Josh Carter – ABD / GEARGRINDER PDT
Race Report: The Last Race
The venue at Eagle’s Canyon Raceway was really nice. The course was awesome; It was a 2 ½ mile circuit with 11 sweeping corners and two slight uphills. The heavy, gusting winds at up to 40 mph gave it a unique twist though. A course that looked like it would typically be fast turned into a situation where you were going really fast in the tailwind, really slow in the headwind, and hanging on for dear life on all of the crosswind curves. With temperatures in the upper 40s – lower 50s at race time, the wind went through every piece of clothing I had on. For the record, it was warmer in Chicago today! Having just moved to Texas from the Midwest, I am not used to winds like this. I chose to use my Bontrager deep dish carbon wheels, which were good until every time I hit a corner with a crosswind. It literally felt like my bike would be blown out from underneath me.
Being the new guy in town, I pretty much just knew my wife Julie’s collegiate riders on MSU / HHH. With that being said, I had no idea what to expect. My only goal was to dismantle my wife’s team and beat them … which equals beating her! I wanted to have fun and ride aggressively. After many attacks from the field the front group whittled down to about 10 guys.
Somewhere near the four laps to go mark Collin Davis from the MSU / HHH cycling team attacked and got away by himself, putting about 10 seconds on our group. Shortly after that Corey Ray from Metro Volkswagen attacked and made it about half way across before I attacked and bridged across to him. The two of us closed the gap to Collin, forming a 3-man breakaway. For the next two and a half laps we stayed about 20 seconds ahead of the group. Finally with about a lap and a half to go the elastic broke and the gap went out to about 45 seconds.
The finish came down to a 3-up sprint as I had hoped and anticipated. We had a tailwind sprint with a chicane between the last corner and the finish line. I wanted to be first through the chicane because my wheels and the wind were not working well together; With that in mind, I had to open the sprint at about the 300 meter mark. The finishing order was me 1st, Corey 2nd, and Collin 3rd.
After having such a rough last few months with breaking my arm in August, it was nice to feel good and win the last race of the year and end the season on a good note. I would like to thank everyone who helped in the organization and promoting of this event. It was very well done and it was nice to have a race to break the training monotony in November.
See you next year.
Josh
