Leaving the United States at 8 years old put American rider Maxwell Toth on a European path toward MotoGP.
There was a time when the road to motorcycle racing’s premier class ran through the United States. Between 1978 and 1993, American riders won 13 of 16 500cc world championships, an era stretching from Kenny Roberts to Kevin Schwantz through Freddie Spencer, Eddie Lawson and Wayne Rainey.
Fast forward to the modern-era and MotoGP’s supply chain of riders seem to hail solely across the Atlantic. Spain and Italy now possess the junior championships, teams and training culture around which Grand Prix careers are built, requiring many of the fastest riders born elsewhere to enter their system long before reaching the world stage. For an American with MotoGP ambitions, the first crucial step may be leaving America.
Maxwell Toth took it at eight years old; his father had begun examining the dominance of Spanish and Italian riders and asking what they were doing differently. The investigation led to the youngest categories of Italy’s CIV championship, where Toth joined the factory Polini team and began a European racing education that would later take him through France and into Spain.
“My dad knew that if we wanted a shot at making it, we had to go to Europe because the pipeline is not from the US to Europe,” Toth said.
Toth returned to race in America at 15 already considering himself European-bred. At 17, he moved to Spain without his parents. Now, the Californian knows more people in the JuniorGP and MotoGP paddocks than he does in MotoAmerica.
The passion for motorbikes began in the Toth family through supermoto. Max’s father raced locally in California, bringing his son to the circuit from the age of four and giving him an early view of the sport that would soon begin to change both of their lives.
“I was always exposed to it,” Toth said. “Since I was four years old, I was going out to the tracks and watching him race. I knew early that I wanted to get on a bike. That’s what I wanted to do.”
Once Max began riding, his father traced the sport backwards from the world championship. Spain and Italy were not simply producing the riders winning in MotoGP; beneath them sat domestic championships capable of taking children from pocket bikes to Grand Prix machinery through categories designed around each stage of their development. The United States offered racing, but not an equivalent route into the European paddock.
“My dad was the one who steered the ship,” Toth explained. “He took the initiative to see, ‘Okay, this is what my kid is doing now, he’s not half bad at it. What are the best in the world doing?’”
The answer placed an eight-year-old Toth with Polini in the minimoto classes of CIV Junior. He progressed into PreMiniGP and MiniGP, riding 50cc two-stroke engines inside small Grand Prix-style chassis, before spending the 2018 season in France with the family of the late Laurent Fellon, former manager of Johann Zarco. PreMoto3 and Moto3 in the Italian championship followed.
While Europe supplied the structure, it also exposed Toth to riders whose careers altered his understanding of how MotoGP could be reached. At 11 or 12, he began training at KSB in Valencia alongside current WorldSBK Ducati rider, Iker Lecuona, then known primarily for winning a Spanish national supermoto championship.
“At the time, Iker was a no-name kid in Spain,” Toth recalled. “In the grand scheme of things, nobody was really paying attention to supermoto championships, but he was a kid with so much talent. He was such a nice guy and absolutely insane in what he was able to do on a bike.”
Lecuona bypassed Moto3 and entered the Moto2 World Championship before reaching MotoGP, an ascent made without the junior Grand Prix titles or sustained attention attached to many of Spain’s leading prospects.
“He didn’t have that huge hype,” Toth said. “He didn’t come through the normal ranks. He took the most unorthodox path to the GPs, and he still made it. That really resonated with me because I’m not a Spanish or Italian kid. I grew up racing in Europe, but it’s still a different support system.”
For all the strength of Europe’s development ladder, Toth’s career has rarely moved through it in the expected order. His height began interfering with Moto3 while he was still too young to race the larger, more suited motorcycles. By 15, he was already approaching his current six-foot-one frame, making another season on a lightweight prototype increasingly impractical before the age regulations allowed him to progress into a 600cc category.
MotoAmerica provided a solution. Toth returned to the United States for a season in Junior Cup, later adding appearances in Twins Cup, and arrived with the expectation that a rider developed in Italy should be capable of fighting at the front. He won at The Ridge, a race he still watches several times each year, and left convinced he had established himself among the strongest young Americans of his generation.
The return also revealed how much of his riding style was credited to Europe. MotoAmerica used different tyres, visited circuits often developed primarily for cars and contained fewer of the people around whom Toth had spent his childhood.
“I’m more comfortable in Europe,” he said. “As funny as it sounds, because I’ve been here for so long, I almost have more familiar faces in the MotoGP and JuniorGP paddock than I do going back home. It’s almost a bit more foreign being in the MotoAmerica paddock than it is here.”
His American identity was never in question, but his place within American racing had become more complicated. Home contained his family and the supermoto tracks where his career began; Europe contained the motorcycles, circuits and paddocks that taught him how to pursue it.
At 17, Toth moved to Spain with friends while his parents remained in the United States. Racing abroad had previously been arranged around individual seasons and championships, but Spain now became the base from which the rest of his life operated. The move removed the normal social structures surrounding most teenagers and placed him among mechanics, riders and other professionals whose ages and responsibilities required him to mature quickly.
“Your social circles aren’t the same,” he said. “You’re around people who are older than you, you’re around people in a professional environment and you’re exposed to that. There are a lot of things you have to understand early on that many people might take five or even ten years later to start seeing.”
Toth does not divide that accelerated adulthood neatly between what racing took from him and what it gave back. Nor does he allow his career to detract from his other personal ambitions.
“I’m passionate about music. I’m passionate about travel,” he said. “I love travelling with my mom. We have so many memories that we’ve made just exploring the world together.”
“There are a lot of different people I could have been if I didn’t race motorcycles,” he continued. “At the end of the day, that career shaped who I am. There are a lot of ways I interact and even see the world that came from being exposed to this industry and being inside it.”
When Toth considers the conventional childhood and education he surrendered, he does so alongside everything racing placed in their absence.
“As much as I’ve sacrificed from my personal life to give to my professional life as a motorcycle racer, I wouldn’t sacrifice anything that I’ve gained from my professional life as a motorcycle racer to get more of that personal life,” he said. “There are so many things about it that just made me me, and I don’t think I would ever do it differently.”
He carries the weight of those sacrifices around his neck, although the necklace itself began with more vanity than introspection. After signing his first Moto2 Junior contract, Toth bought a pendant bearing his race number, 27, something he had wanted for years after seeing MotoGP riders wearing their numbers in the same fashion.
“Being a young guy, looking cool is part of it,” he admitted. “It was something I wanted for a long time, but I didn’t want to do it when the moment wasn’t right. It can be a cocky, show-off thing.”
In the years since, the pendant has become less about the riders Toth once wanted to resemble and more about the life he built while trying to join them.
“Twenty-seven, the number, the logo, everything, represents all that I’ve sacrificed, all that’s changed,” he said. “I wouldn’t be who I am without motorcycle racing.”
The route that carried Toth away from the United States eventually returned him to the MotoGP paddock aboard a machine rooted in a very different side of American motorcycle culture. The FIM Harley-Davidson Bagger World Cup places modified Road Glides on Grand Prix circuits, bringing the scale, noise and spectacle of American V-twins into a paddock dominated by European and Japanese prototypes. Toth had discussed contesting the championship before the season began, but the proposed arrangement failed to materialise and his attention remained on Moto2.
The first opportunity instead arrived through MotoAmerica. Saddlemen required a replacement at Road America while its regular riders were competing in the Bagger World Cup at Mugello, leaving two motorcycles available for a rider whose recent experience had largely centred on a prototype less than half their weight.
Toth expected the Road Glide to feel as unusual as it looked. Beneath its proportions, he found a motorcycle that responded like a racing machine and enjoyed it considerably more than anticipated. A mechanical problem removed him from the second race before he could convert that comfort into another result, but his performance left the possibility of a return.
When Cory West was injured at Mid-Ohio, Saddlemen called again. This time, the free motorcycle was waiting at Silverstone.
“You can’t say no,” Toth said. “It’s a MotoGP weekend.”
He qualified sixth on his World Cup debut and finished sixth and seventh across the two races. Three weeks later, he joined the championship again at Aragón, improving to fifth in both races and cutting his deficit to the winner from approximately 12 or 13 seconds at Silverstone to six in the opening Spanish contest.
“The position wasn’t as much of an improvement,” he said. “It was the time. We almost cut the gap in half. That was the big one.”
His height, once responsible for closing one route through the junior classes, finally appeared appropriate. The Road Glide gave Toth room to use the exaggerated body position he had developed around his frame, hanging far from the motorcycle in a style he compares with Jorge Martín, while his weight could add load to the rear tyre. Even then, smaller riders were managing to throw the same machine through corners without apparent disadvantage.
“You think the size helps you and then you see some guys in the paddock who are five times smaller than you, and they can still throw the bike around the same way,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s just me coping with the burden and saying, ‘Yeah, it made it easier,’ while internally I really wish I was 30 kilograms lighter.”
“If being big is going to have an advantage on one bike on this planet, it has to be the bagger.”
The humour disguises a career built around repeated changes of machinery. From minimoto and Moto3 to production twins, Supersport, Moto2, an R1 and the Road Glide, Toth has rarely been granted enough stability to treat adaptation as a discrete stage. During the seven days preceding Aragón, he trained on the R1, completed two days of Moto2 testing in Valencia and then “skedaddled straight” to MotorLand for the bagger.
“Motorcycle racing is a very instinctual sport,” he said. “Obviously, there are a lot of things that are intentional: how we move the body, braking technique, throttle technique and bike set-up. When you boil it down to the root of it, so many things are just instinct.”
A rider can catalogue the differences between motorcycles until the comparison becomes an obstacle, particularly after years spent developing around a single machine. Toth instead begins with the controls and two contact patches common to all of them.
“It’s a handlebar, there’s a front tyre, there’s a rear tyre and there’s an engine,” he said. “It’s all bikes at the end of the day. You just have to get on it.”
His preferred state is “almost childlike”: “I’m just going to get on the bike and go fly.”
Moto2 has tested that adaptability more severely than any of the machinery surrounding it. Toth’s third Moto2 European Championship campaign scarcely existed. Reconstructive surgery on his shoulder kept him off a motorcycle for six months and restricted his season to the final round in Valencia. Even that absence, however, is stored in his memory alongside the people who accompanied him through it.
“You’ll look back on it and think, ‘That was such a bad moment when I was in the hospital, but what did that do for me? Who was around me? Who helped me during those times?’” he said. “It’s a lot of human moments that get overlooked because it’s such a brutal industry.”
The following year promised continuity, but opened in Barcelona without the results or feeling he expected. Unlike the injuries and mechanical problems whose effects could be easily identified, the distance between Toth and the front of Moto2 proved more difficult to locate.
“This season has not played out the way I was expecting,” he said. “It’s been a lot of question marks. In the past, there were things where I could definitively put a finger on it and say, ‘This is happening because of this.’ I haven’t been confident with the bike at all this season.”
His belief in his ability has therefore existed beside results that offer obvious grounds to challenge it. Toth raises that conflict himself.
“Somebody could probably look at the timesheets from the last two or three years and say, ‘He hasn’t adapted to Moto2,’” he said. “There are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes and outside the cameras and social media that people don’t see.”
A test in Valencia shortly before Aragón delivered the first substantial change. Toth considered it the best he had ever ridden a Moto2 bike, recovering a feeling he had struggled to find throughout the season. The improvement arrived during the same week as the R1 training and his strongest Bagger World Cup weekend. After several difficult years, Toth finally recognised himself across the motorcycles he was riding.
“This last week has been one of the best weeks of my life, in terms of training, racing, stuff outside it and getting myself into a better place mentally,” he said. “This year has been hell, and in one week everything can change.”
“This week is great. Next week, I might be crying in a hole. I don’t know.”
That volatility has not reduced the scale of his ambition. Toth considers Moto2 more difficult than MotoGP in its current depth and remains convinced he can compete at the front once the relationship between rider, motorcycle and team begins producing what he experiences elsewhere.
“There is still so much with the Moto2 that we haven’t shown,” he said. “I’m fully confident in myself that we can be frontrunners. Everything just has to click. If somebody disagrees, I would say hold out a little longer, because it’s going to be shown eventually.”
His father has shared that confidence from the beginning. Whether Toth is training on a 450 supermoto, riding a 600 around a kart track or working on the R1, he describes their success collectively.
“My dad and I go through this practically together,” he said. “My success is his success and vice versa.”
The success Toth is still chasing is the one that first sent him to Europe: MotoGP. It has remained the ultimate destination through every championship, injury and change of machinery.
There is something compelling about a rider whose career has given him plenty of reasons to become cynical, yet who can still describe getting on a motorcycle as something almost childlike. Toth is intelligent, self-aware and strikingly certain of what he believes he can become. Whether Moto2 eventually gives him the opportunity to prove that, and carry him the final distance to MotoGP, remains an open question.
For now, Toth still believes the Stars and Stripes can fly again in motorcycle racing’s premier class. After speaking to him, it is difficult not to want to see him prove himself right.