Friday night racing was a blast! A good crowd to heckle and cheer seems to add a few watts to the legs and a higher level of competition added with some out of town racers makes for faster racing too. Then the pits between races are fun too with great camaraderie that pretty much always transcends whatever goes on during the races.
20 lap scratch: It quickly became obvious that the four visitors up from the ADT track were working well as a team chasing stuff down, blocking and generally setting the race up for a sprint finish. I BLEW IT with two to go when the bottom of the track seemed open, I was the first guy coming through and then backed off when it seemed like the two riders up track were coming down into my line. What I should have done was blasted through. Even if they did come down, I could have easily dropped down to the blue line of the apron and let the officials sort it out. What I did do cost me the pole for the final lap (which would have been SWEET) and also screwed up quite a few riders behind me on my wheel. OK. Hopefully next time I'm in that position I'll remember to be in more aggressive and less cautious. ESPECIALLY with only two laps to go.
5x5 points (25 laps): I wasn't able to get up into the sprints one and two so decided my only way to have some fun was going to come if I tried to stay near the front for a sprint and then counterattack. At best I was going to stay away and score and at worst I would be putting a double hurt on the sprinters. After the third sprint I snuck up under the track and when all the spent sprinters were uptrack I attacked and quickly got a good sized lead. I held it until the next sprint to take a solo win for the points. I stayed off the front for another lap hoping the pack would stall again after that sprint but that was obviously not happening as things were stretched out and broken behind. Instead of killing myself I backed off and tried to recover a little since I didn't want to get dropped when I got caught. I rolled in on the back of the pack on the final sprint. So it wasn't exactly a suicide flyer and notching 5 points solos off the front was fun but I'd trade if for having been able to factor into three of the sprints and scoring a little higher...
Miss-n-out: Wow this is my worst event! I was the first one eliminated when I simply had no where to go. The 23 mph neutral lap with no racing laps before the first sprint kind of got the best of my slow-to-start mentality as well.
So, despite the miserable win-n-out and the mental fart on the scratch race, it was a great time. Now if only I hadn't ridden to a 55 mile team ride and notched up 100 miles in 17 hour period I'd probably feel a little more perky today... But it's all worth it.
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