The 16th edition of St Etienne Indoor was held this weekend. It’s my 4th time that I do this race and it was by far the best so far. The track was, for once, really good! Since they have some limited space in the arena they can’t have a pro section. But this year they tried something new to make racing more spectacular, they had a ramp that they lowered down from the ceiling when the Elites raced making the last jump a big triple. It worked out really well and made for some good action. The only down side was that they had a make a really weird jump for the challenge riders but they can probably improve that for next years race.

This weekend held two races for me. Saturday was the Nations Trophy, and open race to all 17+ riders. I signed up to get some (read a lot) of extra time on the track before the “normal” race on sunday. I was sure that I wasn’t going to qualify on saturday so I was really relaxed and actually surprised myself with how well I rode. I was relaxed, had a really good gate and was closer to the guys in front of me than I would have thought. I finished 6-6-7 in a race with 8 guys and I was please with the way I rode. In the last race I was in 6th but aired it out and just had fun on the last 2 straights so a guy passed me. But I was really please with how the weekend went.

Sunday was a completely different story however. During the first few laps of training I was riding really good and have nearly perfect gates. But then the my race nerves and pressure from myself started to rise and things just went downhill from there… I was supposed to have no expectations this weekend but as usual with me it didn’t work out that way. I messed everything up and didn’t even qualify out of the motos… After the race yesterday I wrote on twitter “Todays race was me against me. And I lost, again… ” and that’s just the way it was. I was holding myself back once more. I cracked and got shut down out of the gate every race because I was really late. And my gates where spot on earlier that morning. I need to race and race and race to get out of this bad circle and get comfortable with racing. Luckily I have at least 1 race every month from now on so that should help me.

From here I just need to keep working hard and be determined. I’ve only spent about a month here and I still have 6months remaining so there’s plenty of time for improvements!