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Southern XC Round 2, Pippingford

May 26th, 2010 - Posted by Euski

On Sunday Ross and Euan competed in round 2 of the Southern XC Series at Pippingford Estate near East Grinstead, using the same course as the National Champs in July. With temperatures incredibly high and some good riders there, the was racing was going to be fierce. With gridding based on the results from the first round, Ross should have been on the first row but missed his call up and to start from the 2nd row. The start rose up for a few hundred metres before dropping into some tight singletrack, so a good start was important. Ross didn’t have the best start and got caught behind a few of the slower riders in the first piece of singletrack, but started to make some good ground on the first climb back to the arena. Meanwhile Jody Crawforth and Billy-Joe Whenman were setting a blistering pace at the front, with Dave Collins chasing behind. As the race progressed Ross made his way through the riders eventually catching and overtaking Dave to get into 3rd place about 2min behind Billy-Joe who in turn was about 2min down on Jody. On the last lap he put in a bike effort and almost caught Billy-Joe on the last climb finishing only 20s down, which isn’t bad considering he only got to the race 30min before the start due to heavy traffic on the M25. This now puts Ross in the series lead after the 2 rounds with round 3 in 3 weeks at Ringwood.

Starting 1min behind the Elites, Euan had high hopes in the expert race. Having not raced at round 1, Euan was gridded on the 2nd row so had to fight hard to get towards the front. Going into the second piece of singletrack, Euan was sat at the back of a train of 7 riders and managed to pick off a few places as riders made mistakes on the twisty course. At around halfway through the first lap Euan had pulled away with David Beskeen and had began to put some good space between them and the chasing pack. Just before the finishing climb on lap 1 David made a small mistake which allowed Euan to get a gap of around 10s at the end of lap 1. Euan kept extending his lead lap on lap, also making his way up to 6th place in the elite race which started ahead of him. By the end of lap 4 Euan came in to finish 53s ahead of David in 2nd and over 6min up on 3rd. The heat had played a huge part in the fatigue of the riders throughout the race with most riders collapsing straight after crossing the line. This win takes Euan to 3 straight wins and with confidence high he’s looking forward to round 3 of the National MTB series at Margam Park this weekend.

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