When it comes to all things enduro and off-road, moto filmmaker and adventurer Adam Riemann is all about that life. Thanks to a lifelong history of riding, competing, and making moto action films with his company Motology for the likes of major manufacturers like KTM, Riemann knows an awful lot of other extremely talented riders. Occasionally, he invites some of them to his home enduro track, the Dirt Kitchen, to set times on totally neutral ground.
This time around, he’s invited Australian women’s racing champion Jess Gardiner to compete. She’s brought along her very lightly modified 2023 Yamaha WR250F for the event, and says that while there’s an Akrapovič exhaust system, Neken handlebar, and slight changes to the positioning of the levers, the only other thing that she’s really done is tune it using the Yamaha phone app. The engine is all stock.
The cool thing about the Dirt Kitchen—apart from obviously having an awesome enduro track in your own back yard—is that it’s not a place that the pros all know and use regularly. As a result, they’re able to come, put in a few shakedown laps to get to know the track on-site, and then just go full send on their timed lap at the end. While Riemann says that he normally does a little bit of preparation of the track before sending riders out, this time, they just kept it chill and took it as-is. Luckily, the weather was excellent.
Each time a rider goes out to do laps at this track, they have a GoPro onboard—so then we get to see how they did. In Gardiner’s case, she starts out confident and then gets even moreso as she gets to know the course. Her assessment afterward is that it feels pretty natural and like it flows really well and wasn’t difficult to get to grips with at all. You can tell just by watching as an armchair observer, and it’s probably even more evident in a technical way if you’re an experienced enduro enthusiast.
After Gardiner’s initial laps, her teammate, partner, and European enduro champ Jérémy Carpentier also joined the party on his Yamaha WR450F. In fact, the final competition of the day involved Gardiner on her bike, Riemann on a Honda CR250R, and Carpentier on his WR450F.
How did their times stack up? Carpentier was still recovering from some type of hand injury at the time this video was shot, but nevertheless managed to make quite a dent in the Dirt Kitchen top times list. In fact, he did well enough to crack the top five, against the likes of homegrown Aussie talent like Daniel Sanders and Brock Flynn.
In the three-way competition, Gardiner managed to smoke Riemann and Carpentier—and her solo time put her just outside the existing top ten on the board. She’s also the first woman racer to compete in the Dirt Kitchen, but hopefully she won’t be the last.
