West Pennine Road Race – 7th May 2017
Steve Whittington writes about another useful road race outing, despite Louis Szymanski being unable to start with a tendon problem:
“60 riders lined up for 14 laps of the small 3.9 mile Bashall Eves circuit in glorious sunshine, and from the moment the flag dropped, it was eyeballs out as the attacks started immediately!! With very little wind, the first of 5 laps played out at almost 27mph average speed.
No elite teams were there to control affairs, so race tactics were quite unpredictable, with some attacks being reeled in straight away, and the occasional attack of a couple of riders managing to stay away for a lap or two. Both Ben Whitehead and myself had a few attempts at getting away, and on one occasion, both of us ended up in a three man break-away, but that only lasted a couple of lung busting kilometres before we were reeled in.
After 13 laps, and with no structured chase being formed, two riders were ahead by around 50 seconds. Those hoping their strategy of sitting in for a sprint victory would pay off had seemingly been cheated and the peleton settled on sprinting for 3rd place. On the final slog up to the finish I simply didn’t have the legs to contest a sprint and was content to try and just hold any wheel I could, eventually crossing the line completely exhausted with Ben a few places ahead of me in a stretched out bunch.
Ed Hopper of Maxxis 4 Racing Team took a convincingly strong victory in a very fast race covering 54 miles in just over 2 hours. Ben Whitehead finished in 22nd place and myself in 26th place.”
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