Welcome to the first installment of our newest feature, The Stopwatch. Every week we’ll break down lap times from the biggest races and see which riders had the fastest laps of the day, and how that relates to their overall finish. For our first race, we’re going to take a look at this past Tuesday’s GNCC season opener in River Ranch, Florida.

Charlie Mullins had the fastest lap time of the day, but a mishap on lap 4 dropped him to 3rd place overall.

Charlie Mullins took the early lead in the XC1 Pro Class and was doing his best to check out from the rest of the field. Mullins laid down a 28:13 lap on the 2nd lap of the race (which was the first full lap, as the track had the riders come through the finish 2 miles after the start) and continued to hammer down the next two laps extending his lead to 45 seconds over Josh Strang after lap 3. As you would expect in Florida, as the race went on and the track grew increasingly more rough, the lap times began to drop. On the 4th lap Strang knocked 15 seconds off of Mullins lead and it was looking that if the lap times were to stay the same it would have Mullins and Strang within a second of each other by the finish. This ended up not mattering as Mullins stalled his bike while skimming a water hole and dropped nearly a minute and a half to Strang and Chris Bach. The last two laps saw Bach and Strang battle it out, passing each other multiple times. Bach edged Strang by 2 seconds on the last lap, but it wasn’t enough as Strang held on to win the overall by 6 seconds.

Jason Thomas is the first XC2 Pro Lites winner on a 2 stroke. Can he do it again in the Georgia clay?

In the XC2 Pro Lites class it was the Jason Thomas show all day long. Thomas jumped out to an early lead and capitalized on his biggest rival in the class, defending champ Kailub Russell’s first turn crash by basically running away and hiding. Thomas put down a blistering fast 28:41 on the 2nd lap and had quickly began to catch XC1 Pro riders who had started a minute before him. Thomas hooked up with friend and XC1 Racer Thad DuVall and the two put down a few fast laps and grew Thomas’ lead in the process. It’ll be interesting to see how the YZ250 2-stroke of Thomas does in the clay of Georgia where he may have less of an advantage over Russell’s 4-stroke KTM.