Mar 17, 10:20 AM by Steve | LA Circuit Race

I’m not very happy with how I raced on Sunday. I hardly ever felt like I was working, but didn’t want to make a move in the wind, so it was a whole lot of nothing. The Wind. I’m not good at determining things like wind speed, but I was told it was about 20-30mph, and I believe it. It was a pure tailwind from the start to the first corner, a hairpin turn after a mile, and then 2 miles into the headwind, another hairpin turn, and a mile downhill to the finish.

Of course nobody wanted to work into the wind and the pack (full field of 100 riders) was bunched up 10 across at times. I’ve never heard so much yelling and swearing in a race. A lot of “Hold Your Line!” and “Easy On The Turn!”, and words I won’t repeat because there may be children reading… Despite all that, there were no accidents except for one guy that took the downwind turn too wide and ran into the curb.

For my part, I was not aggressive enough to get good position on the final lap, and went around the final corner maybe mid-field. I did the best I could to accelerate up on the left side, and made up a lot of ground on the middle of the field. But the front of the field was moving way to fastand there was no chance. The 53×11 on my Tarmac (the compact on my TCR only went to 50×11) helped me get a lot of speed at the finish, and even though I never “sprinted” my computer showed over 40mph. Unfortunately when I uploaded the data it said 39.8. I Finished off the results sheet (>23), probably around 30th somewhere. Talking to several people after, we all thought we were 25-30, so take that with a grain of salt.

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