Freeridenz Blog: Round 2 NZ Nationals byJame Pollard

James Pollard

Thoughts/Experiences at dirt park this year for nationals!. . . Well where do i begin haha.

I had been lucky enough to have gone up earlier in the year with Julz and Dan from "four four three" who among others were organising the building of the track and looked around for different lines and commented on what they already had.

James doing some runs at Dirt Park durring practise day

My thoughts on that were Awesome!! i had only ridden the new middle section they had built and the faaaaaaast last section,so on practice day of nationals when i rocked up there was a whole new top section to tackle. It was really tight and quite steep so coming from Alex i was quite used to that and enjoyed the mental challenge. Getting down it however wasnt as easy after taking a smoking hot line through the spiker bushes (whooops) into the middle of nowhere i figured id better slow down and start seeing what other people were doing!! After that i got it heaps better.

In particular i wanted o take a proper look at the bottom fast section after hearing some guys were taking hot lines every where. There was one spot where if u went inside to out you could legally straight line it with out braking which took me most of the afternoon to get right but felt soooo good to get it. I loved the dirt park track how it was soo tight at the top and had some reasonably flowy bits in the middle (so you could rest up slightly) then just a flat out fast bottom section that was just wide open!!

.....Braaapp!

So theres a few thoughts and experiences on the track but i was hearing heaps of mixed thoughts on the track from most of the riders saying how it was getting blown out and how shit it was and it was hard for me to accept partly because i was finding it OK to get down and wasn't having any crashes =) and also because i knew how long Julz, Dan and the boys had to get the track up and running. From starting with nothing at the time of year they did i thought they did farkin well and at the end of the day the track held up and i heard of no major injuries and due to suck a big hill and long track thought that was good news!. So after all i knew it was disappointing that they thought that way.

Anyways after seeding 1st with a small woops in the middle section, I loved the track enough to claim 2ND place in senior mens so i was pretty happy with that and hope we get to race there next year and see what the boys bring up for us cant wait. Jimmy.