Yamaha JGR Ballards Off-Road Team’s Jess Gardiner has set the Women’s category benchmark for a number of years in Australia, also scoring a wealth of impressive results on the global stage including six International Six Days Enduro (ISDE) victories. For 2023, she returns to the EnduroGP World Championship and is currently second in the Women’s division, juggling racing commitments domestically where she leads the EW class of the Australian Off-Road Championship (AORC) and scored her seventh-career title in the Australian Four Day Enduro (A4DE) earlier this year. MotoOnline spoke to the highly-capable Yamaha racer for this latest Fast Thoughts feature. 

Image: Foremost Media.

EnduroGP World Championship opportunity for 2023…

Pretty much last year at the six days, that sparked the hunger in me again I guess and I just wanted to have another crack at the worlds. It’s been a few years since I’ve done it, obviously with covid it became really hard travelling in and out of Australia, so that sort of put a halt to the world enduros for me. I rode not too bad at the six days last year coming off the back of pretty much no training because I was working away and a few other things, so that sort of fired me up to go again and we got really lucky with the calendars, being able to line everything up because it was a huge year. It’s all sort of just worked with the four Women’s rounds and yeah, it’s been fun!

The transition between living/competing in Australia and also racing in Europe… 

Obviously this year it is a bit hectic, riding with a bit of jet lag so far because each round has been back-to-back weekends from something in Australia. Getting from one side of the world to the other has been pretty hectic. We raced AORC at Mendooran then I literally jetted off the Monday morning at 7am to make it to Italy, to get there by Tuesday, with the Super Test Friday night and race Saturday, Sunday. Full on! The last rounds were just as challenging. Results-wise I didn’t do probably as well as I was hoping in Finland and Sweden, but then I have got to remember I raced the four-day [Australian Four-Day Enduro] the week before, flew straight to Finland, raced there and then we flew straight to Sweden and they brought that race a day forward as well to help everyone travelling afar. It was three massive races, back-to-back-to-back, and I think at the end my body was just like, ‘oh my gosh, I just need to breathe for a second’. So we’ve only got one round left [in the Women’s category of the EnduroGP World Championship], which Jane [Daniels] who is leading the world title is obviously running away a little bit, but I’m still in a very comfortable second overall at the moment, which is good. So hoping to finish strong in Portugal in October.

Key to being the continued EW benchmark domestically…

I guess a number of factors over the years, just experience as well comes in handy. We’ve had a few technical races and we’ve also had some high-speed races that normally aren’t my style. Overall I think with the years of experience, just sort of getting to know the different terrains, obviously being comfortable here in Australia, being happy with the team environment and the people we work with, all of the sponsors – I think when everything is working well together it makes it easy to put results down and keep them coming. I guess in Australia it is a lot easier than the world enduro racing, and that is why I sort have done the world enduro racing as well, just so I wasn’t getting too stale here. I wanted to be able to put in the time and effort in training and continue performing here but also get good results overseas.

Image: Supplied.

Mentoring the next generation… 

That’s always been a goal of ours for the last few years, and we’ve been working with young Danielle Macdonald in the Junior Girls category. She is going super fast at the moment and we are actually hoping to get her over in Portugal with us and give her a taste of the last round of the Women’s world championship. So that will be really cool to be able to ride alongside her, and hopefully, before I’m done we can do a couple of six days together too, that would be awesome as well.

Sickness at the Hattah Desert Race… 

Unfortunately, young Danielle was quite sick right before it, obviously, we helped her on Saturday with her race and we were staying together all week. I thought I stayed away enough not to get ill, but I guess my body just caught it all after being so busy at the start of the year and flying in and out of Australia and all of the other races going on. I think my body just caught and caught it real good. I have literally only come good the last two days, so it has taken me a good week and a bit to shake this one, I ended up having an influenza. I managed to do the prologue, but sort of after the prologue finished, by dinner I was literally bed-ridden and I could barely have dinner. I was nauseous all night, it really got me and I woke up Sunday really dizzy, literally just standing I felt like I was going to pass out. I said ‘I can’t start like this’. Obviously, Hattah is one of the toughest races, four hours in the deep sand, it is a very physical race if you go into it healthy. When I woke up feeling like that, I just said I can’t line up unfortunately, the body had to say no. We are coming good now, which is good.

Upcoming fill-in ride at the FIM E-Xplorer World Cup…

We’ve actually had a spontaneous call-up to be a fill-in rider at the FIM E-Xplorer world championship in a couple of weeks’ time. So yeah it’s basically my Yamaha, but as an electric bike. That will be a bit of fun to mix it up in that world championship.

Plans for the 2024 season… 

Yeah absolutely [wanting to compete overseas and in Australia]. We’ve been growing our Off-Road Riding Institute as well, so we are doing as much coaching as we can in between the races with my partner Jeremy [Carpentier]. Hopefully next year… Obviously, it’s always tricky with the calendars, we’ve got to wait until Jan-Feb to make sure all of the calendars are out to line everything up. It’s really important for me to keep racing here as well, because a lot of the support for the worlds is coming from all of our Australian partners, which is really cool. I like to give back to them as much as I can, as well as trying to perform on the world stage. Hopefully, continue growing the team and supporting the juniors and so forth.