Page 83 - GRID4

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VIRGINIA!
JACKSON BLACKMON | KTM RC390
immediately began to challenge the championship leader, Benjamin Smith, in the opening race of the weekend as the two of them separated themselves from the rest of the pack. They emerged as the class of the field, building a gap of more than five seconds after just a couple of laps of racing. Blackmon utilized his lightweight frame in order to eek out a small advantage down the massive straight aways of Road America, but the two riders remained stuck together throughout the opening portion of the race.
It came to light midway through the seven laps that Blackmon had jumped the start and would need to pull in for a ride through penalty, but he was unclear on the exact rules. Instead of pulling into pit lane and slowing down to the speed limit of sixty kilometers per hour, he reverted to a rule present in his club racing days in which the rider comes to a complete stop and resumes normal race pace. Blackmon ended up maintaining second position on the track as he emerged just in front of the chasing group
of riders, but it wasn’t until after the race that he was handed a time penalty for breaking the rules that demoted him to ninth position. He was out for redemption in the second race and broke away in the lead group with Benjamin Smith and Cory Ventura as the three of them sparked an exceptional battle for the lead. They swapped positions back and forth, flying down the front straight away three-wide on multiple occasions, but it all came down to the last couple of corners on the final lap. Blackmon slipstreamed his way past the pair of them headed towards turn twelve and ended up pulling away just enough to negate the slipstream over the next section of the course, clinching his second victory of the season in the process.
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JACKSON BLACKMON