Maximus Purvis: the man to beat in NZ MX1
Back-to-back MX1 champion who won every round of the 2026 series.
By ROOST New Zealand desk · 17 October 2026
There is dominant, and then there is what Maximus Purvis did to the 2026 New Zealand Motocross Championship. The Mangakino-based Altherm JCR Yamaha rider won every round of the four-round series and all but one race, from the season opener in Invercargill in November 2025 through to the Rotorua finale in February. The only moto that got away from him was Rotorua's opener, which went to Kyle Webster.
The final tally was 297 points and a 49-point buffer over Honda's Josiah Natzke, with Invercargill's Jack Symon third. That made Purvis a back-to-back MX1 champion, and that's after 2025 was anything but easy. That year he had to hold off defending champion Hamish Harwood and a returning Natzke right to the final round in Rotorua, and he took the title by 15 points.
Add his 2023 MX1 title and Purvis has three of the last four premier-class crowns.
Part of the story is the machine and the crew. Purvis races the YZ450F for Altherm JCR Yamaha, the team that also took the 2026 MX2 title with Hayden Draper, which gave Yamaha a clean sweep of the senior headline classes.
What's next? He's back for 2026–27 with the renamed Monster Energy JCR Yamaha team, after racing the Australian Enduro Championship with ShopYamaha Off Road in the NZ off-season, where he won an E1 round. The question for every other MX1 rider in the country is the same one as last year: who can actually beat him?
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