The town of Varallo Sesia, in the Italian Piedmont region hosted this weekend's first round of the European Trial championship and Gas Gas enjoyed a double victory in both categories when on Saturday Laia Sanz dominated the women’s class and Matteo Grattarola took the overall win on Sunday.
After the rains that affected the region during the day on Friday, the sections for the women were quite wet, so Laia chose to avoid risks and to make her own race. Despite having nearly a month recovering from the knee injury that occurred at the start of the championship of Spain, the GasGas rider has recovered well and showed it section after section, totalling only two penalty points at the end of the day compared with the 13 and scored 19 points for Becky Cook and Emma Bristow who were second and third respectively.
On Sunday the sections were a little more complicated and the fight at the front was particularly disputed. Finally, the victory would go to the hands of Italian Matteo Grattarola riding a Gas Gas -looking for a title that has eluded him the past two years. Finishing behind Grattarola were Daniele Maurino and Cedric Tempier respectively, while the Gas Gas rider Pere Borrellas did not have much luck and had to settle for sixth place, just four points behind the fourth position.
Laia Sanz "This is an important victory for me because I had several months without references of my rivals and did not know how they were doing. The last half year, with all of the Dakar, I have trained very little Trial and also the knee injury has kept me out of game for a month, so I was a little uneasy. Fortunately all went well and now I am more confident in my chances of winning the championship, but there is still much work to do.
About the race, it was easy to slip and make a mistake because the ground was wet by rain on Friday, so I decided to go into first to make my own race and not have to be aware of the others. Yesterday we had to work a little on the bike as we were looking for the proper settings to adapt to my riding style. And I think we found a good compromise because I felt very comfortable".