Course: A 0.7 mile flat six corner course in down town Santa Rosa.
Course Description: Turn is a narrow one lane right turn lane with a concrete median on the left. The second to last straight away between turns 5 and 6 is the right half of a four lane road with hay bales marking the course.
Road Surface: Smooth down town pavement with botts dots. The exit of turn one is the exception. Watch for some cracks that could catch your wheel if you're not careful.
Gearing: Flat criterium gears.
Facilities: All of the usual down town facilities.
Weather: At the end of March the weather should be nice. Remember how March goes out like a lamb?
Feeding: N/A
Rules Specific to this race: This is one of the few races where catagory 2 riders can race without the 1's and pros. Not a bad time to try and score some upgrade points.
Race Advice: Be careful in the first corner. It is narrow and in a
large field it can get crowded. There are a lot of botts dots, but they should
not present a problem.
Last year I got caught behind a crash in turn 5 and then later in the race
I was involved in a crash in turn 4. Some guy dumped it in front of me and I "T-boned"
him at about 25 mph. That was about enough for me and I think the free laps
might have been over anyway. There was another pretty major crash with about
two laps to go that split the field. (This was in the Pro/1 field, BTW.) I
think the problem had to do with there being a whole bunch of gung ho riders
looking to score big in an important early season race and some of them took too
many chances. It seemed worse than usual at this race and the conclusion that
my friends and I came to was that none of the big teams took control and wound
it up to warp speed towards the end like the old Coors Light team used to do.
Usually at the end of a big race with all the pro teams the speeds are so high
that everybody is strung out single file and it's too hard to go dive bombing up
on the inside and take everybody out.
I don't think that this course is dangerous, in fact I kind of like it. I
think my experience from last year had more to do with guys taking stupid
chances because the prize list was so big.
Lodging: There are lots of places to stay in Santa Rosa, including
several budget hotels.
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Corrections and additions, please email me!
Kevin Metcalfe
[email protected]