Defending Australian Supercross Champion Matt Moss has returned to riding and confirmed he will race at 100 percent fitness for Bathurst’s season-opening round on 10 October.

Moss, 27, has been recovering from ongoing effects of his Shepparton MX Nationals incident, in which he sustained a painful knee injury, severe bruising to his scaphoid and a general battering from the impact with track maintenance machinery.

But after sitting out the final three rounds of the outdoors in recovery, Moss is determined to move past the controversial crash and focus on retaining the SX1 crown he’s won for the past two years in a row.

“I’ll definitely be at 100 percent,” Moss told MotoOnline.com.au. “I’ve been training my butt off, doing a lot of motocross to get back in the swing of things and then two days of supercross now as well, pumping out the 20-lappers.

“Everything is going good, so there’s no reason not to go back to Bathurst and do what I did last year. My injuries are all good, my knee still hurts a little bit every now and then, but I’m sure by Bathurst I’ll have no problem.”

After racing to an unmatched perfect season last year, Moss will enter the Supercheap Auto-backed Bathurst opener as the title favourite despite his injury-plagued MX Nationals title defence this year.

“I took advantage of my time off to get two tracks ready for supercross – McLeary’s and the Moss Institute Training Facility – both by my brother Tom,” Moss added. “He’s such a good track builder and they’re tracks that I love to ride. I just want to go racing actually and I feel like I am at where I was prior to Shepparton, both mentally and physically.”

With mounting speculation that he will depart Team Motul Suzuki – unconfirmed by either Moss or Suzuki at this point – at the end of this year, Moss has no plans of racing for a 2016 contract during supercross. Instead, he’s confident that he will have next year’s deal completed prior to the supercross opener.

“The plan is to be done before supercross, as long as the team comes to the party,” Moss revealed. “I definitely want to be and in my mind I will be all done before supercross – I don’t want my racing to decide what I’ll be getting for next year.

“I’ve done what I needed to do the last couple of years; if you want a champion to win championships then I feel like I’m that guy. If they want me, they want me. If not, go find someone else.

“I’ve got an offer, but I’m not going to say where or what right now. I just want to get my deal done and go racing with a team that wants to go racing. I love where I’m at, but we’ll just see what happens.”