ICE1RACING, a completely renovated team for 2013

Rui Gonçalves, Antti Pyrhönen and Xavier Boog during their stay in Spain - Juan Pablo Acevedo image.

To start with, the Finnish squad will be racing with KTM machines this year, Antti Pyrhönen will be the new manager, and Rui Gonçalves and Xavier Boog will be the ones representing the team in the MX1 class.

The ICE1RACING has been completly renovated, so there has hardly been a break for the Finnish team to start their pre-season. For four months, former MX3 rider Antti Pyrhönen has been working really hard to have the new team ready as soon as possible in order to be fully competitive in 2013.

"Everything is new; the complete crew is different, the mechanics, the riders, the brand … the team has been completely rebuilt and I am extremely happy for being part of it. Of course, this last four months have been full of massive work, but we have done all the steps strongly and so far everything has been positive,” Pyrhönen explained.

The Finnish team manager announced his retirement at the end of 2012 and it seems that everything clicked perfectly well because weeks after such announcement, he became the team manager of ICE1RACING: "I had been racing 12 years professionally, and when I turned 34, I thought it was the time to think of something else and I had always wished to be involved in the Grand Prix as a team manager,” Pyrhönen confessed. "During my racing days I had been in contact with Kimi and everything clicked together, I decided to stop racing when he was looking for a new team manager. I feel really motivated and very excited with this new opportunity that we all have, in fact, I have not looked back at my career at all,” he explained.

Pyrhönen counts with two of the best MX1 riders of the moment; Xavier Boog was seventh in the 2012 FIM Motocross World Championship, whereas Rui Gonçalves finished ninth. "I am very pleased with the riders because they are extremely professional and they are putting the effort and the work needed at this level. The technical crew that is now with us were very fine selected and they fit to our team extremely well. Everything is going as we had planned and now we are getting closer to the first races, and we can’t wait for the gate to drop,” ICE1RACING team manager added.

Besides, ICE1RACING counts with the factory kit engines from KTM and the WP factory suspensions to be fighting for the top positions of the championship. "KTM is the perfect partner for us,” Pyrhönen said, "they are fully involved in racing and they are located in Europe, which is very good for us because we can constantly be in contact with them and develop the bike very fast.”

Both riders, Gonçalves and Boog, spent some time with the whole team in Finland, where they did some physical training, and once they were back home, they started training with their new KTM, firstly in Belgium on the sand, and some weeks later they travelled to Spain to set their bikes up on the hard pack.

Frenchman Boog, who is now living in Belgium, has been training with the KTM since November, and although he found many differences with the bike he was using last year, he admitted that he is feeling really good right now and he expects to improve his previous years performances: "My goal is to be among the top five by the end of the year and of course be more on the podium because last year I could not be on the podium at any Grand Prix, so I’m working for that. My main goal is having fun on the bike, and if everything is working well, the results will come.”

Gonçalves, who had one of his toughest seasons in 2012, is fully fit and motivated again, and he will use all his personal and professional experience to face this new season. "It is a new challenge in my career, coming back to KTM is for sure a good thing and the ICE1RACING team has been great. We are a strong group, we’ve stuck together since day one and that was really important. I can’t thank them enough for what they have done for me so far,” the Portuguese explained.