Jordi Viladoms

At 39, the Rallye Team Manager of the Red Bull/KTM Factory racing team has 10 Dakars to his credit as a rider and a wealth of racing experience. Adventure Rider Magazine sat with the mildly spoken Spaniard to find out a little more about the man Toby Price singled out as his mentor.

JV: First of all I need to say thanks to Toby, because he never said this directly to me. It’s nice to hear. He was one of the guys that, from the beginning, came to my place in Spain. We were practicing the navigation and everything. And I had the feeling I put something of myself into his thinking. It’s good to know he felt it, too.

AdvR: You have 10 Dakar finishes. That’s a pretty big effort. How did you get into Dakar racing in the first place?

JV: I was racing motocross, mainly in the Spanish championship, and I was doing well. But at the same time my father was pushing me for my studies. I was runner-up in the Spanish championship as a junior, but then I went to the university and did a degree as an electronics engineer.

By then it was too late to do something in motocross because I was already 22 or 23.

But anyway, the deal with my father was, once I had my degree, I could do one year only training on motorcycles and see what happened.

I never went to work again as an electronics engineer.

The first year, 2004, I started to get good results in motocross and I finished fourth in the Spanish championship. I was teammates with Garcia Rico, one of Spain’s best motocrossers. He finished second in the MX3 world championship.

In 2005 I rode as a professional rider on the Telefónica Movistar team and we shared a manager with the Repsol/KTM team. One of the Repsol/KTM riders, Jordi Durán, was injured in October and was not sure he would be able to ride Dakar in January 2006. At the last moment the team asked, ‘Do you want to come with the team to Dakar?’

I went, ‘Whoa!’ It was really the last minute.

Durán recovered well and the plan was to run a junior team with he and I, but then he was injured again, and his place was taken by Australian rider Andy Caldecott.