Image: Simon Dower Photography.

KTM Off-Road Racing Team new signing Tye Simmonds has begun his tenure with the team in the best possible fashion, leading a KTM 1-2 in the annual Deep Well Motocross event south of Alice Springs.

Finishing 3-1-1 from the three points-paying motos, the former factory motocross professional only needed one race to get a feel for the nine kilometre loop, then proved the motocross-style demands of the race to his liking, winning from his KTM teammate Ivan Long and Damon Stokie in third.

“The team had a good day so is the main thing,” Simmonds said. “It’s about a nine kilometre loop, but it’s pretty wide the whole way around, so you can definitely have some good battles with guys on the way around. But it’s just a mixture of everything, up and down big sand dunes, across a couple of clay pan flats where we get up to about 130km/h, and it was rough all the way around so that was a good thing.

“It was unreal, Grabbo is obviously one of the best in the business; I’m on the best team there is in both the desert racing and enduro scenes – you can’t get any better than these guys and the bikes are just unreal.

“He went out of his way to do everything for me, we made a few by changes in between the first and second moto, and before I could even ask or talk about anything, he already had in his mind what he wanted to change. I barely had to do or say anything, he was on top of it all.”

Long, the defending Deep Well Motocross Champion, won the day’s first moto and finished second in moto two to take the overall lead into the final, but couldn’t halt the charging Simmonds and was forced to take second for the race and the day.

“It was the coolest Deep Well I’ve ever ridden, they even had five millimeters of rain overnight, so it was definitely different. It was good fun. I was beating my head against the wall initially because the forks were a little bit too stiff and I got arm pump, but the last two motos were a lot better.

“Even though I won the first one, my last two were a lot better. It’s just that that new recruit is a little bit quicker than me! In that last one, we had a dingdong battle right at the start, and then he got away, but then I caught back up to him, only to have a couple of lappers get in the way and I lost him. But the main thing was that we went 1-2 for the team.”

Simmonds now goes straight back into national-level action, taking on the first round of the Australian Enduro-X series at Brisbane’s Archerfield Speedway on 7 February.