Trail Bike Adventure Magazine

Murray Bridge AORC - Sunday

Sunday, 28 June 2009 08:59

As promised I'll try and blog through the day today. We have to bolt as soon as the racing stops, so I won't be able to blog tonight. We'll give this a spin and see what happens.

It's clear and sunny and the moment, but we're surrounded by low cloud and the temperature's dropping. The parade laps are over and we're waiting to start the first racing lap. I'll ride a lap or two until the sun gets high enough to throw some light in here, then I'll jump on the camera and have pics for you by about lunchtime.

The big question today will be, "Does anyone have an answer for Merriman?".

Trent Johnston, Team Dynamite owner, was waiting here with toast and a Vanilla Latte when I got back from the parade lap.

Legend!

I'm up.

Back in an hour.

TF 

9.45am

Back from my first lap. Stalled, lost two places, then rode a suicide run to get the two places back. It's wild at the back of the pack, I can tell you!

At the moment, Merriman's winning by 0.5 second from Price. AJ and Hollis have both had big offs.

It's drying out fast and getting a little powdery but it's fabulous riding. 

I'll go one more.

Yee-hah!

TF 

11.15am

I'm off the bike and been out on the track with a camera.

After five laps Merriman is leading Price by a smidge over eight seconds, and Boyle is in third by about 47 seconds. Merriman is holding amazingly consistent lap times, which must be frustrating for the competition. The track is starting to get really rough, but it's not making any difference to Merriman. It's not making much difference to Price, either.

The weather's closed in. It's getting cold and rain looks almost certain. 

I'll resize some pics and get them up here. Check back in about 20 minutes. 

TF

11.54am

Here's an idea of the terrain...

Big news! Ben Burrell has had a bike problem and missed a lap. I'll try and find out more.

Cold and windy now, and so much for my "rain seems certain". It's sunny as a bastard.

TF 

12.36

Pros have one lap to go, and the outright seems almost certain to go to Merriman - as certain as I was about the rain, probably.

Ben Burrell's bike failled. He changed to his practice bike and it failled too. Now he's on Kirk Hutton's bike. I don't know what Kirk's doing, and Ben doesn't know where he's placed having lost a lap.

Final results in about an hour, I guess.

TF

3.15pm

All over. Merriman won it by around one minute and 10 seconds from Toby Price, and Price finished around a minute-and-a-half in front of Peter Boyle.

I'm at the airport now with a few of the riders who are thrilled at finding a Coopers pub.

A couple of interesting points of discussion from the weekend are:

* The riding can be finished by 1.00pm when there's no dust (the Pro/Experts ran at 12-second intervals today); AND (botanically)

* Stefan Merriman's responsible for the Great Pademelon Caper, which I'll endeavour to sort out and outline later.

That's it from me for the weekend.

TF