This here is Dalton Gauthier. Whenever I hear his name I get excited. He talks like I imagine a laidback cowpoke would, legs crossed leaning on a fence post, battered Stetson pushed way back. His riding style is languid, unhurried, unfazed, sanguine. There isn’t an AFT Singles race he enters that I’d bet against him. As we reported recently, the Black Hills Harley-Davidson team, in conjunction with Vance & Hines, has promised him one of the former factory XG750R races bike to compete in the seven remaining AFT Production Twins races. It could well be an audition for a full-time AFT Super Twins ride for 2020 (or maybe a full-time Production Twins ride, but I think Gauthier needs to be in Super Twins).
Whenever he’s introduced on fanshoice coverage of a 2019 AFT Singles race they mention the sponsor name Gobert Smash. Pretty much anyone who sponsors a flat track racer, team or event is OK by us, but I didn’t know this company and there was no obvious clue to there business (unlike, say, Roof Systems of Dallas, who are an industrial roofing company from, you guessed it), so I had a little dig around. It turns out Gobert Smash is an Australian automobile crash repair company, the brainchild of Miriam Deitcher who launched and runs Flat Track Live.
Read Miriam's entertaining blog post on how and why a flat track mad American marketing professional ended up running a SW Syndey crash repair shop, named after a bike racer, at Gobert Smash dumb ass luck.