Raven-black day for Luca Nierychlo at the EMX65 semi-final in the Netherlands

On the last weekend in June, we travelled to Axel in the Netherlands for the semi-finals of the 65cc European Championship.

The deep and challenging sandy track near the North Sea is already familiar to us from previous events, so I was looking forward to this event. In the semi-finals, the strongest riders from the Central Europe Zone will meet the best from the North East Europe Zone.

As usual, the qualifying race was on the schedule for Saturday. I started in the very strong Group A field and came out of the first corner in second place, but had to let Britain’s Harry Dale pass me on the first lap. During the course of the race, I was able to stay consistently behind the holeshot driver Rainers Grasis from Latvia, as neither of us wanted to take any risks and finished second and third safely behind the winner Harry Dale.

The strongest riders from both groups met for the first time in the warm-up on Sunday morning. The standard in the field was incredibly high and the lap times were very close together. Twelfth place was a good performance for me in this field of drivers. The start of the first race took place around midday. I came out of the first lap in ninth place and was able to keep up with the extremely high pace in the top ten.

In the meantime, I fought my way up to sixth place before a riding error caused me to fall. I was back on the bike extremely quickly, but it didn’t restart immediately. I crossed the time loop in 21st place and fought my way back to 15th place in an impressive manner within three laps.

The second race was over for us just a few metres after the start. With a good reaction, I came out of the gate very well and fought for the holeshot, but I was involved in a violent starting accident with a few riders and was unable to continue the race.

Nevertheless, 15th place in the first race was enough to secure direct qualification for the EMX final in Loket with 20th place.

Unfortunately, I suffered a shoulder injury in the crash at the start and will have to be treated at Werneck Castle next week. We will let you know separately when I can start training again.

So I won’t be competing at the DM65 in Schweighausen, but I’m already looking forward to the DM races in Thurm and Westerhausen.

Special thanks go to Beate Herrmann, Collin Dugmore and Mart de Jong for their support!