Joel Roelants is new MX2 Junior World Champion
By TMX Archives on 14th Aug 06
This weekend, Joel Roelants crowned himself junior-MX2 Worldchampion in Vantaa, Finland!
The prestigious 2-day junior MX-worldchampionship-event was competed by the worlds most talented MX riders under 18, from 20 different nationalities. Where last year Joel didn´t even make it into the top 20 at the junior WC,now teammanager Jacky Martens had to slow him down at his first GP-MX2 in Namur recently in order not to score regular worldchampionship-points. This would have meant exclusion from the Junior-MX Worldchampionship. A wise decision by Jacky Martens because Joel brought home the junior-title for himself and KTM-JMRacing!
Joel´s comment on things; "At saturday´s timepractice I set best time with a 2,5 sec. gap to Butron and I was feeling strong with my KTM perfectly dialed-in to the track-layout to with lots of cool jumps, and sand. In the first race my start wasn´t too good and I cornered in 7th position. From then on it took about 5 laps to work my way into leading position and I stayed out of trouble to win with a 21 second margin over Musqiun and Philippaerts. A perfect result although I was really nervous the first race. In the second race I crashed at the start and later on I crashed again to restart dead-last.I think I must have been out for about 30 seconds total. Still I managed to remonte to 4th positon, 10 cm short of Steven Clarke at the finish line who came in 3rd."
Teammanager Jacky Martens comment´s; "All of JMracing are thrilled with the fantastic achievement of our joungster!Joel was riding strong and displayed a superiour fysical condition wich kept him going especially thru the second race wich he started a bit to eager. I am happy to see the progress he has been making,resulting in this worldchampionship at age 17 and Joel is still learning and growing."
Yentel Martens, our 15 year old youngster form the JMJunior-team crashed during the start of the first race and fought back to 22th place at he finish, coming from way behind of the pack.This fysical drain proved too much for Yentel who crashed and dnf-ed in the second race. Yentel however leaves Finland with more mx-experience under his belt.
Result Junior MX-2 worldchampionship Vantaa-Finland
1 25 Joel Roelants 43 25 18 BE KTM
2 29 Gert Krestinov 37 15 22 EST KTM
3 53 Marvin Musquin 37 22 15 FRA KAWASAKI
4 30 Gianluca Martini 36 11 25 ITA KTM
5 46 Steven Clarke 34 14 20 GBR HONDA
6 40 Rinus Van De Ven 29 13 16 NL KTM
7 79 Jose Butron 29 18 11 ESP KTM
8 17 Ceriel KleinKromhof 20 6 14 NL HONDA
9 15 Deny Philippaerts 20 20 0 ITA YAMAHA
10 21 Herjan Brakke 18 8 10 NL HONDA