Livia Lancelot grabbed the first ever Women’s Motocross World Championship title and won her second GP of the season in Lierop on board her GPKR Kawasaki
It has been a long time since Livia got a Pee Wee as a present for Christmas. Nobody in her family was involved in motorcycling and she started practicing in the garden around her parent’s house. Later moving to real motocross tracks and starting her career with local, regional and later national races amongst the men she joined the Kawasaki family three years ago when Roger Pourcel offered her a ride in the GPKR team alongside his sons.
Third in ‘06, Livia started the ‘07 season with a broken collarbone and later lost all her chances in the title battle when she damaged her knee ligaments during the summer. She had surgery straight after sealing second in the series and after six months of intensive rehabilitation she got permission to ride her Kawasaki again in March.
Winning all the rounds of the new French Women’s series she dominated the opening round of the World Championship in Bulgaria but then lost the red plate in France. Second in Germany, she came to Lierop with a strong lead and just needed two consistent results inside the top five to be crowned.
Working hard alongside her mechanic during the last two months, Livia trained every week on sandy tracks to improve her riding. Second during the timed practice period she didn’t get a great start in the opening race but was able to recover promptly and took a strong second place behind Steffi Laier – her main rival in the title battle.
She got a better second start and ran second and followed her rival for a few laps until Laier had a technical problem and Livia passed her before winning the race and the Grand Prix. She claimed the title and offered another success to Kawasaki in this Women’s series which will continue to grow up next year.
Involved in the penultimate round of the MX1 campaign Sébastien Pourcel had a tougher weekend than Livia. Seventh in the qualifying session Sébastien never felt confident on this sandy and rutty layout. He spent most of the first race in ninth position and then had a more difficult second race. After running fourth in the opening laps Sébastien couldn’t hold the pace and finished 12th in the second race. Let’s hope that he will have a better feeling with the track next week in Faenza, a location which has good memories to the GPKR staff.
Livia Lancelot: “It’s awesome to win here in the sand, it’s a strange track and I struggled last year but today I won the race and the title - it’s a great day for me and our partners! I was waiting for this title for three years but I always missed it and finally I got it just when it changed from a World Cup to a World Championship.
“I was pretty relaxed when I arrived here. I knew that with a 20 point lead I had a big advantage. My goal was to do safe races and avoid any crashes but in fact it was better than what I expected. In the first race I nearly crashed in the second corner and I was maybe 14th but I came back second behind Laier.
“She passed me early in the second race and then I made a big mistake so I decided to secure my position as I knew that I could lose the title with a crash. But later she had some technical troubles and I was able to win the race even if the last three laps were pretty difficult! Now I have two more races for the French series and then I will take some holidays as I was working hard all this summer.”
Sébastien Pourcel:“I did one of my worst GPs of the season and there are not so many things to say. I never felt comfortable on the track, we worked on the settings of the bike but we didn’t find the best compromise between the engine and the suspension. We need to do more testing sessions in the sand which will be part of our winter programme to prepare the next GP campaign.
“My first heat was average, I started eighth and finished ninth. In the second one I had a better start, moved up to fourth but then lost confidence in my riding. The problem was not my physical condition, I was just afraid to crash and in these conditions you can’t keep a good rhythm. I’m sorry for Kawasaki, my team and my fans – it was not the real Sébastien Pourcel on the track and I know that I will have to do pre-season races in the Netherlands to improve my results in the sand.”
Roger Pourcel: “We’re proud to offer a second world title within three years to Kawasaki. We’ve been working for three years now with Livia and we missed the title twice in the past. We worked hard with Laurent - her mechanic – and they had a great co-operation for weeks and weeks to prepare for this final round. She is a hard worker and we saw the results this weekend. Last year she was four seconds slower than Laier and now she has the same speed. She won the GP, she is World Champion – what better result we could offer to Kawasaki?
“For sure we’d like to get some more MX1 wins but for three years now we have offered good results to the brand and for sure we expect to do better in the future. That’s our motivation with Thierry Chizzat Suzoni and Martin Van Genderen – we want to win races and get titles. Sébastien never believes in his potential when he comes to a sandy track but next year we will be based in the Netherlands and we all know what he has to do to solve this problem.”
