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Tour Series 2010: Portsmouth · 02/06/10
Round three of the Tour Series saw the Rapha Condor Sharp team come back down to earth with a bang. A combination of bad luck, organisational mix-ups and a plain old lack of concentration left the team languishing at the wrong end of a league table they had led just hours before.
Relentlessly fast racing saw few moves off the front throughout most of the race. A crash on the lap of the first Hot Spot Sprint being the only incident to cause a split in the bunch with Malcolm Elliott the most notable victim.
Expecting the fast course to deliver a bunch sprint as its most likely outcome, team manager John Herety had devised a ‘spoil and surprise’ strategy: other teams would be allowed to drive to the line and a late attack from one of our non-sprinters could be used to disrupt, enabling the Rapha Condor Sharp team to pack out the leading positions.
As with so many of the best laid plans, things didn’t turn out quite as expected as the anticipated Midsummer Night’s Dream quickly descended into something more akin to a Comedy of Errors.
The final laps of the race saw an error with the lap board prompting Kristian House to attack early. His pre planned move had been intended to soften up the other teams and spoil the leadout trains of Endura and Motorpoint, but as the next lap saw the number on the board increase not decrease that attack served little purpose other than to leave Rapha Condor Sharp one card less to play in the finale. At the same time as Kristian launched his attack, Dean Downing suffered a puncture, leaving Rapha Condor Sharp exposed and light on numbers at the bell. The final nail in the coffin came as Zak Dempster, not realising the fate that had befallen Dean, swung off thinking his night was over and leaving just two riders from the team in the front group, guaranteeing a lowly 9th place finish on the night and leaving the team in 4th place in the overall standings.
Ian Bibby took the final gallop to the line to lead Motorpoint to victory.
Speaking after the race John Herety was philosophical about how events had unfolded.
“You make your own luck in this game and we’ve had a lot of good luck recently so I guess it had to run out somewhere, we had a good plan for the night and most of the guys did what was requested of them, things like the lap board don’t help, but Zak’s got to take a little responsibility for what happened there, he put his head down and stopped thinking, you can’t afford to do that, you race with your head as much as your legs. Similarly, Deano’s puncture is unfortunate, but Dean Windsor and Graham Briggs should still have been there and we need to understand what happened to them tonight.”
With an 8 point deficit now on the Motorpoint team the overall title seems now to be out of reach for this year, when asked how that affects the way he’ll approach the rest of the series, John acknowledged that the coming weeks will have both advantages and disadvantages:
“Yeah, I guess we need to sit down and decide where we go from here. Putting the first rider across the line is attractive, in some ways it gets you more publicity than winning the team thing. Racing like that would be difficult for the other teams to deal with as they pursue the team win so that’s one option. Alternatively we sit tight and hope that Motorpoint have a bad night too, if it can happen to one team it can happen to any.”
Thursday sees the Tour Series move on to Exeter, if you want to find out what John decided in the end, tune in on ITV4 or head back to raphacondorsharp.cc on Friday to find out more.
