Round 2 Yorkshire Points: Northalleton

Another grass crit which should have been fast and fun but turned out rather differently. After a rather odd start with some weird channeled grid compounded by the odd request "Will the top 8 from last weeks race, you know who you are, come to the front"!

The rest of us waited but that was it and those unlucky enough not to have jumped into a channel early were way back:-/ So a desperate start trying to make up places and going well into the red but almost back to a reasonable position as we come through the finish are for the fist time. Unfortunately with such a big field (103 again) a rider stalled just ahead and the ensuing jam led to me tangling with the heavy duty tape (not the stuff you can rip out of). More time lost and another lap of chasing hard. In one way this was good training, lots of overtaking and no places lost until I wiped out. Twice. Both errors caused by just trying to push it too hard on a corner and later a banking. The second one resulted in the rider I recently overtook running me down, not his fault at all as there was nowhere for him to go. So my worst placing in a CX race (33rd) but lessons learned. In contrast Nick W had his best race and beat Nick E by a few places for good measure and rightly so as Mr Elder is defecting to Dirt Wheels before even joining HCtB! I'll lace his wheels up like a set of Osymetric chainrings ;-) John had a good race too creeping up the order on his new tubs.