Yesterday and today was the MWCCC Regional Championships and my first races this season as a mechanic. I was asked to provide neutral support before yesterday’s road race and that went without any real incident. The key word is [i]before[/i], as once the racing really got underway I sort of took on a soigneur role for the UWM Men’s A team, which really just consisted of giving food/drink handups as needed.

A quick word about handups… if you’re on the sidelines and giving feeds to people in the race, and if they miss their bottle/feed-bag, don’t chase after them to try and get it to them. Twice I missed my feeds because of someone running in front of me as my riders were passing by. Not to mention all of the people standing around the feed zone that really had no business being there. It’s great to want to support your team and fly your flags and take pictures and all that, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Just don’t get in my way time and time again when I’m trying to give my riders food. Sooner or later I’m going to put you into the ditch. I’m kind of short, kind of big, and odds are your average bike racer isn’t going to really be able to move me.

Kip wound up puncturing his tubular, I happened to have a spare back at my house and I got him ready to go for today. A proper glue job involves a total of 5 layers of glue applied over 3 days, I had roughly 10 hours to work with. I was able to space out each coat enough I think to get a good bond, either way it’ll be more secure than the tape that he had holding the old tire on.

I setup shop again today for the TTT and Crit but Madison (who organized today’s races) decided to have their sponsor shop provide neutral support, and that’s a story for another time. As such, I dedicated myself entirely to UWM today.

Kyle and I rolled into the parking lot for the TTT start about a half-hour before their start time, and I setup shop. His bike was working pretty well, it only needed the rear wheel/cassette switched over the HED trispoke. Erik’s bike, however, would no longer shift into the big ring. Particularly odd since he recently switched to SRAM Rival and the shifters were basically brand new.

The course was described as flat on the race flyer, but rolling might have been a better word. Either way, it was of a nature that if he needed to go into the little ring he’d be spit out the back, so I set his front derailleur to stay in the big ring and off he went.

The rest of the time trial went without any problems as far as I could tell. They looked fast on the road, but I think they only managed a 7th place. I’m not sure what the time gaps were like, but a lot of the bigger teams had a lot of fancy time trial gear that we didn’t, and as much as I hate to admit it that stuff does help.

The crit was later in the afternoon, and after getting some food I setup shop again and went to work on Erik’s shifter. Despite working regularly with SRAM Neutral Support I still haven’t ever really had to take one of the DoubleTap shifters apart. I took the cover off and discovered the transport pawl was slipping over the cable spool rather than pushing the spool up to be held in place by the holding pawl. A call to Jose Alacala reminded me of something I saw back in Portland last November, where sometimes some dirt gets into the internals and things just stop working. In a shop setting a blast from the air compressor will work or some sort of aerosol degreaser/solvent, which I didn’t have. In Portland we used a waterbottle to try and clean out the insides. I didn’t have any actual water bottles either, go figure. What I did have was a couple store-bought bottles of water, and after a nice tap with my smallest screwdriver and a mallet I had a water gun.

Now, water doesn’t really displace grease all that well, nor does it displace things trapped in the grease with any sort of efficiency. Kyle came back and got bored and started playing with it while I was thinking of other options and discovered a tiny little pebble stuck in the detent on the cable spool, which is what was keeping the transport pawl from fully engaging. Sure as shit, the shifter started working again flawlessly. Put everything back together and Erik was ready to ride.

As for the race itself, it was a 75 minute crit, and lap times at the start were roughly 1m25s a lap. Rounding that to 1m30s, that’s a 50 lap crit. I’d say of those 50 laps there were maybe 10 were someone wasn’t running back to the pit because of a flat or broken wheel. There were a bunch of potholes out there and someone managed to find one hard pretty much every lap.

Rach was there with the HED Stingers I glued up for him not long ago, and he wound up puncturing both of them and breaking the rim on the front, which is super unfortunate. He paid some decent money for those wheels and tires and now they’re more or less unusable.

But, in the end, that’s racing.