Archive for the ‘racing news’ Category
When it comes to a World Cup, the weather always rains on our parade. When we arrived in Champery on Tuesday the weather was amazing with temperatures of 30° for setting up the pits, but as we got closer to the race day the weather got worse and worse. The race track was deterioratingextremely badly due to the wet weather. The mood in the pits was that no one was looking forward to racing such a difficult track like Champery in the wet. Loads of rain made the challenging track of Champery an almost unrideable monster. It was all about staying on the bike, which made riders runs look more of rodeo than anything else.
MS Evil Racing was on site with Steve, Luke, Brook and Lewis, but Filip unfortunately crashed hard on his head the weekend before Champery and was unable to make the trip to Champery on doctors advice.
In qualifying some riders stepped their game up in the wet like Wyn Masters and the MS Evil rider Brook MacDonald who qualified 11th. Unfortunately all other MS EVIL riders didn’t fare so well in qualifying crashing and ending up disappointed with their qualifying results. The team results were as follows: 32nd place for Luke, 51st place for Steve and 86th place for Lewis. Everyone was ready for race day to make amends for their mishaps in qualifying. Steve and Luke looked strong until the first split, but again the hill got the better if them, sending them to the ground and out of podium contention for the weekend.
So it was up to Brook to carry the torch for MS/Evil for the weekend. Brook came through with an extremely impressive run, he ended in 6th place just missing a podium appearance by a small margin. This was Brook’s best result in the World Cup series in his young career and one of the best results for MS EVIL RACING team in 2010.
MS EVIL RACING team manager Lukas Haider “It was amazing to see Brook prove his talent in these conditions and a pleasure to see him in the top 10 of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Champery!”
1. Gee Atherton GBR/ Atherton Racing
2. Greg Minaar RSA/ Santa Cruz Syndicate
3. Brendan Fairclough GBR/ Monster Energy Specialized
4. Sam Blenkinsop NZL/ Lapierre international
5. Damien Spagnolo FRA/ Mondraker Factory Team
6. Brook MacDonald NZL/ MS EVIL RACING
40. Steve Smith CAN/ MS EVIL RACING
46. Luke Strobel USA/ MS EVIL RACING
Full results on uci.ch
Here we go with the 2nd issue of our brand new podcast produced by mtbfreeride.tv. Dom and Alex followed us on our tour thru Scottland and show the daily grind of a professional mountainbike race team.
Stay tuned for the next episodes…
Like two other big UCI mountain bike teams also MS EVIL RACING decided to stay one more week in Leogang to compete the growing and well organized IXS cup event series.
After a world cup weekend affected by loads of rain, we had good weather from Monday on and so it would have been a good time for just riding and testing. Nevertheless MS EVIL RACING decided to do some sightseeing and so we went to the world of Red Bull better known as Salzburg.
First off all we visited the international team manager of Steve and Luke in the head quarter of Red Bull in Fuschl. It’s a quiet cool building without any red Bull signs, but really cool architecture. While Steve and Filip got some stuff of the new Red Bull athletes collection the rest of the team had the chance to have closer look into what’s going on in the heart of Red Bull.
Right after that we had a date in Salzburg city for a sightseeing tour in the Hangar 7, which is a kind of museum for all the airplanes of the so-called Flying Bulls. We got it managed to get a special tour with the boss of the “flying bulls”, who led us through the holy halls of the Red Bull Hangar 8, where Red Bull keeps a crowed of mechanics and engineers busy with restoring old airplanes and keep them running. It’s really special to get into this service hangar and to have a look in the inside of the infamous DC-6. The boss of the flying bulls mentioned that every once in a while the boss of Red Bull Didi Mateschitz himself show up at the hangar to fly with one of the airplans… and by luck it has happen. It was a quiet special situation for Steve and Filip to see the man, who support them for so many years… not just with money, but also with whole power of Red Bull.
Next day it was the birthday of Luke, which get celebrated with a traditional Austrian Sacher Torte and for sure loads of beer.
On Friday we have been back on “race mode” and we all have been pretty focused on the competition. Even it was no world cup there have been a lot of really good rides such as Justin Leov or Nick Beer who leads in the overall of the IXS cup.
Saturday starts with the DH qualifications and finishes the 4X race where Filip became 3rd right.
After the qualification all riders have been qualified in really good positions except Brook who had a mechanical in his qualifying run. His early start in the race run bestows Brook a really long time in the hot seat, which means about 140 riders. Brook just got beaten by 4 other riders including his team-mate Steve Smith who become 2nd with 0.233 seconds off Justin Leov.
In the end we had 5 riders in the top 15 and Lewis is 2nd in the overall of the European IXS cup series.
1.Justin Leov, Trek
2.Steve Smith, MS EVIL RACING
3.Nick Beer, Scott 11
4.Marcus Klausmann, Ghost
5.Brook MacDonald, MS EVIL RACING
7.Luke Strobel, MS EVIL RACING
11. Lewis Buchanan, MS EVIL RACING
15. Filip Polc, MS EVIL RACING
