Gibbs was given the ride at the US GP at Glen Helen as a reward for giving the national distributor its first Aussie Premier class title win since 2002, as the MX Nationals drew to a close at Coolum in Queensland a little over a fortnight ago.
‰ÛÏAll things considered it was an okay result and a great experience." Rob Twyerould, KTM Motocross Racing Team Manager commented. "On Wednesday Kirk had a really big crash. He went over the bars - it was really nasty. He rang his bell pretty hard and spent a couple of days at Dr G‰Ûªs - he is the guy that works on all the top guys over here, and he did an amazing job and got him prepared for the weekend.
"In Saturday‰Ûªs qualifying race we struggled a little bit yesterday with bike setup because the bike is a little bit different here, so for today, we changed the gearing initially for the warmup and then the mapping because of the heat and we got big improvements for him.
"The first race was fantastic, he was right in there amongst it with Bobryshev and a lot of the top ten guys and he looked really comfortable. He got a little bit excited though, when he caught Searle and was going for the pass on him, and he crashed and winded himself. He lost so much time that he felt it was smarter to come in and rest up for the second moto.
"In the second he didn‰Ûªt get out the gate as well, but he was challenging the other Aussies in the field and having a good dice with Ferris in around 15th. He got past him and was looking ahead but had a silly little fall when he just got cross-rutted, and made a couple of other mistakes, and then it just became a matter of surviving the heat, because a lot of guys DNFed from it.
"From our perspective it was good to get a look at how the teams operate over here. We got to see through KTM USA factory team, met the Troy Lee guys, the BTO guys have been fantastic, it's been really good to see the technology they are using. We learned a lot and probably realised that we are on par with anywhere in the world, our bike at home is very, very good.‰Û
