The last race of the 2009/2010 AMTBC Summer Series was yesterday.  The race was held at Flinders University on some of the trails near car park no. 3.

This was the first time I had ridden on these trails at Flinders as they are normally closed to bicycles.  The course was a mix of singletrack and fire road with some moderately technical sections and a fair amount of elevation change.  The weather was cool at around 20°C with light rain starting about half way through the race.

As in the previous two races, I was in the C grade.  The C grade raced four laps of the roughly 4.5km course.  This time I decided not to lead from the start, and let someone else set the pace.  This worked out for the first couple of laps where I held a close third or fourth place.  But, by the third lap my fourth place was significantly behind third.  In the end, I finished in fourth with a time of 1:03:08, 30 seconds behind third place, and with fifth and sixth place not far behind.

A brief update on the BB7 brake upgrade:  The BB7s worked very well in the wet and muddy conditions.  My feel for the brakes has improved significantly in the almost three months that I’ve been using them.  I initially had some concerns about rear wheel brake modulation, but the modulation seems on par with the Motolites now that the brakes are fully bedded-in and I’m more used to them.  Also worth noting is that after the initial setup, the brakes haven’t needed any adjustment.  Overall, I am very happy with these brakes.

My official results; hours:minutes:seconds:

For comparison, grade average lap times; minutes:seconds (number of laps completed):

Do you want more data?  Well, I noticed that a large number of people in my race grade were named David.  In fact, 7.8% of people racing at Flinders were named David.  Furthermore, 66% of those named David finished adjacent to another David.  Overall, those named David had a lap average time of 16:29, which is 29 seconds faster than the field average.

Helmet-cam video of my first lap: