LAMONT LOOKS BACK | Bikesportnz

The sand has long since settled following this year’s Motocross of Nations in Belgium and so the BikesportNZ.com crew decided the time was right to sit down and chat with MXoN first-timer Kayne Lamont about the big experience.

“First of all, I have to say the atmosphere at the Motocross of Nations was amazing,” said the 19-year-old Lamont, the BikesportNZ.com rider who was making his debut for Team New Zealand in this year’s ‘Olympic Games of Motocross’, on the deep sand track at Lommel.

“Fans for all the various countries there just go mental. The noise is so intense and there are even fans with chainsaws (with the chains removed) revving them up, even during the warm-up or sighting laps. Just trying to squeeze through the pits is tough … even more congested than the GPs.

“Television coverage doesn’t do justice to just how deep and difficult the sand was. Even when riding at a slow speed on the sighting laps, the bike’s front end would want to tuck under all the time, so you had to be careful not to put your body weight too far forward.

“If you buttoned off the throttle and were not sitting far enough back on the bike, you’d be over the bars in no time. I’d try to sit near the back of the bike seat in the corners too, rather than in the middle of leaning forward. It took some getting used to,” said Lamont, a rider who is very much at home on one of New Zealand’s sandiest tracks, the Digger McEwen circuit on Taupo’s outskirts.

“You can sit down on the bike and relax at some points around the Taupo track, but not at Lommel.”

Lamont received plenty of valuable advice from GP veteran and MXoN Kiwi team leader Josh Coppins and also from the man assigned to prepare his KTM for the big race weekend, former GP star Werner De Wit.

De Wit was Coppins’ former factory Suzuki team-mate in Europe, between the years 1995 and 1998.

“Werner was available all the time I was training and setting up the bike and also over the race weekend. He was a great help. It was okay training in the sand but the track just got rougher and rougher on race day.”

Lamont shrugs his shoulders when asked about the disastrous qualifying result, New Zealand struck off the qualifiers list and relegated to the B Final thanks to a noisy exhaust.

New Zealand was penalised because of a technical infringement – the factory-supplied bike of Kiwi open class rider Cody Cooper failed a post-race noise test.

So the Kiwis were doomed to ‘last chance qualifier’ territory.

But the brave New Zealand trio knuckled under and punched their way into the main event as the 20th and final qualifying nation by winning the B Final race early on Sunday, Coppins and Cooper finishing a remarkable 1-2 in that race, allowing Lamont to back off and save himself.

“I was shattered in the B Final. I crashed twice and tweaked my thumb. I backed off to save my energy for the main races later that day. The first of the main Final races was only about an hour after the B Final and I had to race back-to-back for those too … MX1/MX2 and then MX2/Open.

“I expected the riders would all be fast but I figured I’d be good enough for top 10 because I’d been keeping up with riders like Spain’s Jose Butron and Swiss rider Jeremy Seewer when I’d last raced against them on a 125 in 2010 and came close to beating them.”

But this wasn’t like racing 125s on a typical motocross track, far from it – the MX2 riders like Lamont, Seewer and Butron were sharing the track each time with the big boys, on big bikes.

Tomorrow we will bring you the second instalment, part two of our interview with Lamont, where he talks about the Main Event, the Motocross of Nations proper.

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