News: Toby Price & that factory ride

KTM Australia’s off-road racing legend Toby Price achieved a ‘dream come true’ contract last week with the KTM Factory Red Bull Rally Racing Team to take in the World Motorcycle Rally Championships and the famous Dakar Rally for season 2016 and 2017. Price is set fill the position left vacant by five-time Dakar winner and Rally legend Marc Coma.

Price’s story is an incredible one of sporting recovery and triumph over career-threatening injury. His spectacular display of consistency and strategic intelligence in finishing third on debut in the world’s largest off-road race – the 9000-kilometre, 14-day Dakar Rally – and won the penultimate round despite having only just learned how to read road maps.
This year has seen Price’s tour of domination roll on, and having already has placed both the Hattah and Finke Desert race trophies in his cabinet, he currently leads this year’s Australian Off-Road Championships.

Toby Price – “It’s a full factory Red Bull KTM Rally ride, so it’s the whole deal. It might actually free a little bit of time up compared to the schedule I’ve had this year, but we have got a good schedule of rally racing and Dakar on the cards and we’re going to work hard on things and try to get a bit more experience at reading of the road books and things like that.
It’s a two-year deal straight up, so we’ve just got to do things smart and make sure we look after ourselves. It’s a bit different to the bike that I rode at Dakar this year, so we are looking forward to getting on it and seeing the potential of it and where we can go with it”.

It’s definitely a bummer that Coma has retired and gone out of the racing, but at the end of the day it opened the door for me to be able to get onto the team, and start learning from the best crew out there. It’s exciting times, and we’ll put a lot of work in and definitely go back to Dakar better prepared than what we were this year.
I’d really like to acknowledge the help and support of Jeff Leisk and Grabbo this year, it’s been astounding and I can’t thank them enough. Jeff has always had my back with my goals and visions that I’ve had, and he’s let me chase them as much as I possibly can without doing anything too silly to compromise my racing year.”

Ben Grabham – “Since Dakar it’s been pretty straightforward that he deserves a chance to do the world rallies and Dakar again at the highest possible level. And what better team, they’ve been the number one team for a long, long time. The big feller definitely earned it, so it’s great to see really”.

Jeff Leisk, General Manager KTM Australia and New Zealand – “It feels really good to see this unfold. Toby is our most popular rider, I think there is no disputing that. These days his results in desert racing are legendary, and he shocked everybody with his podium finish in the Dakar last year. It’s just so pleasing and gratifying to see that effort be recognised by the factory, and for him to get a ride with the KTM Red Bull Factory Rally Team is an absolute remarkable achievement. We’re are all just so excited for him.
The first time we saw him up at Finke, I was down at the second fuel stop on the first day at the 160km mark when both Toby and Ben came into that fuel stop virtually side-by-side and we had to fill them up both at the same time. That’s when I suddenly realised that this guy, in his first attempt at Finke, was something special. He won that race too, and that’s when I first realised that this guy had a bucket-load of ability. “He’s just like a big kid at heart, totally unassuming, but, man, when he gets on that bike he does some mind-blowing things.”