Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

(Left) Cannichael (4) jumped out to an early lead and never looked back. Even Jeremy McGrath (1) couldn't run him down. (Below) Third-place finisher David Vuillemln (934) leads Sebastien Tortelli (21), Kevin Windham (14), Larry Ward (10) and Kyle Lewis (112) durin9 the main event. from the very beginning, and it only got rougher as the day went on.) "I had a little bit of strategy," confessed McGrath. "If RC [Carmichael) got the holes hot, , was going to try to stay as close as I could to him, and then try to wear him out." Instead, just the opposite happened. Carmichael's lead was around 2.5 seconds from laps four through 11, and then it began to grow. '" was just digging bad," Carmichael said. "Like the 1Oth lap, it was, I got to keep going, I got to keep going. I was hoping he [McGrath] would fall off [the pace], but I didn't think he would. Then he started backing off a little bit; he didn't have to win. He's got the championship pretty much in the bag." On lap 12, Carmichael added more than half a second to his lead, then a full second; then, from lap 13 to 14, the lead ballooned by over four seconds. And it continued to grow. "At one point, I would pull him [Carmichael] a little, and then he would pull me a little," McGrath said. "I think what happened is that he was faster a little bit in the back [section of the track] and then I would catch him a little bit maybe in the front section. I didn't really feel like' was catching him. He kept that distance, and I was trying to keep him as close as I could. One time, I came down the start straight and hit one of those kickers, and my hand came off the bar. That scared the crap out of me. The next lap after that I was pretty much shot because I was a little nervous. I pretty much didn't take any chances past lap 13." Since the track was so torn up, McGrath decided to finish and preserve his championship lead rather than risk a crash. "This track's really rough, and really narrow, and really dangerous. I knew that I wasn't going to make a charge on Ricky; I was just trying to survive and get second place." "It feels great," Carmichael said afterwards. "It'd be a lot better if I wasn't so tired - I'm so worn out. This is a brutal race." While McGrath was a contender for more than half the race, the same could not be said for Vuillemin. The Frenchman hung around in third for about the first six laps, then faded quickly after a mistake in the rough stuff. The only consolation was that he was well in front of any challenge and only had to ride out the race to maintain his second place in the championship. "I got a third-place start behind Ricky and Jeremy, and I was running with them for maybe five laps," Vuillemin said. "I did a big mistake in the whoops, so I lost contact. It was very difficult for me to make time on them. 1 just started to get tired. I made a mistake; I crashed before the finish line. After that, I rode my own race to get third place." Team Honda's Sebastien Tortelli had a fairly uneventful ride, finishing out the day in fourth. After breaking away from teammate Kevin Windham on the seventh lap, Tortelli was too far behind the leaders to do much, so he settled into a solitary fourth. Like Vuillemin, the heat wore out Tortelli. "The first half of the race I thought I was ready [to make a charge], but I guess not," Tortelli said, dripping sweat after the race. "I need to work harder next time to be better." He said it was just before the halfway point that he began to feel tired. "Heat is one factor," he said. "The track was pretty tough and pretty rutted. It was hard to be good at it. It's very tough, very technical. I was try- ing to do whatever I could and do my best." Two corners after the start, Mike LaRocco's day took a turn for the worse. Going into the hairpin right, which led to the finish jump, Suzuki's Damon Huffman ran into LaRocco from behind. The crash dropped LaRocco to the back of the field. "Actually, I had a great start," said LaRocco. "I went in there - there was a deep rut - and Jeremy [McGrath, eye I e who was in third place] was already in it, and I kind of was waiting for him to go in, and [Damon] Huffman ran into me and pushed me into Jeremy. Then he [Huffman] got all caught up in my back wheel, and I ended up falling over. We were tangled up. He kept clutching it, and we couldn't get our bikes apart. So we were way back, and I just did what I could to get through traffic." When he remounted, he was dead n e vv s MARCH 22, 2000 13

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