Taylor Robert flying down a straight and Hoop working hard! Photo stolen from: Brian Pierce
The second day of the ISDE is now in the books and I’m waiting for the 3rd time for my video to upload so I thought I’d put a few thoughts from the event so far, and from today’s racing, down in a little blog entry. I’m learning a lot as we go at my first Six Days so if some of the things I post are common knowledge please excuse me!
• There’s a sweet grass track test that will be used for the first and the last test every single day. That’s right, the riders will race on that test 10 separate times. The ruts are starting to get deep and choppy and I can only imagine how gnarly it’ll get by the end of the week.
• There were 3 tests used in the first two days of racing and each day the riders rode each test twice. For days 3 and 4 there will be 3 new tests added in and they’ll ride all of those tests twice for a total of 8 tests each day. The next two days are going to be really long, each over 200 miles total.
• The US Trophy Team started to find its groove today with both Taylor Robert and Charlie Mullins putting in consistent rides throughout the day. Mullins finished 6th in the E1 class for today with Robert only 3-seconds behind him in 7th in the class.
• Kurt Caselli got back moving after a big crash on day one and is now up to 15th in E1 but wasn’t able to show the speed that he’s capable of today.
• Thad DuVall was on a mission today and moved up quite a bit and helped the US Junior Team get into 3rd overall right now. He also threw a sick scrub over a double in the motocross test that made the cut for today’s video.
• The Euros are deceivingly fast. Their riding style for the most part is so different from the Americans and it’s very obvious just by sound. They don’t rev the bikes nearly as high as we do and have insane corner speed. It’s crazy to watch a guy like Mike Brown absolutely fly around a grass track test and then end be 13-seconds back from the leaders like in yesterday’s last test.
• The weather so far has been amazing, but things could get pretty ugly if it rains. Unfortunately there’s a 60% chance of rain for tomorrow morning and some of the locals have told me that there’s parts of tomorrow’s tests that are considered “impossible” when muddy.
That’s about it for now, I’m falling asleep at the keyboard in the hotel’s business office waiting for this upload and my alarm is set for 5.5 hours from now! If you’re wanting to kill more time at work check out a small gallery of photos over on Seattime here.
