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Home < News < News item |
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| MATT SCOLES MARIBOR REPORT |
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| SCOLESY REPPING HIS NEW TEAM, PROTONE |
Scolesy just sent through his report from the first round of the World Cup this past weekend
After spending a week riding in San Remo on some of the sickest/rockiest tracks in Italy, and getting the bikes all dialled in, it was off to Maribor, Slovenia in the big team truck for the first World Cup!
We arrived in Maribor on Wednesday night after about 8 hours of trucking,and checked into our hotel at the top of the hill for a bit of a nap before track walk and rego on Thursday. After registering in the morning it was off to go check out the track! The track for this year was pretty much the same as last year except for a few turns here and there to try and slow it down a bit, and there had obviosly been quite alot of rain as walking the track was almost as loose as riding it!! So it was on with the mud tyres for the first day of practise.
Friday was practise and there had been a bit more rain over night, but it managed to stay away for most of the day. The track for friday practise was loose! The mud was drying out slightly and was geting super sticky so it was clogging up tires and getting dragged over all the roots and rocks so there was some big old swaps going on! Especially in the rock garden where some Euro pinners were trying to hit it at a hundy!
Then in true Euro style the rain came! Saturday morning we had a couple of hours practise before qualifying and it was pissing down! The track seemed to ride better when it was raining though as it washed some of the mud away, and cleaned the rocks and roots, the only problem was your goggles being covered in shit by the first turn!After getting a couple of reasonable runs in it was time for qualifying, I was pretty nervous at the top of the hill being the first World Cup of the season and the first big race for a new team, and I ended up making a bit of a mess of it! I had the top section pretty good but then coming out of one of the high speed sections i got cross rutted and ended up off the side of the track,after floundering in the mud for a bit and trying to untangle the tape from my bike, i tried making up some time but just ended up getting loose, so I thought I had blown it and came across the line in about 50th with still about 200 riders to come! But turned out I wasnt the only one having some trouble in my run and I ended up making the top 80 cut in 65th with Wyn just behind in 66th and Rankin in about 60th both with crashes in there runs! Not very often you can crash in a World Cup Qualifyer and still make it through!
We woke up to more shitty weather on Sunday, it was super windy and foggy up top and the Gondola operators decide it was to dangerous to run the gondola! So after a UCI meeting they got some buses to drive everyone to the top which was about a 1 hour drive, and said everyone can only have 1 practice run before the race which wasnt ideal!
Race run soon rolled around and i decided to just try and have a clean run and try stay smooth, I rode the top section not too bad and decided to try and open it up a bit in the bottom and came into a turn a bit hot and my back wheel must have hit a root coming into the turn and I swapped out and had a pretty decent off the bike crash which would have lost me a good bit of time, I came across the line in the lead and got to hang out in the hotseat for a while i eventually got knocked out by Ben Cathro who put in a good time! I ended up in 36th so i was pretty gutted as it could of been a good time, but hey thats racing!
So all up it was a pretty good weekend, track was sick and heaps of fun to ride in the mud!Good to have the first world cup out of the way now! Bring on the rest of the season!
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