Santa Rosa Cloterium Race Report

Santa Rosa Downtown Cloterium
6 May 2007
Weather: Hot (90-100), sunny, steady wind with tailwind finish
Race: 30+ 1/2/3, 60 minutes
Team: Rob MacNeill, Brian Peterson, Ted Burns, Tom Fahey
Result: 1st of ~65

(photo courtesy of Mark Estes, www.estesphoto.com)

I like this course, it's a somewhat technical clockwise L-shaped loop with awkward pavement transitions in every corner and tons of bots dots everywhere. The trick to riding fast on this course is to ignore the bad pavement and bots dots and just ride through the obstacles. I raced this course once before a few years back as a Cat 4 and scored my first win ever, so I had fond memories of it. This year, Brian Peterson and I headed up together to see if we could repeat success and get some of the big money on offer.

This was a pretty hard race, harder than the P/1/2 if average power is an indicator. There were lots of breaks, bridging, chasing, and so on. Our team took more of a keep it together for a sprint approach with some chasing when appropriate. Ted took a turn on the front but then flatted shortly after and couldn't get back in. Brian worked hard a lot on the front chasing moves and keeping breaks in check. I did a bit of that too but started pretty much sitting in for the latter third of our 60 minute race. Breaks weren't staying off or looking overly threatening and I liked my chances in the sprint. The finish is right up my alley with a bumpy corner followed by a gently sweeping finishing leg of around 200m to the line.

They started showing lap cards at 10 to go on this short course. At that point I really started focusing on maintaining a good position, ideally in the top-5. That's pretty much what I did. It's a delicate balance letting guys through that are moving up for leadout duty and those that might be the competition. I made the right choices today though. I was happy to see that Don Langley (Morgan Stanley) was assigned long leadout and that I wouldn't have to sprint against him. He did a lap on the front from about 1.5 to 0.5 a lap to go, keeping things lined out. After he pulled off, I was 2nd wheel. The guy in front of me surged and really started nailing it. I had to work really hard for about a minute to stay within reach of him. There was about 1-2 bike lengths between us through a strong head/crosswind and I was concerned I was going too far into the red before I had to sprint. Luckily I gapped off the guy behind me slightly so the pack wasn't exactly following my draft either. Into the last corner, I shifted to the sprint gear and got through the corner and upright as fast as possible before starting a full sprint to the line. After settling in and grabbing another gear, I started looking around, nobody was there. I crossed the line with room to spare and hands in the air. Sweet. Things really fell into place during this race, wish that happened more often. Brian finished farther back after putting in a lot of hard work and luckily avoided a last lap crash.

Link to some finish and podium photos and a video of the finish:
http://picasaweb.google.com/robmacneill/SantaRosaCloterium30123

I did the P/1/2 race a couple hours later but had to pull out with totally cramped up legs. Unfortunately, that was with 2.5 laps to go when I was in good position to duke it out in another pack sprint. Two hard races in the heat was too much for my body. I scored a win though so it's not all that bad.

-Rob