Tim Snyder • 🥇 1st of 27 Land Park Crit – Master 35+ Cat 3/4
Weather: A perfectly calm and sunny 60 degrees
Course: Fast course with one chicane
Plan: Win
What happened:
I've raced this course a few times now and really enjoy it as it's smooth and fast. There is only one technical chicane which can be taken fast as long as you are near the front or else you can get the accordian affect. Usually the winners use this to their advantage. My plan originally wasn't super clear. I wanted to watch for any breaks that might happen or if that failed, judge my legs and attempt an attack at 1.5 laps to go by using the chicane to gain a gap. If I did this, I knew I needed to be smarter than at Cal Aggie where I sat on the front too long pulling the field around to have the snap needed to get away.
Either way, 10 minutes before lining up, my right/rear shifter battery died and left me with one gear. I checked the batteries the night before and it had a green light so don't trust the indicators! No one had a sapre battery and the race was starting so I just lined up anyways hoping I had the right gear.
The race started off slowly with one rider from Monster Racing immediately riding off the front. I've seen him do this before and wasn't concerned so I let him dangle. On lap 2, he's actually got 5 seconds on us already so just before the chicane, another rider makes a big attack to bridge. I'm pretty far back at this point and a few riders jump up including a rider from Terun. I grab his wheel and we moved up to the top few in the pack before the chicane again. In the last corner before the next lap, the rider from Terun goes and I follow and pull through to make it to the now 5 man break. We were moving fast but the rest of the pack chased hard and mostly closed the gap. At this point I was second wheel into the chicane on lap 3 and thinking this race is separating at least. The Terun rider rotates off and then I looked back debating if an attack was worth it and that's when Alex screamed to go. I took the bait and hammered it out of the chicane and we gained significant separation while everyone else fell back. It turned out that this was an optimal time as the field thought it was going to slow down to regroup.
From here, we maintained a 10 second gap up to I think around 25 seconds by rotating pulls. We ended up rotating for all 6 primes to evenly split them 3:3 which was great teamwork and mostly due to Alex paying more attention to them than I was. After 20 minutes or so I figured we had this and started to think about how to go for the win. I had noticed that I was taking the chicane significantly faster than Alex to the point that I needed to let off the pedals entirely if I was in front to get him back on my wheel. My plan was to use this advantage and attack as hard as possible out of the chicane. Unfortunately, I rotated poorly / second guessed myself on how much speed we needed to maintain and ended up second into the chicane. I still ended up attacking but because I was second wheel, he was easily able to get back on. From there we both slowed down and recovered a bit with both of us side by side at this point at the final stretch. I again made the first move for a heads up 1 on 1 sprint a bit further out and he followed for a very close finish by 1/4 of a wheel for a very satisfying finale.