Xtreme Lumezzane

After all that fishing and rocking it was time for me to get back to business and fly to Italy for the last round of the Italian championship that was held in Lumezzane, Brescia province north Italy. But just to make sure I don't get abstinence symptoms I had to go fishing on Wednesday in Italy ;) My friend Remo who is the president of our team's motoclub Trial Fornaroli promised to take me fishing if I win the Italian overall title and now it was time to reclaim that promise. He took me 2000m above the sea level to one little mountain lake where he is a member of a fishing society.

Remo was fishing mostly with live maggots and he started to catch rainbow trouts straight away just like me but he also caught one little char with his methods.





I even brought my own spinning rod for the occasion and some Finnish lures to see if they work out also in Italy. It turned out to be a massacre. I had some lures that were too efficient to use on this lake. With every cast I had a rainbow trout hooked!





The lake seemed to boil with the rainbow trouts breaching all the time for insects at the surface and soon we had so many trouts that it pointless to continue fishing. Remo said it had never been like this before. They must have restocked rainbow trouts recently and overdone it! But what can you do when you have to keep impatient people happy. If people don't catch anything the society is losing members. I think that's what had happened.


Thanks to Remo I had this opportunity to test my lures with trouts and even if some of them seemed unresistable some others didn't catch anything. Now I know with which lures to start with next time I go trout fishing in Finland. Though it might be that the Finnish trouts are not so easy to cheat!





Having already the title in my pocket I didn’t have much motivation for this last Italian championship race but it was a good way for me to get back in shape. So, I was looking forward for some good training that a 4 laps and 7h race can offer. We had also Friday evening prologue on the Xtrem test like in WEC and I was happy with my result for I felt a little lack of routine. There was a lot of rain before and during the test so the logs and stone sections got very slippery. Oldrati was back on his 250 2T WEC bike and on the gas again winning the prologue. I was about 4s slower but second fastest anyway.

Saturday morning broke with sun from somber skies and we had the start an hour earlier than usually in order to finish earlier and prepare for the night race. The first special test was the same Xtrem test like the prologue again. I was like flying over the first stone section and tried to keep the same pace on the second one. I lost my balance with still slippery stones and my front wheel caught behind a bigger rock and down I went! The bike stalled also and it wasn’t so easy to get back going from the slippery rocks. I ended up loosing about 20s more so Oldrati. Then there was the MX- test which was in the middle of an industrial area all done on different small grass fields. It had many hills too but it was very slow until half way of the test. It started from the small dirty stream and when turning to the field I noticed too late that the rut by the edge of the stream was too deep! I tried to wheelie over it but stalled the engine when the back wheel was sucked in the mud. The bike fired on the third kick so I didn’t loose that much but my riding on this slippery test was something I couldn’t understand myself. My ride was just bad and lacked the attitude. I was again about 20s slower than Oldrati. After these two special tests+Friday’s prologue combined I was 44s behind Oldrati and I lost completely the will to fight. After some mental battle with myself I decided to continue and take the race just for training that I needed. Off course training would be riding full gas anyway! The Enduro test on the first lap was not timed. It was a mix of fast gravel mountain roads, stony river bed and some up and down the hills partly on the same course like the evening’s Xtrem. When the first lap was done I realized how good training four laps on a course like this would be! It was mostly true off-road with long stony river beds and trails and quite physical riding. From the second lap my riding was better and that odd feeling on the bike was gone. I did the best time on the second and third lap's MX- tests and only Nambotin beat me by half a second on the fourth lap's MX. On Xtrem and Enduro test I was at the pace of the best riders and at the end of the day Oldrati won and I was 31s slower sixth. My team mate Oscar Balletti finished second only 4,2s behing Oldrati and Nambo third, my team mate Fabio Mossini fourth and Simone Albergoni fifth.

The race finished around 15:30 and it was good training indeed! And like that wasn’t enough in the evening there was another race, Xtrem Lumezzane! The name says it all. This was 6th edition of this ”survival” race but it has not been done every year and the last race was back in 2006. Click here for the video of previous event. The race formula used to be different back then with a 20min long rocky special test and hours of racing. This time it was only a three minute long special test done three times. What is so extreme about this race then? The highlight for the 20.000 spectators is the final hill climb named ”il Dente Del Diavolo” = The Devil’s Tooth which is a hole digged with bulldozers and excavators in allready steep uphill. It’s kind of like two dirt ramps one after the other and the latter even steeper. On top of the first ramp one has to come to almost a complete stop before rolling down the ditch and pick the right moment to open the throttle and by using the clutch and body weight find the correct amount of traction to make it to the top.

Between the end of the Italian championship race and Xtreme race there was only 3h hours and not any time to rest. I was hungry after 7h hours of racing so I wolfed down a big plate of pasta and hurried to the prize giving ceremony of the Italian championship where I received the second place trophy in the class of ”stranieri” = foreigners. Gas Gas pilot Christophe Nambotin won and Husky rider Seb Guillaume was third. Does it sound strange to you that there is such a class as "foreigners"? Let me explain: Something like 10 years ago the Italian championship was ”open” meaning also foreign riders can race for the titles. Then Italians got tired of foreign riders winning their titles so they decided that only Italian riders get points for the class championships and only the overall championship remains open. It didn’t quite work though. Foreign riders didn’t get points but were still on the podium out-shadowing Italian riders. Foreign riders get the trophies but no points. No good. Italian riders MUST get on the podium in Italian championship! Then someone had a strike of genius and the ”foreigners class” was born. It means that I still ride amongst the Italian 450 riders but even if I am the fastest I have to climb on the podium of this downright ridiculous stranieri class. Sometimes there’s not even enough foreign riders to crowd the podium… even Italian riders themselves count us foreign riders out when they speak about the race. For example if two foreign 250 riders are faster than fastest Italian rider on the same bike he says he won the race because faster riders were foreigners! It’s really been quite amusing having followed the evolution of Italian championship. So actually I am not just Italian overall champion but also Italian Foreign Champion, how’s that!

After the prize giving we took HM Honda 230F Easy with my team mate Mossini and rode nearly 20km to check out the Xtreme track. There was already heaps of people gathering on the site and shouting encouragements as we looked for the best line to approach the Devil’s Tooth. The last part of the uphill was so steep it seemed vertical and intimidated also a seasoned veteran like me! Some riders like Meo and trial rider Jarvis came just for this race and didn’t participate the Italian championship which basically was a qualifier for the main event of the evening. The starting order was the overall classification of the day race in reversed order with some strange exceptions just to make it pure Italian order! Anyway, I did my first test in dusk a little before 21:00. I started one minute after the local hero Alessandro Botturi and that was a good thing for I thought he will not get stuck and block my pass at the Devil’s Tooth. I actually had never had time to walk around the complete course and doing it full gas in the dusk was harder than I thought. I was backing off on gas in too many places too early but I thought all that matters is getting up the Devil’s Tooth. When I arrived at the foot of the uphill Botturi was still at the Devil’s Tooth stuck put I didn’t even realize it for that fast the marshals of the race pulled him and his bike up with the ropes. There were 60 riders and most of them got stuck and crashed or back flipped their bikes at the last steep part but it never caused any delay or traffic jam for that well prepared and determined were the marshals to pull everyone’s bike up the moment it stopped rolling down the hill. Riders who almost made it to the top were saved by the marshals pulling them up the last meters from the ledge cut in the almost vertical hill couple of meters down from the top. I had no idea how to get up this wall of dirt from the ditch were one could only hope to get the launch needed to survive. I ended up getting it up easily and was surprised even myself for how easy it felt. I can’t even explain the technique of doing it for it comes purely instinctively on the moment. My time wasn’t that fast though. Oldrati was fastest 6s faster, Belometti second 5s faster and Meo third 4s faster. After the test there was about 40min wait before the next lap. By the second lap it was completely dark but even with my powerful helmet light I had difficulties to see properly down in the valley because there was some fog. Off course this was the problem for everybody but I found myself still riding too hesitantly. The Devil’s Tooth was no problem again and my time was better but so was nearly every top rider’s time. I hoped to catch Belometti but was only one second faster than him. This meant I was still fourth only 3s behind Belometti but not happy at all. Last lap and I decided to push as hard as I could and calculated that I could quite easily take 5s off my time just by riding more aggressively. Everything went well until the Devil’s Tooth. I jumped high against the first dirt ramp and kept the momentum falling perfectly down the ditch but hit one loose rock at the bottom the moment I accelerated… The bike was thrown to the right side and I struggled with my balance but kept the gas open and with delicate use of the clutch prevented the bike from wheeling over and just made it to the top! But the top of the hill was crowded and I couldn’t do nothing but dive inside the wall of people who tried their best to get out of the way! There should have been only marshals but the hilltop was totally crowded because most of the riders got up from the left side where the finish line was just behind the corner. I knew I was doing a very fast time so I turned the bike in the fleeing crowd and accelerated towards the finish line. People jumped out of the way but one man was too slow and ended up under my tyres. Well, not completely under but surely he got hit like a mule’s kick from my wheeling front tyre and slowed me down some more before I was clear and made it through the finish line. In the end I improved my time 4s but also Belometti improved and I was only 0,7s faster which meant I remained fourth in the final classification. I was very disappointed but it's not easy to beat the local boys in a race like this. Meo did it and was the true king of the race winning by 0,5s over Oldrati while I was 11s off the top spot. In the end there was not so much riding in this race with total of about 7 and a half minutes, a lot of waiting but surely from the spectators point of view it was one hell of an event with illuminated up and downhills at the end of the track in a valley and a huge TV screen at the top of the hill with live footage for those who couldn’t see down from the crowds. It was also live on TV in some Italian channels so it was a good promo for Enduro in general!