BEHIND THE LENS AT AFT ADVENTURETRACKERS
Photographer Josh Winders embeds with two racers competing in the 2025 AdventureTrackers Series. The following is his experience, captured on camera, and described in his words.
American Flat Track doesn’t ease you in, it explodes around you. The atmosphere shakes with engines screaming at full roar, dirt roosts into the air like fireworks, and the quarter-mile oval transforms into a theater of blurred sliding steel. It’s chaos and choreography all at once, the kind of spectacle that commands your attention before you’ve even had the chance to catch your breath.
Before I get too carried away, I believe introductions are in order. My name is Joshua Winders, though most people call me JK. I’m a photographer, a Triumph rider, and someone who finds himself endlessly curious about the places motorcycles can take us. For my day-to-day, I ride a 2019 Thruxton 1200 R; Triumph's original racing machine, though I’m no racer myself. My work is more often behind the lens, chasing the artistry of motorcycles rather than lap times.
This year during the 85th Sturgis Rally, Triumph graciously offered me the chance to venture trackside to capture the races at the legendary Jackpine Gypsies. It was a first for me. I grew up going to the occasional NASCAR race, I've watched a fair share of MotoGP™, but Flat Track was a new world. The whole environment felt raw, unpolished, and almost analog compared to the paved precision of road racing, its beauty lying in the chaos of sliding bikes defying laws of physics and gravity. It’s fast, loud, dirty, and unlike anything I have ever stood in such close proximity of before.
The riders for team Triumph, Brandon Paasch (#196) and Dalton Gauthier (#79), are heavyweights in their respective disciplines. Brandon is a two-time Daytona 200 winner, and Dalton is the 2019 AFT Singles Champion. Together, they arrived in South Dakota barebones, without crew chiefs, and supported only by an artist (me) that at the very least is proficient at putting gas in a bike. Nonetheless, they were both ready to take on something new; competing in American Flat Track’s first multi-race season of AdventureTracker class races.
The bikes are both the Tiger 900 GT Pro, which after providing event support for Triumph at ADV rallies, is a motorcycle I’ve have been personally developing a strong appreciation of. Our first afternoon was in the garage changing tires and getting the bikes up to the required minimum weight. It was there I noticed they were the very same bikes we had used as demos for Get On! ADV Fest just two weeks earlier. This also meant that they were fresh off the filming of an upcoming BDR (Backcountry Discover Route) and spent the week prior in the Black Hills on a Jeff Stanton Adventures tour, led by the 6-time champion himself. It felt kind of perfect, a proper way to show off their capabilities, proving they could handle backcountry trails one week and the flat track the next.
As we took to the track I witnessed two champions on new bikes navigating a new course. It was a bit of a gamble, and I could see it in their first practice laps, the cautious leans, the calculated slides, it was a learning process. Meanwhile, I was running a race of my own. Capturing the spectacle of the flat track is a balancing act - dialing in settings, pushing the focus, wiping away copious amounts dust, inching closer to the action until track officials have to give me a good tap on the shoulder. Every lap forced me to adapt: speed too fast for a lazy shutter, dust too thick for a safe autofocus, corners too tight for hesitation.
It's all blink-and-you-miss-it kind of action. I was able to get plenty of practice between the Singles and SuperTwin classes, but during the Adventure Tracker practice rounds, qualification heats, and main events, my sights were glued to number 79 and 196. What kept me sharp was the artistry of it all. Brandon, Dalton, and all the other racers weren’t simply wrangling bikes across the dirt; they were painting lines with throttle, shift and lean, carving strokes that no brush could capture. As an artist, I recognize that language, rhythm, flow, instinct, even if the canvas is different in every way. Watching them, I found myself not just documenting a sport, but bearing witness to a conversation between rider, bike, and constantly-shifting earth.
After three days of races, I wasn’t walking away with just photographs. I was carrying proof of Triumph’s racing spirit, of riders willing to push beyond, of bikes tested where they’d never been tested, of myself stretched as a storyteller in the dust and noise of the flat track. Racing, I've come to realize, is hardly just about the win. It’s about what you pick up in the margins, in the split-seconds between turns. For me, behind the lens at Jackpine Gypsies, that meant seeing Triumph’s grit in action and catching stories in the dust that hung over the track long after the checkered flag.
