🎥 Watts & One-Two-Dinger Sing!

Twenty years after a wild-eyed, cocksure young Victorian called Shane Watts won the 1997 125cc Enduro World Championship aboard a prototype version of what soon became KTM’s groundbreaking 1997-model 125EXC, the 44-year-old Watts – now living back in Australia after a 16-year stint in the USA – climbed back aboard KTM’s new-generation, 2017-model 125XC-W to contest the 2016 Australian 4-Day Enduro (A4DE).

Check out this sweet edit of Australia’s first ever World Enduro Champion, making his beloved little orange 125 two-stroke sing around his Aussie bushland practice tracks in the lead-up to the 2016 A4DE.
Video courtesy of Jeffrey McDonald.

If you missed the full, pre-A4DE Watts interview last November – in which the notoriously opinionated and amusing ‘Maffra Nugget’ offered his unfiltered take on a range of subjects – do yourself a favour and check it out.

For the record – and despite a head-turning 11^th Outright in the prologue that demonstrated he’s still packing world-class speed – Watts ended up 10^th in the E1 class at the 2016 4-Day, where, by all accounts, he took the opportunity to do plenty of socialising. After all, Wattsy wasn’t exactly talking up his chances ahead of his first A4DE in a decade. “Look, I’m 44. I’ve barely raced a bike for the past seven years. My timing’s not there. I’m older and slower, and my knees and body are shot. And I no longer have the skill, precision and desire to try to run with the frontrunners, where the margin for error is so small,” Watts told Transmoto for our 2016 A4DE Preview article. “So my plan is to get out there and have a good, fun ride. I’ll get on the gas and rip it up here and there, but I’m there for a good time, not to kid myself about winning.