One of our eastern states based riders Brett Tivers, competed in the Preston Mountain Classic over the weekend. Brett recorded the fastest time for the day, read his review below:
Special thanks to Jarrod Partridge for supplying the awesome photos, we look forward to seeing his work during the Tour of Gippsland. Visit the jpxphotography website here.
The early part of the Victorian Winter road season is largely based around epic handicap races and on the weekend I completed in the 135km Preston Mountain Classic on a hilly terrain that finished up a 2k switchback berg.
There were 10 of us on scratch giving away 32min to the front markers and we had our work cut out for us from the word go. The scratch group always work well together with many of us riding the National Road series tours so we are all strong riders.
We caught the 4min chopping block bunch just coming into the 2nd of two laps and proceeded to drop half of them and a couple of scratch riders up a decent climb half way through the last lap. The 25min bunch had some very strong riders plus the luck of getting through a light operated section of road works which we were held up by the red light for a decent minute.
Coming into the last 10km we knew we were only going for fastest time. Nick Akin from the AIS was the first to attack at the bottom of the 2km hill top finish but not panicking I just rode tempo and soon caught 4 of the riders that had gapped the bunch. Riding a solid tempo I soon found myself with a gap which I held to take the fastest time for the day. |
