Page 85 - issue28
P. 85
theGRIT
IMAGES / LAKE KILPATRICK
Aaron Plessinger showed such great speed a week ago at Unadilla and looked to be coming into his own as the season winds down. This weekend at Budds Creek, he intended to keep the good times rolling but struggled a bit in practice only coming away with the fourteenth fastest lap time. He could not wait for the
races to begin to try and erase the bad stigma from practice. When the gate dropped for the first moto, Plessinger found himself buried in the field. He would fight to emerge for the green flag in eleventh place. I was waiting for him to start dicing through the field but instead he bounced around for the first half of the race making mistakes and ultimately falling back to twelfth. In the second half of the moto he did his best to try and right those early lap bobbles and picked off a few riders to hop back up into tenth. He didn’t stop charging and slowly made up ground on Hampshire and Davalos, making moves on both of them late in the race to secure eighth place for the moto. Plessinger needed a good start to turn his day around but would get the opposite when the gate dropped for moto two. He was way back outside the top twenty to start the moto but this time he looked a little more comfortable on the bike. He was able to make more moves in a less amount of time surging to eleventh after several laps. He continued his steady movement forward slipping into eighth place with ten minutes left to go in the moto. He saw a pair of Monster Energy Kawasaki riders, Savatgy and Tonus, struggling in front of him in the late stages of the moto and locked onto them. Like a shark smelling blood in the water, Plessinger went right after them and gobbled them up to secure sixth place for the moto. The 8-6 sixth overall performance was not what we were expecting from Plessinger but he was plagued yet again by bad starts. Next weekend we return to the track that he won his lone career overall at so he will surely welcome those good vibes and try to go back-to-back.
words/SETHHARNISHFEGER WWW.GRITMOTO.COM
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