Phillip Island Spectacular

This year the Phillip Island Spectacular was focused solely on teams racing, the format consisted of a team time trial followed by a 15 lap race around the grand prix circuit. On the Friday night before the race, as tactics were discussed, I jokingly suggested it would be a more exciting race if it poured rain. Needless to say on the Saturday morning, when it was pouring rain, the girls were not impressed, and told me to eat breakfast outside.

I was both nervous and excited for my first team time trial with BCS, we had worked out a plan and I felt that we actually managed quite well considering we had not ridden together before. I was stoked when we came in with the third fastest time, a big improvement from my last tt, where I finished second last!

All of a sudden we had 30 minutes to get organized for the road race. Everyone was running around frantically and becoming stressed as we did not expect to have such little time between the tt and the road race. The plan was simple, we needed as many QOM and sprint points as we could get. Unfortunately Nic was out with a sinus infection, but the other girls certainly made up for her not being there! Lauretta and Tayla stayed right up the front, taking the majority of the sprint points and the KOM bonuses. Minda was continually attempting breakaways and chasing down anything that went off the front. For entire race the weather was fairly pour, it rained, whether you had your glasses on or off you still couldn’t see, and everyone did there best not to slide around the corners. The race came down to a bunch sprint, we has three girls in the top 10, with Tayla 4^th, Lauretta 5^th and myself 7^th. Nic came running over wrapped in a blanket, yelling that we had taken the overall win for the teams classification.

We were happy, excited, relieved and very glad to have finished the race upright. Despite the fact the we had some amazing ‘dirt tans’ and were sopping wet and freezing cold, we were running around taking photos and having a great time with some of our other competitors.

I could not be happier to be part of this amazing team of girls, and absolutely stoked to come away with a win for the team in a VRS race. Overall the day was definitely a highlight for me and I’m looking forward to our next race as a team!