MOTORSPORT: Six wheels for Toby Price

The two drivers who are now Australia's biggest guns in motorsport are in action this weekend half a world apart in very different environments.

Daniel Ricciardo is in Montreal, Canada, scene of his first grand prix victory two years ago, and with the world watching to see that there are no repeats of the mix-ups by his Red Bull team that have cost him victory in the past two Formula 1 races.

Toby Price, who five months ago became a national hero by becoming the first Australian to win the two-week, 9000km Dakar Rally, is in outback Australia for the Finke Desert Race – and doing it on both two wheels and four.

The Dakar well and truly proved Price's mettle, with the ultimate success in the world's most torturous motorsport event at just his second attempt, but if he completes the Finke driving both the Geiser Brothers trophy truck that won the event in 2012 and riding his KTM500EXC motorcycle he will be officially an "Ironman".

Price has been largely out of the spotlight since his Dakar success, which almost guaranteed him being Australia's motorsport achiever of the year, and there will be comparatively little media attention on him over the Queen's Birthday long weekend other than in and around Alice Springs – although a '60 Minutes' feature story is on the horizon.

The Finke is sometimes described as the Bathurst of off-road racing. For most it's a 480km, two-day blast south from the Alice to the small Aputula community across the Finke River and back the next day.

But if all goes to plan for the 28-year-old Price, from NSW's Hunter Valley, he'll be doing it twice each way – and be flown backwards and forwards to give him every chance of scoring the "Ironman" double.

Only Billy Geddes in 2014 has achieved a double finish on the Finke.

The event – in which buggies and quads also compete – begins with an 8km prologue Saturday, the outward leg from Alice is on Sunday and the return on Monday.

The course is largely a corrugated dirt track along sections of what was the old Ghan railway track beside the famous north-south railway line.

Price has already won the Finke four times on bikes – a fifth victory would equal the record of Alice Springs ace Randall Gregory in the 1990s – but he's done little on four wheels other than racing in the stadium super trucks at Adelaide's Clipsal 500 V8 Supercar event.

"Yes, I'm going to try to do the 'Ironman', which is about 1000km of racing in two days," Price said.

"You can't live in a cotton wool box, and I always like challenging myself.

"I think this is something that is going to push me pretty hard.

"I might have made it harder to win my fifth Finke and tie Randall's record, but this chance has come up – and it may not have come up next year.

"We'll try our best to compete strongly in both classes.

"We'll go down in the morning [Sunday] in the truck, and while I'm in that there's going to be a helicopter following me, so if we run into any dramas where it's going to jeopardise getting on the bike, we can fly straight back in the chopper.

"If not, if we get down to the other end that day, we'll have a plane sitting there waiting to fly back to Alice Springs and then jump on the bike for the bike leg.

"I've been pretty successful in the bike category. I just thought that, while I'm still at a younger age, I'm able to be still competitive on the bike, then if I can get into a truck and be competitive in that then I'll be happy.

"There might be a 20 to 30 per cent chance that it's putting a fifth bike win at jeopardy, but I'm still young – I'm able to do both bike and truck.

"If it doesn't go to plan, then ... you can't be scared of failure really."

Ricciardo's smiling again and raring to go
Daniel Ricciardo has "moved on" from the disappointment of the Monaco Grand Prix and is intent on challenging Mercedes pair Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in the Canadian GP early Monday, Australian time.

And the West Australian is hopeful of making the F1 world championship a fight with the Merc men, although he's 40 points behind leader Rosberg and 16 behind Hamilton – but there are 15 races to go.

Ricciardo said he had quizzed his Red Bull Racing team intensively not only about the slow second pit stop he had at Monaco which most certainly handed an almost certain victory for him to Hamilton but also about his earlier stop, when he was switched from wet to intermediate tyres.

"I've moved on ... I just want to get back in the car and basically smash it," he said.

"I've still got faith in the team and I don't doubt them moving forward.

"The last four [GP] weekends I felt I should have got more, so this time it will be important to know we have maximised everything from both sides."

Certainly in Spain, two weeks before Monaco, Red Bull's strategy call worked against Ricciardo and presented his new 18-year-old teammate Max Verstappen with a shock win in his first outing with RBR as the replacement for Daniil Kyvat, whose antics may have cost Ricciardo an earlier victory.

While Ricciardo had exclusive use of Renault's latest power unit upgrade in Monaco, Verstappen will have the same equipment in Montreal.

Ferrari and Honda-powered McLaren will introduce improved turbochargers there.

IndyCar this weekend is at Texas Motor Speedway, where Will Power won in 2011 and has consistently qualified fastest, while there is a World Rally Championship round on the Italian island of Sardinia and the World Rallycross Championship, in which Mattias Ekstrom is leading Petter Solberg, is at Hell in Norway with Sebastien Loeb and Ken Block in the field.