By: Lanolin (RitteRacing.com)

Ritte Racing just wrapped up the three day San Dimas Stage Race. That is one bitch of a race… bad roads and huge fields make mechanicals and crashes common, and no matter how your form is going into it, you’re just a dice-throw from watching from a prone position as the pack races away. This was my third time to San Dimas and the first time I’ve made it to day three. And after having a hugely successful stage racing season thus far, our Cat 3 team lost 6 of their 7 riders by the end.

Spencer stayed in front to avoid the likelyhood of getting F’ed in the A by a crash. photo by Robert Plumb

I’ll tell you what though, besides the bad luck, San Dimas is one hell of a hard race; the pace is fast and the level of competition is the highest we face all year. And it’s pretty much all due to the juniors. San Dimas doesn’t have a junior category so they all race with the 3s. Damn those kids are strong. Squirly, but strong. Juniors won every stage and occupied half of the top ten on GC. Hell, they even took the top 6 spots in the crit! Those kids are mutants. Thank god I’ll be able to seek refuge in the Masters soon.

Here Rob is using his time trial skills to chase back on after several mechanicals, but he soon got pulled when an official saw him working with a group of dropped 2s.

Ritte’s small European Farm League Team has been hitting some of the lesser-known Spring races and we’ve sent a camera crew along to catch some of the action. We’re just getting some of the videos now, among them was this clip of Ritte’s Stratton getting a pretty unusual bottle feed from our German team director, Thomas (pronounced with a long “o” and an “aus”).

Looks like they need to work on keeping the speed up and maybe it’ll become an effective feeding technique.

Stay tuned for more videos from the Ritte Documentary series Behind the Peloton.

Party,

Lanolin.

www.ritteracing.com