The sun was shining but there was a cold winter wind howling across the Long Swamp course yesterday for Round 10 of the 2017 Road Racer competition. Despite this, 18 riders signed on, including a welcome trio of Wooster’s with Michael sporting some serious winter weather gear.

Details on the actual race are a little light but thanks to Pete Harris, we had access to some mid-race footage that showed things being blown apart on the first lap with riders struggling to stay in their groups. Starting off 3-minutes, Captain Creagan chose to ignore the wind and drove hard from the start, dropping his mate Derek Shirlaw and at the half-way mark was just 15s down on the leaders. Houlty and Mick Harris were also riding solo with the latter managing two laps at sub-24 minute pace – no mean feat under the conditions.

Ultimately PC held on, seemingly without too much trouble to record his first win on Long Swamp since records began*, finishing 1m:14s ahead of Kirky who did well to hold off a hard-charging Mick Harris (fastest time) by 1s on the line. Angus Apps secured his first top-5 finish in 4th place and Rob Tindale closed off the bonus points also in the top 5 for the first time ever** on Long Swamp.

At the top of the Road Racer League, with Chris Stace and Dave Munday not racing, things have shuffled around. Alex Thomas is now level on points with Chris and they both share an average-points-per-race of 6.43. Chris just stays at the top of the table due to rule 1.3.1 and Keglegs receives 4 points as a result of rule 1.4.2.1 and Jo Wauch volunteering to run the race after Phil put the signs out. The day belonged to PC however who having won the race, romps up from 7th to 3rd in the table.

Congratulations to PC, thanks to Phil and Jo and well done also to the Wooster’s for winning the family award – in particular to Harry who successfully completed his first club road race in some pretty horrible conditions.  We’re taking a short break from the Road Racer League now with a 40km scratch race on Dangarsleigh next week, assuming the roadworks are complete and the surface is fit for racing – check the calendar and the Thursday SMS update for more details there.

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* PC has previously won on Dangarsleigh (twice) but enjoyed his first Long Swamp victory after 17 attempts although it was only his 11th fastest time on the course since records began in February 2014.
** Tinny has enjoyed five top-5 places but never on Long Swamp before the weekend and interestingly has not won a race in 49 attempts since records began in February 2014.

The following chart is a bit of an experiment, it shows the average speed and number of races for club riders in handicap races so far in 2017. Only riders who have competed in at least 3 races are shown and only Long Swamp, Boorolong and Dangarsleigh races are shown. Let us know what you think.

[wpdatachart id=11]