Our road trip to Woodville on Friday started a couple of hours later than planned after my cat decided to play hide and seek as we were packing and was found hanging out in the paddock next door. After a pretty good drive we got to the track to set up the pits and do a track walk. Since it’s been a long hot and dry summer the dirt track is almost hard pack but it looked really good. There was a couple of different jumps but the usual Woodville features were there. Qualifying on Saturday was ok, I did my look laps and got p13 which was annoying as I know I could have done better. I went into race 1 fired up and was unfortunately involved in a holeshot pile up, still not sure of what happened but my bike cartwheeled one way and I flew the other way. I got up and gave myself an quick checkup and was able to get my bike started and get back to racing. I had to work hard from dead last and almost a minute behind the leader to get any places back and I fought hard up to 25th. Back at our trailer we found out my bars were bent, my thighs were bruised and my stomach hurt from smashing into something. My awesome pit crew changed the bars and I went back out to race 2 just aiming to have a better start and to give it as much as I could since I had lost any chance of a winning day. I placed 11th in race 2 and finished my day with a 7th in race 3. The track was really dusty by the end but I kept pushing until the checkered flag and was so pumped to be told that 25-11-7 put me at 11th overall for the day… only a couple of points off my goal of a Top 10 finish for my first MXGP on the 85. I was happy to get out of my gear and go jump in the river to cool down before prize giving. and while I was a little disappointed to not come away with a trophy or some prize money I am proud of myself for not giving up when I had a lot of reasons to but no crashes or busted bits are going to slow me down.
Soren Staudinger 