As a two-time Australian Off Road Champion, Toby Price picked up the 2012 season right where he was hoping to last weekend at Dungog’s season opener in New South Wales.

The Motorex KTM Off Road Racing rider won on Saturday and backed it up with a second on Sunday to lead the series Outright and in E3, riding KTM’s brand new 500 EXC.

MotoOnline.com.au called Price yesterday afternoon to speak about his success, also getting his thoughts on the new inner-team battle between he and new teammate Chris Hollis.

The first and second round of the AORC series have been run now and you’ve come out leading the championship, taking a first on Saturday and a second on Sunday behind your teammate, Chris Hollis. It’s a good result to start out your 2012 campaign…

Yeah definitely, it started off a lot better than last year and I’m feeling really good. Saturday’s result was really good, it was good to get a win under my belt straight up. Getting a second on Sunday behind Chris, my teammate, I put down some good times with a few little mistakes along the way, but that’s all part of racing.

I’m looking forward to the next round to come around and getting back out there to try be consistent and stay on that podium.

You and Chris are both champions in the AORC series and now teammates at KTM, you took a win apiece over the weekend, so does that increase the rivalry between you both or did you sort of know it was going to be between you two from the start?

Yeah it’s good, there’s no real big rivalry between us in the team or anything, we’re just out there to get the best results for ourselves and the team, trying to get the KTM up on the podium.

So yeah we get along fine, no arguments or fighting between us, it’s actually going to lift my game and it’s lifting his as well.

So in the long run it’s going to help us both and hopefully we can get set up to try go overseas again and hopefully ride there full time – that’d be great.

When you first joined KTM a couple of years ago you were on the 450 and managed to win the championship, then you switched to the 350 and you were obviously in form apart from those couple of injuries. For this year you’ve gone all the way up to the 500 EXC, what was the reasoning behind that to switch to the big-bore bike this year?

It’s been good, they have the all-new 500 EXC that’s come out this year and it’s been a great bike. I’d been doing a fair bit of riding on the 450 at the start of the year and also the 500.

I just seemed to be able to fit well with the 500 and it always felt comfortable, it’s got plenty of power to pull me out of trouble if need be and I really like the way the power is delivered on that bike.

Once I started doing a bit of testing with the KTM guys, it started to prove a lot better on lap times and I’m not regretting it one bit – the bike is definitely capable of winning races as I did on Saturday.

I’m looking forward to these next rounds, if we get a nice wide open track the 500 is going to be unstoppable I think.

It would be pretty unique as well if you can go on to win the Outright championship as an E3 class rider, as usually it’s the E2 guys that are up the top there…

Yeah definitely, the E2 class is what they call the premier class and for me it was a little bit weird going into E3 on the 500, because it felt like I was going into retirement [laughs]. But I just had a laugh about it and just went for it.

The bike’s definitely capable of an Outright championship, I’ve just got to hold that throttle on and keep it on two wheels and it should be possible.

So I’m looking forward to it, just need to stay injury free and keep getting up on that box and we’ll be setting ourselves up pretty good for the end of the year.