Pont de Vaux

[MJNOVA]

Thrashing on the bike.

[MJNOVA]

Our muddy pit(before the race).

[MJNOVA]

Bikes lined up in the town of Pont de Vaux

[MJNOVA]

Tech

[MJNOVA]

Bike Pic.

[MJNOVA]

Quick pic of the track near the corn fields.

[MJNOVA]

About 1/4 of the pits ------120 total teams.

[MJNOVA]

Bike

[Bart]

I got to sit down and interview mjnova last night. Highlites of the race:

It rained during the week. The track was muddy on Sat. Think Sparta I mud.

The Banshee provided by Yamaha of France (YoF) was top notch. Greg and Harold were consistently 15 sec per lap faster than the other top teams. Unfortunately, the added performance to the motor lead to some tuning and reliability issues.

After dodging the rain and trying to tune the quad the 3 days prior to the event, team YoF almost didn't make it to the start as the quad was still not running right 30 min prior to the start. They were able to get it running decent as they lined up.

Greg started the race for team YoF and quickly grabbed the lead. They estimated that they could run for 1:20 before they needed to stop for gas and change riders. They estimated wrong as Greg ran out of gas at approx 1:15. After pushing the quad back to the pits to refuel, they lost their lead.

During the night session, team YoF's chain and sprockets got so bad that they needed to be changed. A lengthly pit stop dropped them further behind the leaders.

mjnova got to run some laps during the night session. His struggles with the twist throttle (he normally runs a thumb) in the rutted up turns limited his time on the quad.

During the final stage (it's a 3 stage race), things started to look good for team YoF as Greg and Harold made up some time on the leaders and were now up to 2nd place. Just when a podium finish looked to be a sure thing, the motor started to let go. The lap times for Harold started to drop significantly as the Walsh team passed him and moved into second. With approx 1 hour left in the race, team YoF's Banshee locked up (could not even kick it over) and resulted in a DNF.

mjnova had a good time and is hoping to make it back next year. The town of Pont de Vaux put on a great race. There were 120 teams and an estimated >15,000 spectators there for the race. It would be great to see a similar numbers for a race here in the USA.

Congrats to Team ATV World - Duncan Racing and all of the others who participated in this spectacle.

[Silverfox@C&DRacing]

darn yamaha anyway......... only joking that is a nice looking banshee

mjnova if I remember right you ran the 12 hrs last year in Fort Dodge, which race did you enjoy more ?