The weather was fantastic on Sunday at the CBR Carson Criterium. The sun was out and it was a little on the cool side, which made for a great race day.
This was the second race of the CBR Bar Series out of seven events and the field was stacked with talent. It was good to see some of the bigger teams and clubs come out and test their legs from the winter training.
Legion of Los Angeles had most of their team in the race. So, it was going to be up to the other teams to make the race hard and maybe try to get up the road without taking too many Legion of Los Angeles guys with them if there were any breakaway attempts.
As it would be, there were plenty of attacks that would see solo riders flexing some muscle and letting out some heavy winter training angst to test their legs out on the field and try to soften up the field and the Legion of Los Angeles team.
With Cory Williams on an early-season roll, the Legion of Los Angeles team was going to be on defense mode for most of the race.
There were many breakaway attempts that saw many of the other teams including SDBC, Subaru Santa Monica Racing putting their guys up the road at one time or another.
It was a break of five riders that put the most time on the field during the race as they worked well together to establish a 20 plus second gap for a few laps. However, Legion of LA had one rider in the mix, who seemed to be rolling through,but also patrolling and not driving the move. So, the break kept a steady pace as they worked well together pulling away from the field. The Legion riders were trying to send off their riders to bridge across in small groups to strengthen the move by trying to bridge. This was catching the attention of the other teams and it would see a frenzy of the other teams also making moves on their own.
This would see the demise of the break as it dwindled and came back to the field after a couple of laps.
As the race was winding down, smaller moves went up the road, but it was more for show than actually trying to work at least for the Legion of LA riders as they seemed to just be covering the moves.
With a few laps remaining, you would see the teams start to set up for the field sprint. With Elevate Webiplex bringing four riders to the race, they had to make their moves count and ride smart as they were outnumbered.
Coming out of the last corner, it was the three Williams Brothers opening up the sprint and not looking back as they finished one (Cory Williams) and two (Justin Williams) and fourth (CJ Williams) with Elevate Webiplex (Alfredo Rodriguez) taking third and our own SoCalCycling.com Team’s latest arrival Osvaldo Mora mixing it up and taking fifth.
It was great to see the many Junior and U23 riders show up to race. This was encouraging! It was also great to see an aggressive animated race.
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By Frank Sarate, SoCalCycling.com
