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Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127942
>halfway came, I said if I had any chance
of getting that extra point I needed to
pass hll:il now and that's what I did."
It came a lap too late, and Chandler
earned the extra point for leading the
most laps.
DuHamel said he made the pass in
the carousel because that was one of the
places where he was a bit stronger than
Chandler.
"There were a few other places I
knew r could pass him, but r didn't want
to show it to him just in case r couldn't
get by him there," DuHamel said. "It
was ,no use to push any more, I could
pass hj.m somewhere else. There were
only like three places where I thought I
could pass him. The carousel, for some
reason, seemed to be a good place. And
when I came up the inside of Doug
again, actually the outside and that led
to the inside on that halfway lap, I got a
good drive and he saw it and he gave
me a little way there and decided to get
behind me I guess. And from there on in
1 just put my head down and started
cracking off some pretty fast laps."
Good enough that he had a two-second lead on the 19th lap and was able to
stretch it a bit to the end before backing
off slightly.
Once DuHamel got away, Chandler
had his hand full with Mladin. In
DuHamel's words, Mladin has "got a big
heart, (he's a) pit-bull kind of guy. You
can't let him get a sniff of you because
he'll just bite you and stay on you."
That's exactly what he did to Chandler.
The gap between the two was elastic,
but never much, and whenever traffic
got in the way and the gap widened,
Pascal Picotte (21 )llassed Steve
Rapp (115) on the last lap to
steal seventh. Rich Oliver (97)
was 10th.
Mladin was able to reel him in. But not
enough to make a pass that would stick.
"When I was behind them I sort of sat
there half a second back and just had a
bit of a look and I figured that if 1 got in
front I wasn't going to be able to pull
away or anything," Mladin said. "So I
thought five laps from the end maybe if I
could do something to try and get past,
put me head down, and just balls-out for
five laps and 1 might be able to hold onto
it, but it didn't happen.
"Like 1 said on the podium, we're
lacking acceleration really bad," Mladin
said. "1 just can't get off the turns, especially the important ones like out of the
carousel and out of turn 10. 1 just struggled to get anywhere even close to off
the turns with them. And once you do
that here, the only place to overtake pe0ple here is on the brakes. 1 wasn't close
enough to do that. Normally I'm one of
the harder brakers, and 1 can sort of get
most people if 1 have to. Today I wasn't
close enough to even attempt it. That's
what cost us the race. I've been bitching
about that all year, acceleration, and
that's how I feel. I just don't think we've
got the acceleration that it takes at the
moment. And that's it, you \