By Bryan Moritz
6/3/2007

Today was the Hummer Hammer race that DICE puts on out near the Mt Joy Airport in Davenport. Going into the race, the plan was for me to sit in the beginning of the race and let the rest of the DICE guys do their stuff up front and see if I could either sprint for a win or get into a break...well the latter part was what happened.

I made my attack 8 miles into the 25 mile race. When I did the attack I had no intentions of it actually working since it was so early into the race, but the pace for the first 8 miles was nothing incredibly fast. I figured I would just try to get the pace going more to shell guys (we had about 40 guys start the race and the pack was in tact for the most part).

It was funny, when I did the attack I heard MANY guys in the front yell "HE'S GOING!!!!!!" I'm starting to see that I am a marked man in Iowa for breakaways :)

So Ron Bridal (Team MACK) and Pete Basso (A9Y) got onto my wheel and we had a small gap. With any other guys this break would not have worked, but Pete is a tank that when he gets the speed going you can sit behind him and have the GREATEST draft ever and Ron is an incredibly fast rider (I did cross with him last year and we got into a 2 man break at Middle Park with me). So knowing this, I kept the pace high and kept encouraging the other guys to keep up the speed because we could make it stick.

After a couple laps Pete dropped off. I was very disappointed to see that because he helps drafting so much :) and also they had about 5 guys in the pack that would help block for us. So I was kind of worried to keep the effort up, but knowing Ron, I figured we should have a go.

Also, our break stuck because of Bruce Grell. Our break seriously would not have stuck had it not been for Bruce. He was up front during the entire time of my break sitting 2nd wheel blocking like a mad man :) I heard a few guys mention that A9Y got a few guys up front to try to chase us down but Bruce got into their line and I was told that many "F-Bombs" were being dropped...yay :)

Bruce also was able to sprint for a Prime so that was sweet...he raced EXTREMELY smart today!

Me and Ron talked and we weren't going to play any games until the final lap to ensure our break would stick.

So the last lap we didn't do all that much work just saving it for the final sprint. Ron led with about half a mile to go and I just sat behind waiting to sprint. When we went through the final 180 degree turn right before the sprint I was RETARDED and clipped my pedal on the group which shot my rear wheel to the side. I was able to stay upright but Ron got a 2-3 bike length gap on me. So I quickly started up the sprint but wasn't able to close down the gap at all...so sadly I had to settle for 2nd.

About 100 meters after the finish I was rolling along sulking when POP, my rear wheel blew...what happened was when my rear wheel jumped to the side, it literally RIPPED the bead off the tire and my tube pinch-flatted.

Oh well, it was definitely a great race and Ron is a nice guy and so he deserved that win. It was actually a pay back for cross season (at Middle Park Cross race he clipped his wheel half way through the race and what happened was his wheel got un-true and the break consistently rubbed the tire raw until less than half a lap till the finish and he blew a tire and I won...so it's all good)