KTM USA and WORCS champion Kurt Caselli kindly invited Jonny Walker to attend the final round of the America Endurocross Championship in Las Vegas at the Orleans Arena. JW jetted in just over a week before to prepare himself and make some practicing with Kurt and his friends, the Indoor World Enduro Championship starts this week so the Las Vegas event was really important to prepare for that.
Jonny riding a KTM 250 XC instead of his usual 300 showed good promise in the practice sessions and set third fastest time behind Cody Webb and Taddy Blazusiak. After practice each rider takes just one hot lap to decide gate position for the qualifying heats. A slight mistake in the rock section dropped him to sixth fastest but still a good position to gain a decent starting position in one of the three qualifying groups. The start in Vegas is very short and directly into a 180-degree bend, almost every race was won from a hole-shot and as the track is so tight and gnarly and passing difficult the start is everything.
In Jonny’s heat race he got second pick on the gate behind series number 2 KTM’s Mike Brown, Brown grabbed the holeshot with Jonny in hot pursuit, these two pulled a small gap on the rest of the field and it looked like Jonny would easily qualify, but stalling in the rocks he dropped to 4th positions and could only return to 3rd by the flag, unfortunately he just missed the cut for a direct transfer to the main as only top 2 go to the final.
So now we had to make the LCQ race struggling from a bad start Jonny put in several solid laps during the later stages to move up to 2nd and right behind the leader, good enough to join the nights two final races.
With qualifying from the LCQ it meant Jonny was almost last to join the start line and had to start from second row, he hoped to squeeze up the inside on the first turn, but other riders cut him off and he got hooked up in the tyres, but he pushed hard from almost last to each lap pick riders off and eventually made 6th position.
In the second final he was not so lucky, in the first turn other riders crashed and JW got caught up with them, another start from the back and several other small incidents meant he could do no better than a disappointing 10th.
Jonny Walker KTM 250 XC “ I have really enjoyed my time in USA, I must give special thanks to Kurt Caselli and KTM USA for giving me this chance, I hope I can come back next year and make a better result, my riding was good but I just suffered with more than my fair share of mistakes, the racing is so close and aggressive out here and everybody is making mistakes, its a case of limiting them “
Julian Stevens Team manager “This was a great experience for JW and excellent preparation for the Indoor World Championship, it would have been nice to have been closer to Taddy and we never got chance to race against him, he was on top form and we congratulate him for another championship, I hope that in Italy this weekend when Jonny is back on his familiar 300 he can be fighting for the podium, thanks to all the American supporters and helpers who made us all feel so welcome”
Next Race: FIM SuperEnduro, Geona, Italy November 26th