Archive for the ‘racing news’ Category
Filip: “After the urban downhill in Brazilian Santos I had the last event on my winter tour schedule.
Valparaiso – Chile
Maybe some of you remember that I won last year addition and I describe the track as one of the hardest, longest and sketchiest of all urban tracks. You need to show your skills on dirt, stairs, wooden obstacles and add some pedal strokes too. This year the organizer invited the past 4 winners of this race here in Valpo. Cedric Gracia(France), Mario Jarrin (Equador), Antonio Leiva (Chile) and me (winner 2010). This guarantied good fight in-between us.
After few practice runs there was the semifinal run on. Top 30 riders heading to finals. I had nice run and I tried to save some power . Cedric won by 2 seconds ahead of me. So the time to beet was 1min42s.
I was trying to thing about where to cut some time off and pedal more. After my bad luck and crash in Santos race in Brasil 2 weeks ago I didn’t want to end up like that again. I decide to stay with safe run, not to risk and pedal hard… it worked out good as a second last rider on the track I set up new best time 1min39s. Cedric wasn’t able to brake this time up and pull 1min41s. Mario Jarrin (winner of Santos) on 3dr spot.
After I realized that I was really stoked and that I broke the bad luck from previous races.
The atmosphere in Valpo was incredible. More than 10.000 people covering whole track a cheering hardest as they could. Almost braking the fences and the security had hard time to stop them, It was like on football match! Really intense!”
It’s hard to find the right words about what has happened at the DH finals of the World championships 2010 in Mount Saint Anne/ Canada. For MS EVIL RACING it was just awesome and the best race weekend in our young history. With the 2nd place of Steve and the 3rd place of Lewis in the junior’s DH we have been one of the most successful UCI trade teams of the week.
The wave of success started with Leonard who became in-official world champion of the mechanics in frame of the “boxer worlds”, continues with the 3rd place and first podium of Lewis Buchanan at the junior world champions race and finishes with Steve Smith with a 2nd place and his first top 3 result in a top UCI race.
Lewis got into the race with serious chance on the world champion title. Unfortunately he bend his right pedal in the top section and wasn’t able to pedal anymore. Nevertheless he was pushing hard and so he was still able to get on the podium with he shared with Troy Brosnan of Monster Specialized and Neko Mullaly.
After the juniors the race was on for the elite riders. First to come down was Ryan Vanderham and his brother Thomas Vanderham, who are not member of MS EVIL RACING, but good friends of our team. Thomas got into the hotseat and was able to finish in 34th position- not bad for someone who is known for being a freerider.
Brook, Luke and Filip came in a package and were able to finish in top places. Especially Brook underlined his results of his 2010 season with a 12th place and Luke came back after a bad crash and crankworx and a solid but not outstanding season. Filip ended up 23rd position after he finished 8th in the 4X two days before the DH race.
Steve was the last men of MS EVIL RACING to go and we were thrilled as he came thru the 2 splits with awesome times and an incredible run. Just a view seconds before the finish and in the last technical section he had a bad mistake and almost got off the bike. Luckily he was bale to stay on the bike and got in the hotsteat. Just one racer after he took place in the hotseat Sam Hill came down and beat Steve by 2.63 sec. After that no other rider was able to beat the times of Sam or Steve and so the podium was fixed with Sam on the top box, Steve in 2nd and Minaar in 3rd.
We want to congratulate Sean Heimdal and the Monster Specialized team on their two world champion titles- that was a demonstration, but hopefully we are able to strike back in 2011.
Now it’s time for us to say good by till we are back in 2011 and for saying thank you to all the people who helped us to make this happen.
Thanks to:
Kevin Walsh, Gabe Fox, Evan M. Choltco- Delvin and Leonard of Evil bikes
Dave Weagle- mastermind behind the delta link
Michael Kull of Schwalbe
Mark Fitzsimmons, Christophe and Justin of Fox Racing Shox
Michael Tobler of e13
Thomas Davy of Mavic
Gabriele Mazzarolo, Claudia Marcolin, the race support crew and Hans van der Gried of Alpinestars
Sebastian Keck of Holmenkol
WTB¬
Cole
Gravity
all the people at Red Bull
Special thanks to:
Christian Schandl- first mechanic, bus driver and technical boss
Benedikt Rieder- race support truck driver and utility men
Peter Kaufmann- mechanic since the beginning of MS-RACING
Martin Newhill- body mechanic and sunshine of MS-RACING
Igor- interim mechanic
Domenico and Alex of MTBfreeride.tv
“morning breath” for their awesome designs
all the family members in the background.
Furthermore we want to thank all the people who might have been involved in our success we maybe don’t know by name or we forgot to list above- thank you!
The later in the season the better we get. Windham/ New York was a good place for MS EVIL RACING. Different to the world cups in Europe the whole race atmosphere was more relaxed and last but not least we had good weather all week.
Windham is a quiet small venue, but with big potential and a lot of nice people who make the event happen. The courses seemed to be pretty good and so the DH course was not really long, but fast. The 4X course looked good too because of big rocks, big oversea containers for jumps and big doubles at the end. Unfortunately there weren’t a lot of places to pass on the track and so it was again all about the start.
Filip was the only racer of MS EVIL RACING who was racing 4X. Because of some hard sections in the course he decided to race the qualification on the DH bike. Even he had a big mistake by casing the last big double he qualified 8th, which was not the best starting position for the race. Filip did well in the first heat, but hasn’t been able to survive the 2nd one- Filip finished in 13th position.
After a 7th, a 12th a 16th and a 21st place in the DH qualifying we had a good base for the finals. As mentioned before the track was pretty fast and short and so the times were pretty close- everything was perfect for a thrilling race.
The first surprise was Lewis with an amazing run. With 6.55 sec of the lead he became 12th in the race, was the fastest junior of the day and finished up 2nd in the junior overall ranking. Brook demonstrated again his skills with his 2nd top ten result. He finished 8th just behind Steve and got 18th in the world cup overall ranking in his first elite season. Steve got 7th with 2 tenth of a second of the podium and finished 10th overall. The team got 3rd in the team ranking of the day and finished 7th overall.
Overall we had a pretty good world cup season and we are happy with the results. Now we are looking forward to the season highlight of mountain bike racing the UCI mountain bike world champion ships in Mount Saint Anne/ Canada.
Stay tuned and follow our racers on freecaster.com.
