Well the first race of the year on a proper track with the whole team and the new bikes couldn’t have gone much better.

After a week over at ChainReactionCycles.com in Ireland, getting the bikes dialled in, doing team photos, filming with Stu from MTBcut.com and basically having a fantastic time getting the royal treatment by everyone at CRC, we finally headed over and up to Fort William for the second round of the Halo BDS National Race for a proper test of our new bikes in preparation for the first World Cup in Maribor – then back to Fort William for the second World Cup in four weeks time.

The course builders had done some massive work on the track putting in some new sections and making the track even longer and more demanding – this really was a great test before the World Cups start. With practice on Saturday – great weather – and then seeding and final runs on Sunday the weekend went close to perfection.

With our new bikes and a top of the range pit set up thanks to CRC all the riders were stoked to be there and racing – this reflected in our results with Chris Kovarik taking the win in Elite men by over 3 secs and Matti Lehikoinen and Matt Simmonds also making the podium.

Julien Camellini and Ruaridh Cunningham also did great times without perfect runs finishing 6th and 10th respectively. Claire Buchar had a great solid run finishing second to Rachel Atherton but posting another very good time. I even managed to put in a rare race run in and managed to take first place in the highly competitive Masters category.

Thanks to Si Paton and Dave Franciosy who did a great job running the event – it was the best National event I have been to for many years.

We are off to Maribor tomorrow for the first round of the UCI World Cup this coming weekend so we are hoping to carry forward the whole teams good form.

www.crcintense.com