M7 Racing Team

Henk Calderon at Castroville

Posted on 24. Feb, 2010 by admin in Uncategorized

Castroville tough race and a hard cookie to munch on. TT don’t even ask. At the crit, I rolled onto the course to get a few laps in before the start. After rolling out, I found myself at a good position. The pace was extremely high the whole time with recent addition to pro team OUCH-Maxxis, Pat McCarty, on the front driving the pace. I tried to maintain that position as long as possible. With about eight laps to go, I tried an attack. No one from the pack reacted for a while and I was able to get about a 5-7 second gap. Unfortunately, I was quickly brought back in by a monster pull on the front of the pack, and the next thing I knew I was being passed by the pack and found myself back and pulled out of the race.The road race was one of the hardest races of my life, won by Kevin Kremke. The race started out with a 7.5 mile roll-out of town with a monster tail wind (we almost hit 40 mph on the way out), followed by four 15 mile loops, with a 7.5 mile leg back into town.

For the first half of the race I tried to conserve as much energy as possible. With two laps to go, a few got to the front on the yellow line and really upped the pace on one of the cross wind sections. This caused many people to be dropped while the remaining 20 or so of us were hanging on for dear life. After a few miles of this, a few guys broke the rules and crossed over the line to get a better draft. This encouraged others to do the same thing, and next thing you know the entire group except a few where over the yellow line and cars were passing us on the right hand side of the road. Before we turned to get off of the road, the follow vehicle pulled up next to us and stopped the race to talk to us about crossing the yellow line. This allowed all of those who had been dropped to catch back up. For the next lap the pace never really escalated all that much. With one lap to go the same group of guys got back up to front on the same cross wind section, and successfully dropped almost half the pack. Fortunately, I was not one of them. I found myself in the group on the road with about 25 others. We all took hard pulls on the front before I spent the next 10 or so miles trying to recover, so that I could hang on for the cross wind section back into town. Finally the sprint came in and I just rolled in for a 20th or so finish.