Europe the home of dry rolls filled with ham and cheese, oh and big mountains!
Well after a dissapointing weekends racing in LeoGang, we headed to Schladming for a bit of training. For those of you who haven't been to Schladming, GO! It's definetely up there with the best tracks I have ridden. To describe how good in words is almost impossible, as soon as you leave the start you have the biggest grin across your face, it's like heaven and has everything a track should have, jumps, loose turns, roots and is super fast! To top all that off, for only 12 euros you get 1 night in the campsite and 2 days lift passes, thanks to the "sommercard"..
After two days riding there we all felt we had sent enough whips off the step up and headed to Saalbach for the day. It wasn't the greatest of tracks but Ash Maller and myself banged out ten runs and we went for a swim in the lake at Zell an See before staying over in LeoGang. We awoke that morning to blistering hot weather and it seemed a shame not to be riding, but it was required to fully service the bikes in preparation for the race at La Bresse...
With the bikes fully serviced and ready to go, we headed to La Bresse for the 3rd round of the Nissan European series. It was a 8 hour drive and we ended up driving till 12 before we called it a night, an hour from the resort.
La Bresse is a pretty small, quiet town with not a huge amount going on, after struggling to find the race, we found it, signed on and walked the track. The track differed from normal, it was pretty much brand new and no one had ridden it, so much so that the lower grass sections had been strimmed specifically for the event. The track was directly below the chairlift and dipped in and out some tricky wooded sections, littered with rocks and slippy roots ready to catch the unwary out, coming into the bottom section and you crossed a long off camber with some serious compressions, quick sprint along the road before dropping into the finally off piste section and across the finish line.
The chairlift was super quick and across the weekend I punched out 30 runs!
The format was qualfying and racing on the Sunday, with practise starting midday on Friday so there was plenty of time to learn the track. Practise went well there were a couple of tricky sections but come racing I had everything dialled in. The main thing was just to keep out the mud bogs forming due to the terrentional rain...
Qualifying run went smoothly I pieced together a pretty smooth run, couple of mistakes I finished 7th with something to build on for finals.
My race run went well, I left the start strong and put together an ok run, a couple of stalls costing me a bit of time. I finished 7th again got 6 UCI points, 80 euros cash and some goodies.
Well, I'm now back home now and working my way through a bag of dirty washing...
See ya at Llangollen BDS next week!
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