Fjord focus!
By TMX Archives on 17th Jul 03
quietly, Kenneth Gundersen has established himself as one of the top-ranked two-stroke MXGP riders. FIRMLY BUT quietly, Kenneth Gundersen has established himself as one of the top-ranked two-stroke MXGP riders. What may surprise readers even more - because he was already a winner on a 125 back in Y2K at that saturated Foxhill farewell - is that the Norwegian will not turn 22 until the end of the year. Compare that to the 30 plus ages of Everts, Smets, Dobb, Cooper and Beirer or Pichon (27), Coppins (26) and Crockard (24) and you begin to realise just what a jewel Jan De Groot has in his green cabinet.It's not just the fact that Kenneth is the only person other than Pichon and Everts to win a 250/MXGP in the last 21 months but also his results this spring - exclude the four-strokes from the results and KG went 2-2-2 in the first three GPs!It was at the end of '01 that De Groot lured Kenneth away from the Champ KTM team with which he'd scored three GP wins that summer. "At the time I wanted to do one more year on a 125 and, if I'd done so, then it would have been with KTM because I knew the set-up and the bike. But that wasn't possible, Kurt wanted me to go 250. Jan also gave an offer for 250 and I felt that was a safer option because he'd been racing and winning 250 races for so many years. I already knew that he was a really decent guy to work with and looking back, I'm quite sure I made the right choice especially when you see the results Dobb, Crockard, Beirer, McGrath and Langston have had with the KTM."Early '02 results weren't exceptional. The factory Kawasakis - the test-bed for this year's production bike - lacked speed when they first arrived in Europe and I remember both Gundersen and McFarlane being blown away up the hill at Beaucaire. But that's why Kawasaki hire De Groot. The gentle Dutch giant is a tuning wizard and by the time the GPs came around the green bikes were at least close to everyone bar Suzuki. And an 8-4 start in Holland and Spain was a solid start.But then came Germany. Okay, Pichon needed to charge from his first turn crash and Dobb blew it on the last lap but Kenneth's maiden 250 victory at Teutschenthal was to take on even more significance when the season ended with no-one else topping the podium all year bar Pichon.And it had been a typically gutsy ride from the only Norwegian ever to have won anything in bike racing. "In the timed practice on Saturday I broke my big toe but I had an injection and won. I soon got over the toe injury but straight after the race I was out practicing during the week and fractured my tailbone when I landed heavily over a table top. That was very painful and already meant I couldn't train properly, then at the French GP I had a concussion and I wasn't able to train at all between that race and Italy."Truth be told, it was amazing that Kenneth maintained top-10 finishes and he even led for 15 minutes in Sweden before fading to fifth. "I was still not able to train properly and it would perhaps have been more sensible not to go off so strong in the early laps but the Uddevalla track is only 50 miles from the Norwegian border and there were 3000 of my countrymen watching. I couldn't let them down."It was the Russian finale before Kenneth revisited the podium - but he did it in style with a third behind the inevitable Pichon-Coppins 1-2. "I liked the track in Russia a lot and by the time we got there I had no pain anymore. It was fun to ride again."Kenneth even got to double up, riding shotgun to Maschio in the 125s against his old team. "Being given the opportunity to ride 125 was something I'd really been looking forward to. The only problem was that I got too tired by the end."He finished eighth but, most importantly, he spent the entire race keeping the next wave of KTMs off Maschio's rear wheel. Kenneth had done the job expected of him and he'd done it with pride for a team and boss he respects immensely.For Alex Hodgkinson's full Gundersen profile check out the August issue of dbr