Hi again to anyone out there, time has come for the new season of racing and first stop for this year is the Sea Otter Classic held at Laguna Seca raceway near Monterrey, California.

After a busy week of building and setting up the new bikes, it was off to Sea Otter late on Tuesday night, the plan being, leave late, sleep in the truck and arrive just in time for practice on Wednesday morning, which all funnily enough went to plan. No stories of plans gone bad here sorry to say.

Had to get a few things on the bikes sorted out first, then it was time to do a few practice runs on the DH course. What can I say? It was a bit of a joke. A fun course to do some runs on with berms and jumps most of the way down, but far too much in the way of straight line, jelly legs pedalling. I thought that the Dual bike would be the way to go given the pedally nature of the track and started practicing on that, despite almost everyone telling me I was making the wrong decision. I stuck to my guns though and was having some good runs on the 5-inch travel Hollowpoint, a weapon for sure. The first couple of days were a bit boring there, just practice and sitting around was all there was to do.

Racing didn’t begin until Saturday with the Dual Slalom, this course is unreal, with the best looking berms you ever did see! Qualifying went well with 2 smooth runs to qualify myself in 8th place with team mates Sam Hill in 10th and Nathan Rennie in 14th, Bryn however decided to taste the dirt quite hard in practice and never made it to qualifying.

As racing began the rain started to fall, which actually made the racing more fun than I would ever imagine. Coming up against Mongoose rider Brian Schmith in the first round definitely made me nervous (whenever I qualify well I always seem to come up against one of the super fast guys who made mistakes in qualifying and therefore qualify badly) It was pretty close, but I managed to just beat him in both rounds to go to the next round, where I came up against Mike King (even better).

By this time the course was becoming quite muddy and I felt a bit better knowing that this would make King’s power advantage less of an issue. I narrowly beat him to advance to the round of 8 and it was awesome to see both Nathan and Sam advancing to the round of 8 as well, which meant 3 Madcatz/Ironhorse riders in the last 8. I felt confident about the round of 8, as I should have been up against 1st place qualifier Chris Kovarik but a mistake in his previous round saw him beaten by Colin Bailey, which meant I raced him instead.

This was super close, super fun racing, but I lost 2 close heats, to be less than a tenth of a second behind after over a minute of racing, I couldn’t believe how much he was pedalling, I could see him out of the corner of my eye and it was unbelievable.

Unfortunately, both Sam and Nathan were eliminated in this round as well, but good results for sure. Nathan was unlucky to crash out while in the lead, to continue his 3-year streak of crashing in the slalom there. The final Saw Cedric Gracia taking the win followed by Eric Carter with Karim Amour taking 3rd, Colin Bailey 4th and myself in 5th, Sam Hill 6th and Rennie in 8th

Downhill was on Sunday, with continuing over night rain making things a bit slick in practice but drying out fairly nicely for the final runs. I never would have imagined in my whole life that a downhill track could be this painful and crap for racing on. The first half of the track was quite good, not completely stupid amounts of pedalling with some fun sections that flowed well but the last 45 seconds of the course was pure straight line pedalling.

Not to take anything away from winner Mike King or anything, cause you still need skills and it also shows how strong he is, but any track that Jr world champ Sam Hill has a good run on and loses by almost 15 sec on is not a DH track. All you could get from that race was an idea of your fitness.

The Mountain cross that after noon was a bit controversial, the course being modified from practice by the removal of the 3 extremely big sets of doubles due to gusty cross winds which saw every second rider attempting to jump them in practice crashing from getting blown over in the air.

Still some good racing was had, a bit disappointing for the team though with both Rennie and Hill being knocked out in the 1st round and myself and Bryn Atkinson going out in the second round, it was good fun to watch though, with plenty of passing.

In the final 3 Aussies lined up With Chris Kovarik, Mick Hannah and Wade Bootes all there with lone American Eric Carter. Carter and Bootes took the lead but came together after the first corner to leave CK to take the win with Hannah in second. It was a well deserved win, as Kovarik was definitely the fastest on track, but not having the gate starts that the BMX riders have saw him have to battle his way through a few rounds.

That’s about it for the Sea Otter Classic for 2003, has to be one of the most straightforward weeks of racing ever, with no major dramas to report at all! A big thanks to the guys at SRAM/ROCKSHOX for the free passes for a couple of hot laps on the Laguna Seca circuit, it was awesome! I’ve now got even huger respect for professional drivers now, as we were only in fairly stock cars with 250 hp and it felt pretty damn fast. Anyways that’s about it, got a bit of a break now before the fist NORBA at Big Bear, so until then, ummmm, bye.

Jared Graves

Team Madcatz / Iron Horse