Masters Racing Report by Paul Hone
This year my racing was focused on trying to win the British Masters Circuit Championships. I entered three masters races – two warm up races at Hillingdon on 24 & 28 June followed by the Nat Champs on 3 July. My training has gone pretty well and I purposely peaked for these events.
24 June – Hillingdon
It was a fast day (average 27mph) with no wind. This is not ideal conditions as I find you need some wind to break it up a bit and distract people from chasing you down. Despite numerous attempts to form and join breakaways, nothing stuck and it was a bunch sprint which I do not take part in.
28 June – Hillingdon
Windier day today with a nice head wind blowing down the finishing straight. Plenty of attacks went up the road as usual which with the wind soon whittled down the pack a bit. All the breaks I joined were getting shut down and decided to wait closer to the finish and try a solo attack.
With about 8 mins to go there was a rider up the road on his own going nowhere. I went to the front and slowly closed the gap as if that all I was intending to do but as soon as I went past him, I flawed it and created a gap. I still had a small gap as I hit the head wind on the finishing straight and piled it on as hard as I could. I built a large enough gap that it was not possible to sprint over to me and held it to the finish to win – job done.
Its was great to have Toks Adesanya support on the side lines who also knocked up this video of the event which you can see on the Hillingdon Masters Racing Facebook page
3 July – Leicester – Nat Champs
Just before the race, it started to rain hard and didn’t stop until we finished. The course was a small loop with a couple of small straights before hitting large hairpin bends. I felt I was one of the strongest but it was not possible to break away in these conditions on this course. I tried to get away quite a few times but the straights were too short before you have to back off for a bend. I was also marked out by the Hillingdon lads that were there so maybe winning on Monday wasn’t such a good idea. So to sum it up, I didn’t achieve my objective – that’s racing!
