Matti finishes top 10 in British CX Trophy

Vitus rider Matti Adair continued his CX race season last weekend by taking part in the British CX Trophy.  Here’s his round-up of the weekend

An early morning on Saturday was called for (4am) to travel to Dublin airport to catch our flight to Leeds Bradford airport to take part in round 5 of the British National Trophy Cyclocross. 

We arrived at the course on Saturday and walked around the lap it was a hard circuit with many draggy straights, tight corners and short shard climbs, but on Saturday it wasn’t too muddy but the race was a different story.

An early morning on Saturday was called for (4am) to travel to Dublin airport to catch our flight to Leeds Bradford airport to take part in round 5 of the British National Trophy Cyclocross. We arrived at the course on Saturday and walked around the lap it was a hard circuit with many draggy straights, tight corners and short shard climbs, but on Saturday it wasn’t too muddy but the race was a different story.

Going into the race I was looking for a top 10 finish which i knew would be do able but hard as i had a bad starting grid position, the race was 40 minutes long and laps depended on the lap times. 

From the start i got boxed in and at the first corner was 10 from last. The course had got much muddier from saturday and this caught out a rider on a tight 90 degree corner were he fell and held up a lot of the field however i didn’t get caught up and made up a lot of positions.

At the end of the first lap i was just outside of the top 10 but the muddy condition were catching many riders out and i made up a few more positions and got me into the top 10. From here on I tried to defend my position while also trying to move up. I continued to make up time on the riders in front and eventually moved up into 8th place, 7th place rider was around 10 seconds in front of me and with 10 minutes

of the race remaining I pushed hard to try and catch him but also to create a gap on 9th place who also had started to push hard and was making up time. However this didn’t go unnoticed and 7th place also began to push hard.

So on the finial lap I knew that it would be hard to catch him and instead of risking crashing in the muddy conditions and losing places I eased back and concentrated on getting my lines right in the difficult conditions to maintain my position. So i finished inside the top 10 which is what i was looking and only 3 minutes down on the winner which i was happy enough with. 

So a good race and now start training for the Irish National Champs in January.