashburn ended that 29-year wait with a margin of one point.
Ashburn, riding a CRF450RX for Phoenix Racing Honda, edged title-rival Liam Draper by the thinnest possible margin across a 13-round season in which he never finished outside the top 10. The Cookeville, Tennessee rider collected two victories and three additional podium finishes during a campaign interrupted by injuries that forced him to race through pain on at least several occasions. It was his second XC1 title overall, having won his first in 2022 with a different manufacturer.
The simultaneous XC2 victory by Angus Riordan made the sweep complete. Riordan entered the season finale tied on points with Jhak Walker and settled the matter the most direct way possible: by winning the race. His final tally across the season included six victories and two runner-up finishes aboard a CRF250RX. It is Honda’s first XC2 championship since 2016 and Riordan’s first title at any level of GNCC competition.
The points margin in XC1 made Ashburn’s consistency the defining quality of his title run. Finishing every round in the top 10 is an almost impossible standard across a 13-event calendar that spans some of the most technically demanding terrain in American off-road racing. One mechanical failure, one crash in the wrong place, and Draper wins. Ashburn’s answer to that pressure was deliberate: work round by round, avoid fixating on the standings, let the finishes accumulate.
Riordan’s path was different. The Australian, who also competed in selected rounds of the 2026 AMA Pro Motocross Championship alongside his GNCC campaign, went into the finale in a deadlock and needed a win to avoid a tiebreaker scenario. He got it. By his own account, he didn’t let himself think about the championship until the final three miles of the last lap.
Phoenix Racing, owned by David Eller, operates across multiple AMA disciplines. This is the team’s first GNCC title in either the XC1 or XC2 class, and it arrived with both championships in the same season, which does not happen often regardless of which manufacturer is involved.
Honda’s last 29 years on the GNCC sideline in XC1 is worth sitting with for a moment. Scott Summers won in 1997 on hardware that predates fuel injection, modern suspension linkage design, and much of what makes a current CRF450RX competitive. The gap between then and now represents multiple full generations of development, multiple factory programs from other manufacturers, and a lot of near-misses Honda never publicly catalogued. Ashburn’s title closes the file on all of it.
One point. Thirteen rounds. No finish outside the top 10. That is the margin by which Honda is a GNCC champion again.
Source: Honda. Images courtesy of Honda.
