Traditional last race of the season, the 2015 Motocross of Nations was a great one for team Swiss who got his best ever result with a fifth overall. Riding for the first time at this level his 450 Yamaha Standing Construct, Valentin Guillod scored a strong sixth position in the MXGP class.
There was huge crowd in Ernée, and 35000 enthusiast spectators were there to support their troops for this 69th edition of the MXoN. Teammate with Jeremy Seewer and Andy Baumgartner in the Swiss team, Valentin was working on the settings of the bike on Saturday and qualified in twelfth position during the MXGP race. With a better feeling with his bike and the track on Sunday, he got a good start in the MXGP+MX2 race; sixth after one lap, he just lost a few positions to Nagl, Simpson and Martin who are among the fastest riders in the world. Ninth of this race, Valentin was pretty happy after this first experience. His start in the MXGP+Open race was not as good and he came nineteenth after one lap; a crash during the second lap relegates him in twenty third place, but he did a strong race to finish fourteenth. Sixth in the MXGP classification and best ‘rookie’ of his new class, Valentin then joined his teammates to celebrate the fifth position of his young and promising team!
Valentin Guillod: “I’m very happy with this fifth position that we got with the Swiss team, they never got such a good result! We were expecting a top ten and that’s incredible to finish fifth with such a young team! For my first race on the 450 we struggled with the settings on Saturday, just coming back from the US and my last 250 race but we did a good job during the weekend, working on the suspensions and engine settings. On Sunday morning I was more confident, and I did a strong first race finishing ninth. In the second race I had a small crash during the second lap, I was then twenty third and came back fourteenth, which is not so bad as I had some trouble with the bike. It was a great weekend, and the fans were crazy!”