As the description for the results section says this topic is telling 'what might have been'!. Got up bright and early Sunday morning and met up with Paul in CSS, got to Dunsfold in plenty of time and ended up parking beside a Dulwich Paragon rider (Guy). The course is pancake flat and very open, no real tight bends and plenty of room widthways. Anyway the race was going to be 13 laps, witht the first lap neutral while we followed the comissioners car around the course. The car duly peeled off and the racing was on! Speed rapidly picked up (we had a great tail wind) and we zoomed down to the first bend (a real sweeping bend), as we completed the turn the great tailwind turned into a hedious headwind and smacked into us with the speed dropping from about 50kph to 25 kph. As we struggled into the wind I hear a lovely HISSSS! and my back wheel rapidly deflated What cr*p luck! (the only puncture in the race) So I slowly came to a halt as the bunch swarmed past and dissappeared down the main runway. I headed back to the race start (taking a short cut through the grass just to find it was like a marsh
). Anyway all my stuff was in Paul's car so I couldn't fix the puncture
but
one of the race assistants had a spare 9 speed shimano rear wheel in his car all ready to go and gave it to me! So I finally rejoined the race after missing about 3 laps, 9 to go. The laps all passed in the same fashion, a high speed chase down oneside (with tailwind) followed by a crawl back up into the headwind. The headwind effectively stopped any breakaways and the pace was easy club level for that section. Paul and Guy did a few attempts to break off but to no avail. As we came to the finish, there are three bends pretty near each other and to stand a chance of winning you needed to position yourself before the first of these three. Paul started to do that but fell foul of the lip by the roadside and almost came off, whilst I wasn't trying at all as I was allowed to
. So we didn't place too highly ! Guy from DP also overcooked a corner and hit some gravel. After the race we were all wondering what might have been...
